The Broken Connection

An engrossing and fascinating book... especially in respect to the place you give to the symbolic operations of the mind instead of the instinctual moves. I learned a great deal by reading it and was given much food for thought. Claude Levi-Strauss

In The Broken Connection, Robert Jay Lifton, one of America's foremost thinkers and preeminent psychiatrists, explores the connections between death and life, the psychiatric disorders that arise from these connections, and the advent of the nuclear age which has jeopardized any attempts to ensure the perpetuation of the self beyond death.

The unique human awareness of our own mortality enables us to ensure our perpetuation beyond death through our impact on others. This continuity of life has been profoundly shaken by the advent of wars of mass destruction, genocide, and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. In The Broken Connection, Robert Jay Lifton, one of America's foremost thinkers and preeminent psychiatrists, explores the inescapable connections between death and life, the psychiatric disorders that arise from these connections, and the advent of the nuclear age which has jeopardized any attempts to ensure the perpetuation of the self beyond death.