Back when nuclear proliferation was rampant and nations detonated warheads across the globe, back during the Cuban Missile Crisis and later, the reactor meltdown in Chernobyl, back when anti-nuke groups were The Resistance, an American psychiatrist and prolific author named Robert Jay Lifton coined the phrase: “psychic numbness.”
ROBERT JAY LIFTON, 2008.
The phrase signified a cognitive dissonance affecting children and adults of the nuclear era – an existential fear of death by nuclear annihilation and simultaneously, a heightened state of denial that let us live, laugh, work and play with a veneer of normalcy. Continue reading
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