The psychiatrist who named thought reform

2016

Robert Jay Lifton explains the model he published in 1961 in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, built on interviews with 25 American servicemen held in the Korean War and 15 Chinese nationals who had left after university indoctrination. The model describes state coercion in Maoist China; applying it to voluntary religious groups is an extension, and that extension is what the field argues about.