Brainwashing

1950

Edward Hunter (1902–1978)

It is no surprise that one of the most controversial topics in modern psychology is that of mind control, or brainwashing. The fear that such techniques were being used by enemies of the United States during the Cold War led the US government and its allies to mount an intensive and secret effort to understand how mind control works and how they could use it. As a popular novel (1959) and then a movie (1962), The Manchurian Candidate was a thrilling account of a person brainwashed into becoming an assassin in the service of a communist conspiracy.

The term brainwashing entered popular usage in English through the journalism of Edward Hunter. In a series of articles that were first published in 1950, Hunter exposed the efforts of the Chinese to brainwash American prisoners during the Korean War. By this he meant that the Chinese were able to convince the prisoners that the United States was evil and had abandoned them and that the communist form of government was superior to American democracy. By extension, the Chinese government and other communist governments had brainwashed their own populations to believe that they were living in the best of all possible worlds.

Immediately after the Korean War, the US government secretly poured money into research on mind control. The term brainwashing also was widely used in popular culture, sometimes with chilling effect, as when southern segregationists suggested that anyone who favored racial equality had been brainwashed by communists.

Mind control took on a new urgency during the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of popular religious cults such as the Unification Church. Psychologist Margaret Singer became a leading investigator of the practices of such cults on their mostly youthful followers. Her report on mind-control techniques and cults was rejected by the organization that requested it, the American Psychological Association. No explanation was offered.

SEE ALSO Sensory Deprivation (1937), Choosing the Right Stuff (1958)

Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra filming a scene in Central Park for The Manchurian Candidate. Photograph by Phil Stanziola, 1962.