The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life

by Robert Jay Lifton

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671413864
• ISBN13: 9780671413866
• Release Date: September 1980
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 495 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

What Death Reveals about Life

In ancient times, mythological systems and religious authorities told us what to think about death. How do we think about death in the modern secular world? The pre-eminent psychologist Robert Jay Lifton thinks that is one of the most important questions facing us today. This book looks at the question of death in the big picture. In the first part of the book, he traces individual development, and shows how the idea of death develops with the individual. In part two, he looks at the relationship of death to various emotions and to psychological disorders. In part three, he looks at the global picture, discussing what it means to live in a world with nuclear arms; here he cites from his extensive personal research with the survivors of Hiroshima. As Lifton argues, "We must open ourselves to the full impact of death in order to rediscover and reinterpret the movement and sequence of life" (p. 52). Indeed, contrary to what one might expect, this is a deeply optimistic and profoundly hopeful book.