ROBERT JAY LIFTON

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

One reason that I embarked on a study of Nazi doctors was that in this personal journey, I had the feeling increasingly that I did want to do a Holocaust study and that increasingly I wanted it to be of perpetrators, which I thought was more needed.

Sometimes it's said that psychiatrists are doctors who are frightened by the sight of blood. I might have fallen into that category.

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.

The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.

I struggled with each of these studies and I was uncertain about what they meant, and often confused, and then I tried to put together what I was seeing.

I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military.

Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.

And I thought about the psychic numbing involved in strategic projections of using hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons of any kind. And I also thought about ways in which all of us undergo what could be called the numbing of everyday life.

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

I'm a Brooklyn boy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised there, and spent most of my childhood there.

It may sound terrible, but I often say that the military saved me from a conventional life in the United States and I've never really thanked them for it, because I haven't exactly been pro-military in my work.

And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called brainwashing.

I never quite envisioned myself a proper doctor under that white coat, but I was interested in the idea of healing and in the psychological dimension rather early on.

That is, we are bombarded by all kinds of images and influences and we have to fend some of them off if we're to take in any of them, or to carry through just our ordinary day's work, or really deepen whatever we have to do or say.

What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.

But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.

In early psychoanalytic thought, narcissism was - and still, of course, is - self-love. The early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include the most fierce and self-displaying form of one's individual self. And in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Donald Trump, you can really see someone who's destructive to any form of life enhancement in virtually every area. And if that's what Fromm means by malignant narcissism, then it definitely applies.

There's an all-enveloping destructiveness in Donald Trump's character and in his psychological tendencies. But I've focused on what professionally I call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he's capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world. He's not psychotic, but I think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his removal from the presidency.

Donald Trump both disbelieves and believes in falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding - the claim that Obama was not born in the United States - he's crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it gave him his political entrée onto the national stage. In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them in some extent. And that's why we simplify things if we say that Trump either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us like a fox or he completely believes them.