What does it mean to say that the Manchurian Candidate is real? “Real” or childhood-onset dissociative identity disorder is never literally real. There is never really more than one person there. According to the diagnostic rules of the American Psychiatric Association12, psychiatric diagnoses must be based on observed behaviors and reported symptoms. This is true for all psychiatric diagnoses. Multiple personality disorder is an observed behavior. The person with multiple personality acts as if he or she has different people inside who take turns being in control of the body. This is a behavior, not a literal fact.
The causal pathway of the multiple personality is not relevant to making the diagnosis by American Psychiatric Association rules. Multiple personality, on the one hand, is never literally real. On the other hand, one “really” has multiple personality if one exhibits the behavior of switching and amnesia, unless the condition is being consciously faked, in which case the diagnosis is factitious disorder. By American Psychiatric Association rules, multiple personality is equally “real” if the causal pathway is childhood abuse, childhood neglect or iatrogenic. Therefore a Manchurian Candidate has “real” multiple personality.
The clinical reason to be interested in etiological pathway is not to decide if a case is “real” or not, but to help in treatment planning. The controversy about “real” versus iatrogenic multiple personality is based on a misconception. The disorder is never literally or concretely real, which is why it can be treated with psychotherapy. Despite the fact that it is not literally real, multiple personality can have very real consequences. There are no better examples of this fact than Mark David Chapman and Sirhan Sirhan. The separate identities and amnesia barriers in multiple personality are symptoms, not literal facts. When I speak of an amnesia barrier, for instance, I realize that there is no physical wall inside the mind.
People actually do find themselves in strange locations, unaware of how they got there, because of multiple personality. These things really happen. Study of the Manchurian Candidate helps us understand the sense in which multiple personality disorder is real. The amnesia barriers, locking mechanisms, and layers of personalities in the Manchurian Candidate actually do provide a barrier to counter-intelligence penetration, as G. H. Estabrooks described. Like the Manchurian Candidate, the person with iatrogenic multiple personality actually experiences the symptoms of the disorder, and actually has dissociative identity disorder by American Psychiatric Association rules.
Consider the hypnotized patient in the middle of gallbladder surgery. The patient is awake, alert and reporting no pain or discomfort. His pulse, blood pressure, muscle tension, and all other physiological measures are normal. What does it mean to say that the pain control isn’t “real,” that the person is “only hypnotized?” Nothing.
Likewise, a debate about whether Manchurian Candidates are “real” is meaningless. What matters is whether the Manchurian Candidate can escape detection and, if caught, whether the classified information he or she holds can be hidden from interrogators. Similarly, for the traumatized child, what matters is whether the multiple personality works as a way to cope with trauma, not whether it is literally real.
In the interests of national security, it is important that the CIA and military intelligence agencies have mind control programs in place. This is true, for one reason, because mind control methods are being used by leaders of destructive cults, dictators and terrorists. There is nothing wrong with the intelligence agencies seeking the assistance of physicians in such programs. The problem is the conflict between the National Security Act and the Hippocratic Oath.
To date, organized medicine has behaved as if this conflict does not exist. That needs to change. The doctors who create Manchurian Candidates need to be governed not just by the National Security Act, but also by the Hippocratic Oath. How this conflict should be resolved, and how it should be regulated by civilian, organized medicine, is uncertain The problem requires study and discussion. Whatever the outcome of such discussion, we will always need an effective, functioning intelligence community. The CIA stands between me and Gulag.
The Manchurian Candidate is fact, not fiction. The degree of control and coercive persuasion required to create a Manchurian Candidate sets the threshold for creation of iatrogenic multiple personality disorder at a high level.
Study of the Manchurian Candidate leads to the conclusion that creation of iatrogenic multiple personality requires much more control and influence than is possible in one or two hours of outpatient therapy per week. When the necessary degree of control and influence is missing, the causal pathway to multiple personality is more likely to be childhood abuse, childhood neglect, or factitious. The relevance of the Manchurian Candidate to clinical psychiatry is the light it sheds on pathway differentiation. That is one reason I have studied the Manchurian Candidate for thirteen years, despite attacks on me in medical journals79, 191, books213, and magazines3, and on CBC and BBC television.
There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were paid by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable.
The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than “historical” interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yet the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.