Random House, 113 pp., $5.95.

AT FIRST glance, the parameters which determine a man's existence would seem to be relatively simple to define. At one end is birth, at the other death, and that which comes between the two is life. Man, however, has never been able to accept these boundaries, to recognize that all that he is or can be must be confined by these two simple markers. Early man attempted in his religions to stretch the life span beyond physical boundaries; the Judeo-Christian tradition represents the most elaborate and most convincing attempt to defy the natural limits of life. The attempt to extend life has found perhaps its most convincing semi-scientific justification in the work of C.G. Jung, the psychologist who broke with Freud to become a mystic.

Robert Jay Lifton is not a Jungian. Often, in fact, his psychological work tends to border on descriptive sociology. (His works on the psychological effects of nuclear holocaust on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become classics in the field.) In his latest book, Dr. Lifton has also raised some challenging questions about attempt a general philosophical statement about the boundaries which define life in an age of revolution. The very boldness of the idea-a Yale psychology professor is attempting to define the nature of man's existence-is enough to make the book noteworthy. As it is, Liften has also raised some challenging questions about the nature of man's life and how he responds to it in contemporary society.

LIFTON uses his work with atom-bomb survivors as the jumping-off point for this study. The survivors of the bombings, he says, found themselves confronted with a set of boundaries with which they had never had to deal. Those were the boundaries of destruction, which had previously seemed obvious and somewhat controllable. In a normal war, Lifton says, men are killed by bullets or arrows, and the community suffers a loss, but there is a clear set of limits to the destruction. The atomic bomb for the first time has confronted man with a "permanent encounter" with death. The victims experience a lasting confusion of death and life, in which neither is perfectly clear. The encounter with death, says Lifton, "left people with a feeling that there were no boundaries-no limits whatsoever-to the deadly force intruding on their world."

Once he has established the reality of this limitless destructive force, Lifton examines men's reaction to it, which comes mostly in terms of an abandonment of the sense of immortality-of the ability to extend the parameters of life and death. Man conceives of immortality in five ways: the biological, in which man lives on through his offspring; the theological, in which he attempts to create a life after death; the creative, in which he attempts to build monuments to himself through his works; the sense developed by some, like the Shintoists, who see themselves as a part of nature, surviving in the natural mode after the individual death; and, finally, what Freud called the "oceanic feeling," the sense of psychic ecstasy surpassing life and death.

Lifton sees the nuclear age as a direct threat to the possibility of the first three forms of immortality, for a nuclear holocaust will destroy man and his works, and theological immortality, already severely questioned before Hiroshima, becomes even less plausible in the face of man-made total destruction.

This leaves man with two possibilities for immortality, and he grasps at them both. The current resurgence of interest in nature and the environment, Lifton says, is merely an expression of man's desire to live on through nature, combined with his perception that nature is assured of immortality, no matter what the fate of man. But the fifth mode of immortality is the one which most concerns him, for he sees in it the explanation of much of the new culture which man has developed in the past quarter century.

THIS FIFTH mode of immortality-the seeking of an experience to transcend life and death-seems to Lifton to be the reason for the drug culture, for revolution, for almost any of the consuming passions made have experienced since 1945. He uses the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a paradigm for man's attempt to redefine the boundaries and re-establish the concept of immortality, while defying the specter of death which the bomb has established. "The activist response to symbolic death," he says, "or to what might be called unmastered death anxiety, is a quest for rebirth. One could in fact view the entire Cultural Revolution as a demand for the renewal of Communist life. It is, in other words, a call for the resurrection of revolutionary immortality." Mao Tse-Tung, Lifton suggests, is the embodiment of revolutionary immortality, the aged man who renews his life in the Cultural Revolution. Thought, as an extension of his personality, finds new life in thousands of minds. The entire Chinese Communist movement, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution, becomes for Lifton a seeking for immortality, a religion.

The fallacies in his arguments are obvious. Lifton has established that the survivors of Hiroshima feel a sense of unlimited destruction, and feel that their traditional ways of relating to immortality are meaningless, but he has failed to show that these survivors participate in the drug culture, the revolutionary movement or any of the other "modes of immortality" to which he refers. He certainly never manages to connect the cultural revolution with the Hiroshima atrocity, or to prove that the bombing had any personal psychological effect on Mao or any of the other leaders of China.

Although he fails to provide a convincing link between Hiroshima and the revolutionary movement, Lifton does formulate one very intriguing thesis from his analysis of the aftermath of the nuclear era. He postulates the existence of what he calls Protean man, a man who has lost the boundaries of his own self. Protean man is in a state of total confusion, and finds himself embracing a series of conflicting ideologies for no apparent reason. "Until relatively recently, no more than one major ideological shift was likely to occur in a lifetime, and that one would be long remembered as a very significant inner individual turning point accompanied by profound soul-searching and conflict. But today, it is not so unusual to encounter several such shifts accomplished relatively painlessly within a year, or even a month, whether in politics, aesthetic values, or style of living."

LIFTON has hit on a very important concept here, yet he insists on finding the reason for the phenomenon of Protean man in the malaise caused by the atomic bomb. In fact, while the bomb may have disoriented members of Lifton's generation, it is implausible to suggest that it accounts for the Protean man. The contemporary adult or young adult does not have as vivid a memory or understanding of the bombing as did Lifton, or John Hersey, and can not relate to it in the terms Lifton suggests. While psychological disorientation and the Protean state are observable in modern man, they can be traced only to a complex of social conditions, not to such a simple explanation as Lifton's. On this point, and in the book as a whole, Lifton has very accurately described a number of the problems of modern society, and ascribed them to simplistic solutions. It may be a function of the intellectual climate in which his generation was raised that he feels bound to ascertain a simple answer to even the most complex of problems.