The Climate Swerve by Robert Jay Lifton

Author:Robert Jay Lifton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973486
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

6

Witnessing Professionals

Over the course of my work I have been interested in the behavior of professionals in the extreme situations I studied. Professionals tend to be socialized to the mores of their societies and to claims of normality. But as we have seen, there are notable exceptions who question that normality and bear witness to its dangers.

Whether doctors, lawyers, clerics, scientists, teachers, computer program designers, writers, psychologists, artists, or morticians, professionals bring a body of knowledge and skills to their work and their standing in society. We can hardly be surprised that professionals have special importance in relation to nuclear and climate threats. But before I explore that importance, I want to say something of what I learned about professionals from my work with Vietnam veterans and Nazi doctors.

In Vietnam I was struck by the malignant normality in which American doctors—I paid special attention to psychiatrists—found themselves. When an American soldier would experience anxiety or revulsion (hard to differentiate in that situation) in connection with the war, the psychiatrist or medic/assistant he was sent to would have the task of helping the soldier become strong enough to remain at duty, which often meant strong enough to participate in daily atrocities. While most psychiatrists who found themselves assigned to that role were reasonably humane people who took such matters into account and did the best they could, I found myself wondering how it was that members of my own profession could be placed in such a context.

The answers I came to had to do with the project the psychiatrists were serving, in this case the Vietnam War. They also were related to a broad sense of what a professional is and does. Looking into the history of professions in the West, I discovered that the term has religious origins and derives from a “profession” (or confession) of faith or of commitment to a religious order. But from the sixteenth century onward, with the secularization of societies, the word came to mean (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) “to make claim to have knowledge of an art of science” or “to declare oneself expert or proficient in a particular occupation,” especially “the three learned professions of divinity, law, and medicine,” along with “the military profession.” Thus there was a historical shift from ultimate spiritual dedication to mastery of a specialized form of socially applicable knowledge and skill. While it was necessary to extricate the concept of the profession from simple religious affirmation, I would argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of technique. What has been lost is a sense of the larger purpose of a profession and the specific ethical impact of its practitioners. The American psychiatrist in Vietnam was assigned to “help” troubled soldiers re-enter an atrocity-producing situation because he was serving military command and bringing his technical skill to a profoundly immoral project.

I had in the past generally accepted psychiatry’s definition of itself as a healing profession with a focus on the mind. I came

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