Opinion | Totalitarianism Can Be Terrifying. It Can Also Be Thrilling. He Taught Us Why.

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M. GESSEN

By M. Gessen

Opinion Columnist

Grappling with the 20th-century inventions of totalitarianism, genocide and mass atrocities, and nuclear arms, great political and legal thinkers strove to define these phenomena and describe their mechanisms. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who died last Thursday at age 99, had a different goal. He aimed to understand what these institutions felt like — and what the people on both sides of great tragedies, the victims and the perpetrators, thought and experienced.