Americans as Survivors

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/352/22/2263/DC1
Interview with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton on the psychological responses of Americans to the collective trauma of war and terrorist attack.
Supplement to Lifton R.J. Americans as Survivors. N Engl J Med 2005;352(22):2263-5.
Dr. Lifton is a member of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and at the Cambridge Health Alliance, Cambridge, Mass.
Rachel Gotbaum, the interviewer, is an independent producer based in Boston

Physicians have always been concerned with how people survive trauma. There has been much interest in the psychology of the survivors of such massive trauma as that inflicted by the Nazis in their death camps, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently, by the extraordinary earthquake and tsunami in South Asia. Less noted has been the experience of Americans as survivors of violent collective trauma. We owe this lack of attention to the relative rarity of large-scale killing and dying on American soil and to the fact that in wars fought abroad, suffering has usually been countered by a sense of victorious achievement.