Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

A substantial extract of this essential book is available on google books.

In this 2021 interview with physician David R. Kopacz, Lifton unpacks the concept of the witnessing professional, which he developed alongside the idea of malignant normality: societal expectations that are deeply destructive yet rendered ordinary, legal and unquestioned. He argues that professionals retain the capacity to expose and resist malignant normality without abandoning their professional identity, and that doing so restores an ethical dimension to work that has become increasingly technicised and prone to psychic numbing. He traces this idea through his own history in the physicians' anti-nuclear movement, and connects it explicitly to the Daedalus special issue on witnessing professionals and climate change, in which his essay 'On Becoming Witnessing Professionals' appears. The conversation ranges into whether the capacity for ethical witnessing can be taught to medical trainees, the risks professionals face when speaking out, and Lifton's concept of an 'animating relationship' to death anxiety and guilt, in which suffering is transformed into a sense of responsibility rather than avoidance. He closes by linking this to his broader idea of the Protean Self - human beings' capacity for ongoing symbolic re-creation and change, which he sees as both vulnerable to totalist control and capable of resisting it.

I came to view my work with Hiroshima survivors in 1962 as not only a scientificstudy but a form of bearing witness to what the bomb did to human beings in thatcity. I tried to bring professional knowledge and experience to that effort, to becomewhat I later called a witnessing professional. Nuclear and climate issues interacted in that early study, and have continued to be inseparable for all of us. I drawupon examples of witnessing professionals over the course of our struggles with thesetwo planetary threats. In each case, they had to expose and combat the malignantnormality, the dangerous prevailing assumptions and narratives, of their time. Inthat way, these professionals have contributed to important social movements. Theyhave also deepened–as we too can–the ethical dimensions of professional work.

A reflection on how climate anxiety intersects with disability and ill health, noting that ableism makes disabled people disproportionately vulnerable to climate change and less able to access mental health support.

One of the first rules of effective communication is to “know thy audience.” Climate change public engagement efforts must start with the fundamental recognition that people are different and have different psychological, cultural, and political reasons for acting – or not acting – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our research has identified “Global Warming’s Six Americas”: six unique audiences within the American public that each responds to the issue in their own distinct way.

ABSTRACT: Compassion has been suggested to be a strong motivator for prosocial behavior. While research has demonstrated that compassion training has positive effects on mood and health, we do not know whether it also leads to increases in prosocial behavior. We addressed this question in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we introduce a new prosocial game, the Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG), which allows for repeated, ecologically valid assessment of prosocial behavior. Experiment 2 shows that helping behavior in the ZPG increased in participants who had received short-term compassion training, but not in participants who had received short-term memory training.