Sometimes, a new word emerges that expresses a concept already well understood. A word might bring new ideas to public consciousness, combine notions previously kept apart, describe a thing that nobody had really apprehended before or that everyone knew previously under some other name. Designations may disappear, move to the margins or be redeployed in new contexts, as when we talk of a computer virus or mouse. Old words sometimes become obsolete, or acquire notable new significance and meanings, as we can see, for instance, with a word such as ‘queer’. Words may, in some cases, have relatively consistent and stable meanings over long durations; they can also be problematised, reclaimed and re-inflected with each passing year. We make micro-adjustments, as listeners and speakers, attentive to shifting contemporary idioms and slang – noticing, for example, whether the word ‘sick’, in a certain context, means unwell or amazing.
A word, in other words, may redescribe something already well known, an old wine in a new bottle; or signify an unprecedented phenomenon. It would be inaccurate to think of the internet as just a new expression for an abstract idea that people had already apprehended hundreds of years earlier, even if you might find glimmerings of this proposition in science fiction or technological speculation before our digital age. Yet the concept of poorly paid or repetitive employment existed long before ‘McJob’ entered the English language (in 1986, to be precise). Words can have multiple meanings, and they may also be weighted with all kinds of distinct nuances, assumptions or moral implications. So, ‘McJob’ might have quite different resonances when used in, say, a trade union campaign, a stand-up comedy routine, a suicide letter or a snobbish magazine airily describing the lives of the poor. And then again, two people may hear the same word very differently, when uttered by the same speaker.
Whether the word ‘brainwashing’, first used in English around five years after the end of the Second World War, ushered in a novel way to understand an older reality was itself soon cast into question: pundits argued about whether it was a mere restatement of something that had been fully perceived by previous generations, or a description of an emerging phenomenon that had no prior equivalent in history and public consciousness. Opinions differed about its reality, location and urgency, and its exploitation to generate alarm.
Some commentators suggested that the term captured a distinct and nefarious combination of power and knowledge at work here and now. They warned of a terrifying form of state that had already arrived, at least somewhere abroad. It was, after all, a time when the superpowers were deploying an arsenal of psychological sciences. Others argued that the term merely referred to practices already well rehearsed, and widely understood, long ago. Sceptics also pointed out that the notion might be heavily spun to serve different interests; a rhetorical vehicle for conjuring up a host of imaginary threats, a means of generating panic about fragile minds in modern times.
In September 1950, during the first year of the Korean War, Edward Hunter, an American journalist who had worked in wartime intelligence, and post-war with the CIA, coined (or, more accurately, first popularised) the term brainwashing, and left no doubt for his readers that the problem was important and real.1 He suggested a profound shift had occurred; new historical conditions existed for governing the mind.2 In using the term, first in a piece for the Miami News and then in other writings and books, he was pointing to what he claimed to be a frightening and rising danger. Hunter described a form of psychological intervention that was being perfected by certain enemy states. This involved a veritable onslaught upon people’s minds. Though he recognised some precursors, he would elaborate during the 1950s upon how the brainwashing threat had truly come of age; a deadly new amalgam of ideology, technology, medicine and psychological sciences that was now transforming social reality in certain foreign places, but potentially in any state.
Hunter’s first article, ‘“Brain-Washing” Tactics Force Chinese into Ranks of the Communist Party’, adapted a commonplace Chinese phrase, ‘xǐ nǎo’, meaning to wash the brain. That was a euphemism; it was not about cleansing, literally, but rather destroying and substituting. The word’s Chinese provenance was highlighted, and this gave more than a clue to the American’s most obvious concerns: Mao and his communist revolution.
The warnings from Hunter and his fellow 1950s writers about brainwashing found a willing audience, perhaps primed by earlier dystopian scenarios explored in literature – all those compelling accounts of a supine society, terrorised by omnipotent masters, and/ or fed by modern equivalents of ancient ‘bread and circuses’. Some writers, such as Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), had pictured a future of captivity through anodyne entertainment, sexual so-called liberation and drugs; others, including George Orwell, whose Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, depicted a world where people are broken and held in a state of permanent totalitarian subjection.
By that time much had already been written in the West about both Nazi and Soviet propaganda warfare. During the First and Second World Wars, substantial efforts were made by both sides to target propaganda efforts more efficiently, and, increasingly, to monitor shifts in morale and public opinion. Clinical expertise was sought, and deployed, in the efforts during the 1940s, to analyse and redress the deep psychological and social consequences of Nazism. The Nazis after all had sought to recast the population; they used the term Gleichschaltung (translated variously as coordination, synchronisation or consolidation) to convey the ambition to refashion society across the board.
The aim of the Nazi Party was to shape profoundly not only politics, but also every facet of society, and, ideally, to end all opposition in the minds of the people: in sum, to achieve a total harmonisation. It was never fully realised, but the German people lived for twelve years under the Führer; millions had voted for him, fought for him, agreed with his aims, loved him and accepted his world view, even in the face of impending calamity. During the Second World War, psychological and anthropological researchers, including psychoanalysts, worked for the Allies in the army and intelligence services. They attempted to understand the mass appeal of fascism and the psychological consequences of living under such modern forms of tyranny; they would also help with assessing the testimony of POWs, refining propaganda, mounting ‘dirty tricks’ operations, seeking to decipher the deeper intent and impact of enemy broadcasts, and, after victory in 1945, assisting the victors’ efforts to ‘denazify’ a defeated German population. That terrible history continued to shadow Cold War debate on brainwashing.
At the same time there were dramatic developments in neuroscience and the elaboration of ‘psycho-surgery’. Some pundits heralded the great advances made in mental health treatment for all, thanks to the advent of electric shock therapy and new techniques of brain surgery. By the 1950s and 60s, some surgeons, including prominent figures notably in the United States and Britain, would make grandiose claims that they could cure or tame those who were presumed to be suffering severe and chronic mental disorders by conducting lobotomies. But if medicine and science might claim jurisdiction and have a key role in fixing pathological conditions in brains, from cancerous tumours to schizophrenia, others feared that drugs, shocks and surgery could also facilitate new modes of social control, including the pacification of the troublesome, unhappy, disturbed and eccentric inside a supposedly liberal society.3 Such debate about the advances and potential dangers in science, medicine and technology also profoundly shaped the language of brainwashing.
Post-war movies updated older conceits in the mode of Frankenstein, featuring white-coated technicians who invade brains even, perhaps entirely rejuvenating and controlling minds and bodies. At the same time, some analyses of totalitarianism focused on the potential role of medicine and psychology in helping the state to ensure compliant or enthusiastic states of mind in a captive population, be it for fascism or communism. Hunter was one of the pundits who set the scene for a vast array of new explorations of mind control, suggesting that the techniques of thought interference exploited by contemporary foes of Western liberal democracy, like the Chinese state, had to be revealed in all their horror, and then fought with all possible means. Brainwashing, he declared, was the current experience – and the terrible plight – of the Chinese population and all those who had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of their ‘reeducators’, foreign prisoners included. Left unchecked the dangers would spread.4
The process was akin to a new and total form of psychological enslavement, Hunter and many other Western critics of China warned; it was responsible for the extraordinary sufferings and political illusions, even delusions, of countless men and women who were now at the mercy of the Communist Party. Mao’s unleashing of a Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, where students and others in their hundreds of thousands became Red Guards, gave new momentum to such perceptions of a vast population of brainwashed foot soldiers, fanatical comrades, or even mindless automata.5
Given what came to be known about Mao’s thought-reform programmes or, later, the Cultural Revolution, such fears of mass indoctrination expressed by Hunter were not completely absurd, but the language that he used to characterise ‘brainwashing’ was obviously biased, polarised and sensationalistic. Those in power both in China and elsewhere, he suggested dramatically, had a large range of secret tools available to snatch away not only freedom of movement, expression and assembly, but also freedom of thought entirely, and to impose an absolute will on captive subjects, en masse. In the most severe cases, he warned in his 1956 book Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It, victims were utterly changed; they could find themselves transformed after being imprisoned and ‘[p]ut under a terrifying combination of subtle and crude mental and physical pressures and tortures’.6 All this, he believed, required urgent research; dealing with the crisis brought about by an array of modern mind-control techniques necessitated extreme political vigilance and a battery of practical countermeasures.
Hunter and other commentators writing of brainwashing at around the same time feared that a systematic policy of psychological conversion was being rolled out on a scale the world had not previously witnessed. It was no good simply to equate this phenomenon to prior procedures, they claimed; nor was it right to imagine that the brainwashing happening in China was tantamount to old-fashioned authoritarian diktats, propaganda campaigns or heavy-handed education under the banner of nationalism. Nor was the crisis just a secular version of old and familiar religious forms of indoctrination. At the very least, indoctrination, if such it could still be called, had reached an extraordinary, clinical level of precision, they argued. These writers pointed to how some new combination of surgery, pharmaceuticals, hypnotism, psychological experiments in animal conditioning (most famously associated with the work of the Russian physiologist Pavlov) and group shaming might be used to cement absolute political allegiance to the cause of communism.
‘Brainwashing’, Hunter insisted, is ‘similar in many peculiar ways to a medical treatment’7 that might well be conducted upon a subject, indeed millions of subjects, without their informed consent. Lurking in the background of this argument about communism’s mastery over the mind was the earlier realisation that medicine, and the people who practised it, could be perverted and co-opted by a monstrous state. After all, evidence had just emerged about the crimes of the Nazi doctors, some of whom were put on trial at Nuremberg alongside the major war criminals; men who had experimented mercilessly upon helpless victims in concentration camps, in grotesque violation of the Hippocratic Oath.8
Hunter wanted Americans to know that brainwashing threatened them too. He offered readers anxious glimpses of how in this new epoch, medico-psychiatric programmes could be unleashed with alarming rapidity. The methods might be overt or practically invisible. He saw links to the past but also differentiated this emerging period of history sharply from earlier ages, when other varied techniques exerted by political movements, religions, parties or states won hearts and minds. The question for Hunter was whether the prisoner/patient in latter-day regimes such as Stalin’s or Mao’s could ever resist, and what tools could be offered to make people more wary, critical and resilient.
Hunter recognised the possibility of psychological resistance, and explored more gradations than these simple absolutes. Whatever the rhetoric, his accounts begged more questions than they answered, not only about how best to meet the challenge, but also about how brainwashing could be isolated conceptually from other ideas about education, persuasion and influence. His writings suggest the modern origins of the word; the mixture of fascination and fear the process evoked; the dramatic pictures so often painted, and yet also the blurred edges of that Cold War debate. Was the procedure so total and indelible? Where and how might people hold out? What about partial brainwashing, split convictions, half-hearted conversions and milder forms of pressure and cajoling? His role as a journalist and pundit on brainwashing was also significant, for much of this debate would be conducted not in seminar rooms or in parliaments, but across the airwaves, in popular magazines, newspapers, on TV and in the cinema. People had to evaluate the stories they were being told and assess the authority of the columnists and opinion-makers who told them what to think, where the dangers were coming from, whom to fear or how to resist.
When it came to describing what forms brainwashing actually took, and explaining the precise mechanisms involved in the process, Hunter reached for metaphors and analogies that, far from pinpointing the science, in fact made it seem truly scary, and also tantalisingly vague; for brainwashing, he proposed, somewhat loosely, is ‘more akin to witchcraft with its incantations, trances, poisons and potions’.9 The whole thing ‘was a mixture of old voodoo as it were but all with a strange flair of science about it all … [a] magic brew in a test tube’.10 Mysteries still abounded; he said the Chinese tried to cover up what they were doing. They didn’t want to call it brainwashing, even though they knew, apparently, that was precisely what it was. The first requirement, in Hunter’s view, was to identify the methods of brainwashing and then explore what would help people to withstand the assault. To work most effectively, the process, he proposed, depends above all on the subject’s ignorance of how it is conducted; so, to educate might also be to arm us.11 If brainwashing could overpower free will, a well-prepared mind and well-equipped society could – maybe – push back against dangers abroad, or here in its midst. On the other hand, the brainwashers were becoming ever more sophisticated, and perhaps a day would come when resistance was futile; but then again, maybe not …
Stories from the post-war period provide an indication of how rapidly reading publics were expected to engage with the problem, and how swiftly news reporters also seized on the term. In 1950, The Times of India took up the expression, describing how ‘China under the Red flag’ witnessed such ‘brain-washing’, and equating it to ‘a new version of the mental purge’. In 1955, The Times of London reported how special military forces were being prepared to undergo, by way of training, ‘realistic “brainwashing” procedures for those who are “captured”’. It also soon found its way into popular culture, as well as into angry fulminations against its dangers.
The topic has never really gone away. Readers, viewers and listeners from the early 1950s onwards could scarcely avoid encounters – in the English-language press and magazines, at the cinema, on radio or TV, in everyday conversation – with the problem, enigma, accusation or perhaps even alibi of brainwashing.12 The watchword would appear in grand slogans as well as in small print over the following decades. It was a buzz phrase in feature pieces and storylines about just about everything, from prison-house conditions to the newest dance craze, from assembly-line manufacturing to heavy metal concerts, from school reform programmes to marital breakdowns. As the label migrated from one setting to another, it acquired new associations, and served as a foil in all manner of arguments, including debates about the nature of identity, authenticity, creativity and freedom.
Zooming forward to the recent past, it is clear the extent to which ‘brainwashing’ has entered our everyday lexicon, and how often it may be invoked, casually too, not least as a way of arguing both about our interactions with one another (for instance, online) and our relationships as individuals or groups to a larger structure, overarching agency or controlling institution. Reference to brainwashing may perhaps also reflect our anxieties and puzzlements about the limits of freedom. ‘Brainwashing’ can be claimed by some as a matter of certainty, and then used by others more interrogatively, a springboard for further explorations of power.
This was illustrated for me by an encounter not long ago with some sixth formers at a state school in London. As part of an exercise, the students had been asked to come up with some associations and then concrete examples in response to the word brainwashed. Some jumped in with accusations about their own school education; that, they said, was brainwashing them just as much as anything else. Quickly, other members of the group challenged that assertion, pointing out that if school was just an exercise in brainwashing, how come they were allowed to discuss it like this? Several looked rather uncomfortable when their teacher felt (or at least appeared to feel) crestfallen by their account, and asked the group gently, ‘You think I’m a brainwasher?’ They immediately reassured him that despite their view of the school they really appreciated him personally: ‘Not you, sir, it’s the system brainwashing us,’ said one of them helpfully.
Brainwashing, the class eventually agreed, was not a process you could simply equate with him, or with their school. They began to reflect on the pressures the staff, as well as the students, were under, and to tease out where brainwashing proper might really best be identified; a few proceeded to argue about the political state in which they were living.
Those and other young people in London I have talked to about this set of issues (including groups of teenagers who made an interesting collection of video essays on brainwashing and hidden persuasion)13 have described the forces around them online and off. They have wondered how best to explain their own self-immersion in, say, fashion, video games, music or interminable online chat. I have been struck by their acute sense of the magnetically compelling, yet also hateful, aspects of living practically 24/7 connected to others, through computers. Some spoke of their attraction, as though moths to a flame, to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or other platforms and social networking services; they were aware of the potential for addiction, of their obsession with checking the latest notifications each time the phone pinged, and tracking the number of ‘likes’ for each posted image.
In feeling troubled by their own behaviour, they were surely representative of millions of others, old and young. They were trying to figure out the degree to which such platforms provide opportunities for freedom, connection, communication and self-realisation; present dangerous traps, brainwashing them; exploit their emotions, in using the human thirst for recognition, affection and approbation; or nurture gleeful, hateful and prurient feelings, to keep users online, and thus constantly return a profit. They asked searching questions about the means, motives, causes and consequences of this daily bargain and the nature of digital capitalism. Those teenagers could often sense or even know full well that they had been virtually hooked, just as previous generations may have come to see themselves as the fodder of the post-war advertising industry.
Online resources have been engineered, they well understood, not only to be convenient and replete with creative tools, but also to be extremely addictive. Thus, software is created to enable the harvesting of data, and geared to exploit the subject’s curiosity, colonise time, monetise emotions and play upon all-too-human wishes to be loved. The set-up is constantly honed to be more and more engrossing and hard to leave, even if nobody compels us. It is designed to capture our desire for contact with friends, to see what happens when we dare to throw a thought out there into the world and discover who responds, and in what numbers; or sometimes to license the most sadistic pleasures and exploit the darkest conspiratorial fantasies. Those adolescents spoke eloquently of being beguiled, and yet knew well enough that the attention we all give, and micro-adjustments we make over time, are precisely the product – that influence-prone porous dimension of ‘us’ – sold by data companies to advertisers. We are the data that then generates untold fortunes for the vast tech companies. Those school students had no doubt digital life was here for keeps, but that it also needed radical reform.
No one is immune to the many varieties of influence and persuasion communicated relentlessly over months and years. We can debate which age group is most vulnerable now, online and off: the computer-savvy teenager, their parents and grandparents, or perhaps pre-teen children, who are certainly heavily catered for by advertisers (the next generation prepared for the market?). Those school students described their struggles to fashion identities, a sense of self, a set of convictions, beliefs, values of their own, modes of resistance, in a world of great insecurity, amid wall-to-wall messages, advertising injunctions and new forms of public shaming, in place of pre-modern pillories and stocks. No wonder that pressure has mounted for a right to be forgotten, an entitlement to own and/or erase our data online, for an adequate response to hate speech, hounding mobs and fake news, and for a break-up of monopoly companies.
The teenagers I spoke to mostly acknowledged that they had some agency and responsibility, but also articulated the sense of imponderable unseen virtual forces that exert great power over their lives. Even so, they suggested how we may all become active and not just passive players, and participants too. We live in a world where we can all too easily exercise our ability or satisfy our wishes to hear only what we want to hear; to exist in bubbles, where we are provided, if we so choose, only with news congruent with our prejudices and predilections.
Some in those groups envisaged life in this new millennium amid ever greater hybrid possibilities, as AI, biotech and human beings become increasingly fused. They anticipated an environment where chips are inserted into our brains, and where the algorithm knows our desires better than we know them ourselves. In short, the kind of developments well described by historians of the future such as Yuval Noah Harari.14
It is hardly surprising that these teenagers had such immediate and intense reactions to the word brainwashing. That term takes on new meanings in their world. It is a concept they have been exposed to in all kinds of ways even though they were born after the period that gave birth to this vocabulary, the Cold War, had already formally ended.
*
Brainwashing became, post-war and after, a ready conceit for adventures, spy stories, tragedies and comedies, kitchen-sink dramas and no end of popular cartoons. In fact, even before the Cold War set in and the word was coined, tales of evil fascist, Stalinist or capitalist global mind-control conspiracies were already staple ingredients of yarns and movies. An American work of pulp fiction of the 1930s, for example, is tellingly entitled ‘The Affair of the Brains’: it portrays a future interplanetary conflict between a demonic ‘Oriental’ tyrannical figure, or evil genius, Ku Sui, and a US cowboy-like hero, Hawk Carse, with whom he must fight to the death. In this adventure, Ku Sui kidnaps the most eminent scientists he can find, extracts their brains, puts them in vats, and then by keeping the grey matter alive and interconnected creates a grand cerebral system under this would-be universal dictator’s total control.15
Comic books and animations have often whizzed their signature characters in and out of political cages and mental states of totalitarian terror; think of Donald Duck, in an anti-Nazi production of 1943, Der Fuehrer’s Face, waking into a nightmare land of clockwork labour, a society peopled by brutal, coarse ruffians, where he must goosestep, before he wakes again with immense relief home in his own bed, to walk as he pleases and entertain his own thoughts in the Land of Liberty. Or cartoons may alert viewers to capitalist enchantment: witness a Soviet-produced Disney-style anti-Western propaganda cartoon of 1949, Stranger’s Voice; it warned the good Russian people of the corrosive import of Western jazz, a music, it was alleged, that would corrupt the soul. The communist heartland was represented by a harmonious colony of adorable birds; they must close their ears, to shut out and save themselves from the toxic (American) cacophony.16
Later, in the West, thanks to Disney, came the memorable image of Kaa the snake, singing lullingly ‘trust in me’, while insinuating himself almost irresistibly into Mowgli’s mind, in the enchanting 1967 film version of The Jungle Book. That very same year, audiences could also enjoy the sight of Tom and Jerry reduced to automata while wearing mind-control helmets, in an episode entitled ‘Advance and Be Mechanized’. The barely disguised messaging in such cartoons, both new and old, can itself attract accusations of brainwashing. When a film version of the Dr Seuss story The Lorax appeared in 2012, a Fox News host, Lou Dobbs, warned his viewers about the brainwashing potential of such supposedly left-wing productions, which he suggested were designed to get the public unnecessarily steamed up about climate disaster. A colleague of Dobbs, Eric Bolling, also opined about the clandestine brainwashing message of the 2011 Muppets movie, which vilifies an oil executive, tellingly named ‘Tex Richman’.17
In ‘The Joy of Sect’, a 1998 episode of that marvellously inventive cartoon series The Simpsons – made for the Fox Broadcasting Company – Homer attends a free residential seminar offered by a charismatic cult, the Movementarians. He is immediately smitten. Soon he is reciting, parrot-fashion, the group leader’s name. The poor sap is indoctrinated completely, and nearly induced to sell the deeds to the family house. He abandons his family and seems perfectly content tilling the soil on the land while a tin-pot guru drives around this private empire in a Rolls-Royce, throwing up dirt in the faces of his ecstatic and grovelling followers. Eventually, he is rescued by his wife, Marge, and the family are reunited and shown back in their town, Springfield, getting on with business as usual; in fact, sitting down to watch … Fox News. We know that the next day Homer, suitably ‘freed’, will be back to work in the nuclear plant, run by the malevolent tycoon Mr Burns.
The cartoon satirically pokes fun at Fox, inviting the viewer to think, and to pose a more serious question perhaps about brainwashing. Even as that corporation shows you The Simpsons, it pumps out Fox News, notorious to at least half of the nation as a font of wretched propaganda and spin.
Popular music can also be deployed as a way of reflecting on, or even recovering from, brainwashing, something Grace Jones alluded to in her 1983 single ‘Living My Life’.18 Jones has spoken directly about her own efforts to escape the brainwashing conducted upon her: racism, sexism and religious bigotry engulfed her, she said, and while growing up she had been ‘brainwashed by all this hellfire and damnation’.19 Music has often been identified as a possible vehicle for brainwashing too. Repetitive, thumping beats and sheer walls of noise have been used in cruel modern regimes of punishment and torture, a means to torment imprisoned people. This is ‘music’ that the prisoner can’t turn off, sound that totally offends in its sheer volume or its lyrics; vibration exploited as a means to devastate minds, to cause a person’s resistance to weaken, even collapse, and thus to assist interrogators and brainwashers.20 Victims can be entombed in an unbearable din as well as in deafening states of silence.
Music may serve as a means of enchanting, enrapturing or moving a mass audience at a religious meeting, political rally or cultural gathering. And it can equally well be the source of an extraordinary moral panic: scaremongers have warned about the hidden goals of popular bands, or the subliminal messages inside apparently innocuous songs.21 During the 1960s, right-wing Christian pastors in the United States cautioned that the Beatles were badly confusing young people about their sexuality, and ultimately brainwashing them. The musicians from Liverpool were said to be part of a project of international communist subversion. Yet besides these images of ‘the Red Beatles’, others noted how Russian young people used their songs to question communism, or even claimed that Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society.22 As the accusations flew, the CIA was actively engaged in using music, art and letters to promote the interests and ideals of the West and to sow images of a free society behind the Iron Curtain; the Soviet state also had its own cultural ambassadors, various intellectuals and artists, serving as mouthpieces.23
The Beatles were not brainwashers, nor anyone’s poodles, but their massive popular influence, and the hysterical response of some of their fans, led certain conservative critics to treat them as such. The group did offer their own wry humour, sardonic quips, experimental musical styles, shifting personas, and lyrics that ventured many intriguing thoughts about conformity, consciousness and revolution. George Harrison’s posthumously released 2002 album is entitled Brainwashed. Its title song tells of how we are brainwashed by childhood, school, teachers, rules, leaders, kings and queens, God, the Nikkei, the Dow Jones, the FTSE and the Nasdaq.
We will probably never know exactly what prompted Elvis Presley to offer his services to the US government to counter the moral crisis afflicting the next generation. However, his overtures came soon after the Republican vice president, Spiro Agnew, directly attacked the Beatles and the 1960s drug culture which he insisted explicitly brainwashes young people.24 Presley, like the Fab Four, had himself caused much controversy about his hypnotic effect on the young, as though his musical style, face, hair and gyrating hips were truly responsible for leading young people to some (orgiastic) hell in a handcart. Presley was having none of all that. Just before Christmas 1970, he drove up to the gates of the White House bearing a handwritten letter for Richard Nixon, a letter that explained how the singer had made an ‘in-depth study of drug abuse and communist brainwashing techniques’, and now wanted to be sworn in by the president as a federal agent at large, so he could use his communication skills to safeguard American youth from all these contemporary dangers.25
By the time Presley met Nixon (and was duly rewarded with that role as a special agent, at least on paper), the word brainwashing was twenty years old; it was by then the go-to term for just about everything that ran counter to the conventional mores and stability of post-war Western society: Stalinism, Maoism, neo-Nazism or religious fundamentalism, cults, populism, the counterculture, psychedelia and the general malaise of adolescents. The background thrum of all that discourse continues, as some use it now to discuss climate change denial, Trumpism, Putinism, terrorism or, historically, the interwar appeal of fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. The London students I met might perhaps as easily encounter the idea of brainwashing in religious studies, history, politics and psychology lessons, as in pop art, video games and in literature commissioned by government itself, designed to try to prevent future ‘radicalisation’. The concept of brainwashing features in explanations of local calamities and faraway mysteries, such as why crowds weep at the sight of the ‘dear leader’ in Pyongyang; in psychological accounts of why some women stay for years with their violent partners; in sociological theories about the impact of digital advertising; and in right-wing political dismissals of the climate change campaigner Greta Thunberg, supposedly the brainwashed young victim of her own parents.
In short, brainwash stories of great variety abound; about leaders and followers, small and large crimes, acts of mass killing and self-destruction. We each must assess the different ways brainwashing can be used in arguments, appeals or accusations, and decide what credence to give to claims in the press. Speaking to Martin Chulov, a distinguished writer on the Middle East who reports for the Guardian, Osama Bin Laden’s mother claimed her shy, bright boy was transformed in sudden and bewildering fashion by sinister teachers. When Osama was in his early twenties, she explained, he grew much more pious and driven. Her son was lost, she insisted, during the time he was studying economics at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. It was here, she explained, that he was first ‘brainwashed’.26
The term has arisen not only in reference to powerful figures like Bin Laden, but also to explain the actions of camp followers in his movement, as well as its rival, Islamic State (IS). But does the term brainwashed sufficiently characterise why so many have flocked to these causes, or make us any the wiser about how best to deal with the threat these movements pose to democracies, how far to punish the followers, and whether to offer psychological treatment, aimed at rehabilitation? The predicament of a young woman, Shamima Begum, recently exemplified this dilemma and prompted heated debate. In February 2015, aged fifteen, Begum left her UK home and her parents, who are of Bangladeshi origin, to travel to Turkey in the company of two other schoolgirls from east London, and from there to Syria to join IS. She eventually found herself marooned in a refugee camp after IS forces were routed by US-backed Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers, and sought to return to the UK.
In 2019, the Conservative British Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, decided that Begum could not be allowed to return to the UK.27 This block remained in place, despite her young age on leaving the country, the personal hardships she suffered, above all her grief about the deaths of her three infants, and desperate subsequent appeals to be allowed to go home. The decision left her effectively stateless, despite insouciant declarations from the government that she could go back to Bangladesh.28 What may really have led her to leave the UK, or to embrace this cause, was drowned out in angry headlines, with much talk of her lifelong dangerousness as well as her brainwashing, and a certain confusion about whether the latter gave grounds for clemency anyway.
To the dismay of those seeking her return to Britain, Begum continued to justify some of IS’s actions, even as she also suggested she was not quite in her right mind. A typical report in The Times quoted her plea: ‘I was brainwashed. I knew nothing.’29 As her case made clear, victims and perpetrators are not always neatly divided; brainwashed or not, she lives on in a desperate twilight zone, although continuing to press her legal case for a right to return. Others more fortunate and less visible than her managed to return to Britain from Syria, albeit often to then face their own grave personal difficulties and much stigma, both within their own former communities and in a wider society. Some returnees found their way to National Health Service mental health therapeutic programmes, despite some critical media pushback, social media objections and even an attempted (unsuccessful) public petition to terminate such services.30
The designation ‘brainwashed’ can serve as a diagnosis, a charge or sometimes even an apology. It can be used controversially in high-profile legal defences to help a defendant argue against accusations of responsibility for mass atrocities.31 The term featured heavily in media reports about some of the most shocking cases to make the front pages of the 1960s and after. Murderous people, from the Manson gang (or ‘family’) to the Reverend Jim Jones to Ted Kaczynski, were and still are regularly discussed through this lens. Jones’s case was perhaps the most shocking, culminating in the tragic Jonestown mass murder-suicide of 909 people (a third of them children) in Guyana, in 1978.32 Those who died at the 1993 Waco siege in Texas were also said to have been brainwashed by their charismatic leader. The killing of seventy-six penned-in cult members and their families by the authorities was apparently one of the key events to have enraged Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and anti-government extremist, and inspired him to explode a device in Oklahoma City in 1995 that killed 168 people.33
Considering the post-war cultural context of brainwashing discussed above, and researching this book, led me to reflect on the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology during the twentieth century. More immediately, various communications by patients and colleagues have left their mark on this study, not least by emphasising our shared vulnerability to coercive persuasion.34 Patients may well seek help through the talking cure, keenly and appreciatively, seeking to break free of repetitive and disabling patterns; yet, however willing to engage, patients may also be deeply worried about losing control. At times, certain patients have suggested to me – or even demanded – that I should think about brainwashing dangers within psychoanalysis; asking that we consider, for example, whether the therapy may itself be coercive and secretly persuasive in intent, or a project designed to convert the analysand.
Analysts can always lose touch with the receptive and open state of mind that Freud wanted his followers to maintain when they worked. We risk, no doubt, becoming overt or covert influencers, or moralisers, even without consciously intending to. Patients may want their psychoanalysts to operate, sometimes at least, as coaches, judges, advisers or advocates, and nudge them accordingly. But even when, as analysts, we are working appropriately, in that original Freudian sense, maintaining the role effectively, patients can have grave doubts about the nature of the enterprise, objecting, on the one hand, if the analyst does not ‘take sides’, and on the other, lamenting their unwanted influence and censorious tone. In an analysis, a patient can feel relieved as well as perturbed to be granting so much access to their own intimate thoughts and feelings. The patient might also feel they have granted a kind of privilege to someone else to help them change their lives, but this very access may also arouse the fear of being possessed, indoctrinated or just overexposed, left vulnerable and excessively porous. A patient might claim, for instance, that their analyst is making them feel guilty, criticising and cajoling or seeking to condition them, when the analyst is inviting their open-minded exploration of a painful issue. We can all bristle and grow defensive when a difficult subject is broached, or when we feel too raw. Many things can get projected by the patient onto the analyst. A patient once complained to me that what I had said to him about what was happening between us during the session was, as he put it, ‘cruelly pinning him down’. Although he came to reconsider afterwards whether his family member X and his work enemy Y were as responsible for all his ills as he had claimed, and to question his own first assumption that my interpretation was ‘dictating’ to him what to do, it was important to him to discover that I was open to exploring the possibility that I might indeed have been pressing him too insistently to take on board my point.
Another patient, who had suffered a very unhappy childhood, spoke at considerable length one day, with a certain relish, about egregious treatments by certain psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the Cold War United States. He had read about these scandals in journals; and, as he rightly pointed out, those sometimes heavily pressuring approaches were not in fact confined only to then and there.35 He spelled out that he was talking about conversion therapies, targeted at gay patients, and about bigots and zealots, seeking to make patients straight, to ‘cure’ them of their sexuality, sometimes through explicit advice, coercive instruction or strong encouragement. My patient pointed to such manipulative and bullying practices, sometimes mobilised by Churches, but also by secular movements, and asked, with a kind of mounting pressure on me, ‘Where exactly do you stand?’ It was as though it was important to pull the words from me, to force my acknowledgement that I abhorred and condemned this too, or perhaps to seek my active dissociation from these bad practitioners. He ‘demanded’ to know ‘immediately’, to have ‘a yes or no straight answer’. He knew enough, I believed, by then, of my way of working not to require that I should seek to convince him of my bona fides; indeed had I responded to this demand by instantly affirming my own contrary views, I felt that I would have been playing some kind of required role. Whatever else may have been at stake in that demand, I thought he was conveying not only his critical views of such treatments, but also what it means to be pressured, cornered and controlled; in fact, letting me know what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that experience, which he had so often endured in his own family as a child.
A different patient, a courageous, elderly man named Mr W., who was in his own view quite mentally unwell and both desperate for and wary of my help, raised the question directly of brainwashing by psychoanalysis. Mr W. had always lived alone and was suspicious about what I, his analyst, might do to him under the guise of assisting him in facing certain problems in his life. He raised the issue of brainwashing, with some considerable trepidation regarding what he half assumed to be my project to adapt him to some secret blueprint of my own.
As he watched me vigilantly (for he was too anxious to use the couch), Mr W. said he needed to try to read my mind. At times he was convinced that he could succeed in doing so, as well as in shaping my thoughts, even as he feared I might be doing the same back to him; he went so far as to liken his head to a transparent glass bowl. One day, he leant towards me and announced that he was worried that the treatment might seriously brainwash him; and it might do this so successfully, he thought, that he would not even realise it was happening at all. He leaned closer still and whispered in a confiding tone (as though fearful of being overheard by a third party): ‘How can I be sure that you are not secretly wired up to your organisation’s headquarters? You might be receiving instructions about what to say to me through a concealed earpiece.’
This was a concrete expression of his more pervasive fear that I too could be at the mercy of forces I could not control – ‘them’. As the session developed, Mr W. explained he was worried that this ‘HQ’ might, through me, be in the business of brainwashing him. In this version of our relationship, I had already succumbed and been brainwashed myself, and was carrying out ‘their’ secret instructions. Theirs? His? Mine? He was quite torn about this: he said he wanted to share the thought but was not entirely convinced by his own fear. He was confiding in a more trustworthy version of me his view that I might be a brainwasher, in the thrall of others outside me (or deep inside me). He also had the concern that I might be far too exposed to his own omniscient mind-reading powers over me.
Perhaps Mr W. sought to protect me from his accusations by laying the blame on an omnipotent remote analytic organisation, separate from either of us. He felt the need to reassure me frequently; to check I was not secretly offended – or worse, ‘furious’, he said – in the face of his grave mistrust. Perhaps all of us (in therapy or not) must bear some anxiety about our own exposure to and dependence on others, and about counterattacks from people on whom we rely, and whose buttons we press. Despite such anxious thoughts, Mr W. continued and made real use of the sessions, hopeful that I could understand how much pain he was in, even as he tended to demonise and conversely to idealise the work we were doing. Later he said, with feeling, that the analysis had enabled him to be less paranoid, to get on better with his own projects, and to help him have more contact, ‘on a friendlier basis’, as he put it, with family and colleagues.
In 1919, one of Freud’s followers, Victor Tausk, wrote an interesting paper about extreme examples of suspicions and fears, and about the role of an ‘influencing machine’. This was not just imagined, he said, but hallucinated, by some schizophrenic patients.36 The ‘influencing machine’ is of ‘mystical nature’ and can take different shapes, sizes and kinds; although these severely ill patients mostly only give vague hints of the machine’s construction. The machine tends to consist ‘of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like … The influencing machine produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings in people, by means of waves, rays, or other forces.’ In such cases, the machine was often called a ‘suggestion-apparatus’. It could also affect motor phenomena in the body, such as erections and seminal emissions, or cause eruptions on the skin, abscesses and other pathological processes that weaken and damage the victim. Tausk added that the interference, as conceived by these patients, ‘is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays’. The influencing machine was taken to be responsible for the patient’s illness and incapacity: ‘Buttons are pushed, levers set in motion, cranks turned. The connection with the patient is often established by means of invisible wires leading into his bed.’37
Tausk found that some believed the machine may be manipulated by an operator, such as the mental asylum’s most senior doctor; he noted how these very ill patients had suspicions that their physicians might be in on the act, operators of the dangerous equipment. Had Tausk written of this thirty years later, perhaps the apposite term would have been ‘the brainwashing machine’.
After its invention in the 1950s, the term ‘brainwashing’ gradually filtered into the discourse of both patients and analysts, and grew more prevalent in clinical literature during the 1960s.38 In an interview with the New Yorker, the novelist Philip Roth remarked that psychoanalysis (of which he had had his own mixed experiences in the 1960s) had the potential to become, as he put it, a homegrown US version of Korean War-style brainwashing. His interviewer explained how ‘Roth looks back on his own analysis as having been, in many ways, a kind of “brainwashing”’. ‘Like the North Korean,’ Roth perhaps only half joked, ‘the psychiatrist would torture you and torture you with his false interpretations, and when he stopped you were so grateful that you just accepted them.’39
I will mostly dispense with using any scare quotes around the expression henceforth. But it is worth remembering that brainwashing is a contentious term, and a powerfully suggestive figure of speech. Admittedly, it is generally treated as a dead, rather than live metaphor, just like, say, ‘internet surfer’; one of those words that are mostly used as though they are no longer metaphorical at all. But some commentators have insisted we pay more attention to what we are saying here.
‘There is one last example which I find irresistible,’ declared a certain Weller Embler, a writer on language, in his scholarly 1959 essay on ‘Metaphor in Everyday Speech’. The example was the verb ‘to brainwash’, which, he observed, ‘is a newly-minted metaphor which suggests a clearing of the mind of all previously held beliefs’. Embler urged the reader to consider what this really entailed, and to question how literally we should take the image: ‘is it possible to wash away beliefs’, he asked, ‘in the same way, for example, as it is possible to wash old newspapers of their ink and then to print new words on the fresh newsprint, as though the old had never existed?’
Brainwash, Embler elaborated, is related to another older philosophical metaphor about the mind, the tabula rasa, meaning a scraped tablet from which the writing has been erased, or perhaps a blank slate or empty sheet. If, at birth, the mind is a clean tablet upon which is to be written the experience gained through the senses, then it would seem reasonable to suppose that the slate or blackboard could be washed clean at any time. But not so fast, he cautioned: various assumptions may be attached to the word. Suppose, he asked, the mind is not like a fresh tablet at birth, suppose we think of it as like something else. Then what?40
Freighted with imagery and preconceptions as it is, the idea of brainwashing may entail or trigger other ideas too, as Embler insisted. Certainly, it can convey a variety of meanings, telling us something about how we view our own minds and others’: it is one way for all of us to think about how our psychic lives could be temporarily or sometimes permanently influenced without our consent or agency. Even if we are not simply blank slates or passive sponges on which another external communicator imposes their will, brainwashing stories speak to the fact that minds are always permeable, and multiple inputs and messages, sometimes entirely unwanted, can shape our thoughts and feelings. Brainwashing is a metaphor but also a practice, with real and horrific flesh-and-blood consequences.
As though to underline that very point a major news story about the Chinese government and its systematic endeavour to ‘re-educate’ the Uighurs loomed large as I was completing this book. Such reports, of which more later, were prominent between 2019 and 2022. They vied with others in the news, helping me keep in mind the topicality of this historical vocabulary and the range of issues it can be related to, from full-blown brainwashing, as in the atrocious treatment of the Uighur population, to a pervasive culture of misinformation, a politics and media rife with lying, deception and ‘economies with the truth’. There was the ever more pressing and evident (albeit in some quarters still denied or at least downplayed) climate emergency; the populist authoritarian politics of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India (to name but two examples); the UK Brexit campaign and its aftermath; and the psychodrama of the Trump–Biden 2020 presidential race in the United States.
Accusations of fake news now circulate constantly; often the phrase is co-opted by leaders who seek to create their own falsely reassuring narrative without reference to widely reported facts. Consider how the Chinese ambassador to London had to provide in the West a sanitised version of the Uighur story, stonewalling journalists, or complaining ‘fake news’.41 Are we now, as some commentators insist, living, in both East and West, in a completely unprecedented ‘post-truth’ era, when mendacity has lost its opprobrium? Or is this to create a gilded fantasy of a previous ‘truth-era’? How do we explain the fact that over 70 million US voters opted to vote again for Trump, despite so much evidence of his lying, and apparently that millions give credence to conspiracy cult QAnon theories?
Though this book cannot resolve such questions, it provides a framework for thinking about the history and politics of such inquiries and fears; it shows how brainwashing is a term we need, but also must treat with a good deal of caution. It is a malleable concept, defined to a great extent by what we consider to be healthy thinking, what we assume about individual freedom, and what kinds of persuasion and causes we deem unacceptable. When people brandish the charge of brainwashing, we need to ask what they envisage, who they are aiming at, or arguing with, and what kind of action they seek in response. I want to set out different vocabularies, theories and stories about the mind that emerged post-war, to explore the problem. The first part of this study focuses on how the most extreme forms of coercive influence were understood by writers in the West, in the early Cold War. However, throughout the book, I invite the reader to compare past and present, and to keep in mind the world we are now in. In sum, I want to move between the post-war debates and the era of Facebook, where billions of people now interact as a matter of course, sharing their feelings, images, stories and profiles, caught up in an endless intersubjective process that is both digitised and monetised, although not always obviously so. One estimate for 2021 suggests the company has close to 3 billion active monthly users. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is one of the largest corporate revenue earners in the world, with advertising income each year running into the tens of billions.
As I conducted research on this topic, I soon realised that no previous project of mine had elicited so much interest from colleagues and friends. You did not need to be a student of the Cold War to become intrigued by the question: what is brainwashing? Can you do it to yourself, or another? Where does it begin and end? When was the idea first formulated? Is it for real? A myth? A fantasy? What features characterise its practices now? Where is brainwashing going in the future? These questions may fascinate us, I suspect, because they also invite consideration of the very opposite: what would be a non- or un-brainwashed self, and what degree of freedom of thought are we capable of ? One set of issues is about vertical authority – a state or at least a jailor, exerting control over a captive subject; another is horizontal – how we interact with peers, friends, colleagues and strangers, in new kinds of technology. The corporate system may loom over us, but we are drawn into this ceaseless and indelibly archived interplay with other people, where not only opinion but also so much emotion is on the line. These forums, that we have signed up to in our billions, are where we play with ideas, or are played by others.
This topic prompts us to consider extremes and the many states between a condition of psychic freedom and of alien thought control. For, even if not brainwashed, we are all, surely, at the best of times, suggestible, impressionable and interdependent. None of us is ever discrete, fully self-knowing, self-fashioned, self-made, able to think all by ourselves or fully about ourselves. We are all leant upon, profoundly affected by others, and never in full control of our minds. Facebook knows we practically all want to ‘relate’, and we all know too that, to put it another way, nobody is free of covert influence, or ever fully transparent to themselves or to others; and we can find ourselves allied unconsciously with others, even without a full-blown brainwash operation.
To speak of drip-drip conditioning in our daily life in the West, to denounce the nexus of weather and financial data that I mentioned earlier as brainwashing, might well seem to you – as it does to me – a little over the top. News may be outright propaganda and brainwashing; or it might inform, or again persuade, influence, assume, suggest or deny a myriad of things even if it does not brainwash viewers to some incontrovertible singular dogma. Perhaps news serves at times to perpetuate a numbing effect of mainstream norms and expectations upon us. To consider these questions is to begin to ask, what kinds of news and information do we need, to be able to think coherently? Much of our thinking and processing, and decision-making, of course, is not conscious and deliberative anyway. We think ‘fast and slow’, as Daniel Kahneman has famously shown.42 But in our ever more commercialised culture, and a digital economy that moves ever faster, thinking for ourselves, in any fashion, perhaps has never been harder.
The extremes of propaganda and brainwashing in totalitarian societies point us back then to consider the middle spaces, those ambiguous states, where we have some free will yet go along in a commercial or political seduction. In some lines of work, of course, people are obliged to be online, the computer an indispensable means to earn a living; but even beyond necessity, a majority seem to have a massive hunger to sign up for far more screen time than is strictly required to get by. We all encounter states of mind or conditions of life where we may have some options but yet eschew them; where we can’t bear to face illusions we’ve already (half) signed up to, and then just continue to go along for the ride; where we deny and disavow our own misgivings, because revising our views feels too costly; where we make promises to be more vigilant against the ‘hidden persuaders’ and social conditioners (only not just yet); where we acquiesce, or maybe actively luxuriate, in strange bargains with ourselves, that somehow postpone conflict or change; states of mind where we let go, temporarily or permanently, of those sane, vigilant and critical capacities we might have had.
We may do well to reserve the word brainwash primarily, I think, for more extreme kinds of intervention by powerful people, states and agencies, i.e. those holding great means of constraint and control. When the word brainwash came into vogue, it was, as we have seen, most obviously to serve as an accessible way to think about totalitarian ideology (although even Hunter, Cold War journalist that he was, could not resist drawing attention to dangers prevalent in the West as well). We argue over the provenance, scope and location of brainwashing inside still functioning democracies, as well as police states. For more reasons than one, the word, the idea, the scenario that Hunter and others conjured up long ago seems still to disturb many of us now, whatever the polity we live within. For the dangers we face of thought interference are not only to be found in the past or on the other side of some political divide, nor just inside some terrifying but distinct total institution, but here and now in our twenty-first-century world, even if we are fortunate to enjoy conditions of relative freedom. We live in a storm of daily warnings, promises and reassurances about the present and future, amid ongoing arguments about the state of the environment, the climate, the economy, pandemics and the political process; in a time, moreover, of rising paranoid discourse and authoritarian populism, social convulsions, during an ongoing digital revolution, and in the wake of Covid-19, a virus that, in 2020, transformed the economic model of business as usual. Certainly, we are now awash with stories that reflect or stir our anxieties about yet greater loss of freedom as well as mounting insecurity ahead.
‘Brainwashing’ is always shadowed by the question of what it entails to think for ourselves. The story of the concept, as we will see, is often a vehicle for other social and political debates, as well as a means of exploring the factors that make ordinary reflection and deliberation so difficult. Brainwashed charts not only how vulnerable we are to covert persuasion, even when we are not literally held as captives in chains, but also why we might be so mesmerised by, and in dread of, total conversion states.
One of my presuppositions in this book concerns methodology and the importance of ideas being considered historically, placed in context. I also contend that psychoanalysis is relevant for this present discussion. It is part of that original context; and it offers tools that we might still usefully employ to consider the issues at stake, and to ask why old debates about breakable captives, in the Cold War, might merit fresh scrutiny in the new millennium. I seek to explore how new vocabularies as well as institutions, processes, products and technologies arose; and to map how a range of ideas emerged to explain what was happening. If this book is a work about modern culture and intellectual history, it is also a study of how people sought to make sense of their changing world, often still reeling from an earlier calamity, endeavouring to grasp the changing political, technological and psychological landscape in front of them, and sift the competing claims made by various experts, eyewitnesses, analysts, storytellers, critics and pundits.
In the following chapters, I will examine several of the important flash points in the history of brainwashing: debates from the 1950s, and after, about thought reform, and the processes of forced confession – involuntary medication, sensory deprivation, solitary confinement and rapid conversion – leitmotifs of the Cold War past. Certain practices of pacification, intimidation and control decried in that literature are in fact widely used in many penitentiary systems and ‘supermax’ prisons today.
Reports about such extreme and coercive measures that can be inflicted upon people confined, against their will, in prisons and other closed institutions can also offer a way to start to explore the less clear-cut and more subtle forms of manipulation that, arguably, we all may experience in a modern society: hidden persuasion in news, advertising, bad education, mental health treatment, or in varied forms of commercial seduction, political spin or cultural nudge. The kinds of influence to which we may well succumb online are not usually based upon top-down instruction; the platforms, in one sense, facilitate exchange, activity, feedback. We live anyway perhaps inside multiple networks. Much of the influence now exerted upon us comes via our own interactive process, suggestions, invitations and prompts, not through imperial commands. We may be shaped not only by states, dictators and political parties, but through this endless traffic of messages and signs; for we are susceptible to the sway of opinion in peer-to-peer dialogue too. A corporation can use the data about us to feed us ever more ‘bespoke’ stories, advertisements and news, according to its own (invisible to us) algorithms. Users may have the illusion they are just conversing with friends or sharing their pictures and lives with a selected online community, rather than in fact providing fodder for advertisers and other agencies, who are not part of the overt conversation; or they may know and proceed regardless. Ultimately what may be most interesting – and disturbing – are the many more intricate aspects of our unconscious collusion and persuasion as well; the denial and the unspoken, perhaps unwitting, bargains we make to forsake our own mental capacities, to turn a blind eye to what we know to be true, to what we are doing, and to how we are being propelled, or corralled.
Uncertainties about freedom of thought and our interest in ‘brainwashing’ may reflect intuitions about the vicissitudes of our own psyches as well as our knowledge of despotic, coercive and beguiling forces that threaten minds from outside. The issue of psychic ‘autonomy’ is real, not only because we can be beset by intimidating jailors, shadowy agencies, clandestine movements or the deep state, but also, as Freud suggested, because we can attack our own minds and have a limited tolerance for facing reality, including our own mortality. We are torn, he wrote, between the reality principle and the pleasure principle, inclined to make-believe, and to split off unwelcome thoughts and rid ourselves of unpalatable insights into ourselves. Such human propensities can, of course, also be cynically exploited. ‘Brainwashing’ speaks to our terror of what can be done in cults and tyrannical states, but also, I think, to our uncertainty about the vagaries of our own minds, the fluctuations of our states of ambivalence, our defences and our fantasies. People may have conflicting wishes, even without obvious brainwashers to hand, to stare certain realities in the face, and might feel compelled to deny, divide, fragment, ignore, discard, fudge and forget.
Although it ranges across the globe, this study is written predominantly about and in the context of the West, no doubt with several other presumptions made in these pages, for instance about the nature of contemporary life, the importance of personhood, the inner world, identity and authenticity. This account acknowledges other ways of seeing the human condition but then draws on a particular model of mind, presupposing, for instance, that we can repress our own unwelcome thoughts. It assumes a distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind, and envisages people, however desirous of harmony, to be nonetheless conflicted creatures throughout the life cycle. Conflicts, for example, might exist between a desire for belonging and a felt need for separation; an acceptance of transience and an aspiration to immortality; awareness of dependence and ambitions of autonomy; a wish to have an impact on others and really ‘get through’, and a terror of others’ potential intrusions, when we are most vulnerable and least able to cope.