After the Second World War, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who had also trained in psychoanalysis, studied survivors of Chinese internment camps, survivors of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, and the doctors who became killers in Nazi concentration camps. His aim was to “identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms,” he wrote.8 He spent a lifetime developing clinical and theoretical approaches to trauma. He described phenomena specific to survivors. He called one “psychic numbing”—a sort of emotional shutdown in response to unconscionable
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