They may come to feel that only the world’s death can enable them to overcome their own inner deadness.

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.

Psychologically, nothing is darker or more menacing, or harder to accept, than the participation of physicians in mass murder. However technicized or commercial the modern physician may have become, he or she is still supposed to be a healer – and one responsible to a tradition of healing, which all cultures revere and depend upon.

When we consider further the social and psychological roots of the collective urge to kill the world, we are likely to see more of ourselves in it and to begin to think of such groups as something of a dark “cultural underground” of our own society. We are also likely to discover that whatever renders our society more decent and more inclusive in its benefits is likely to undermine the totalistic impulse to destroy everything.

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

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.

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.

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

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.