Brainwashed — a thought-provoking history of mental manipulation

On September 24 1950, a strange article appeared in the Miami Sunday News. “Brainwashing,” it began, “is the principal activity on the Chinese mainland nowadays. Unrevealed, thousands of men and women are having their brains ‘washed’.” The author’s name was Edward Hunter, a journalist and former OSS operative.

It is possible that Hunter’s new term, adapted from the Chinese xi nao, meaning “to wash the brain”, was actually a product of briefings at Langley (having worked for its forerunner, Hunter kept close ties to the CIA). Regardless, the phrase stuck and began to define the paranoid zeitgeist of the cold war — particularly in 1953, when, following the Korean Armistice Agreement, news spread that 21 American prisoners of war were flatly refusing to come home.

Pick expounds the brutal, Stalinist variety of brainwashing . . . but also the thought control that we in the west have come to accept from boardrooms and advertising campaigns

Since the 1950s, the idea of the vulnerable mind has taken root with stupefying force. Advertising strategies now routinely seek to influence our unconscious drives, focus-grouped political messaging has played a key part in countless elections, and large-scale psy-ops campaigns — formerly marshalled by the US military against its enemies — are increasingly used as a weapon in the war against disinformation.

Hunter’s panic even heralded some of the sweeping social revolutions of the following decade. Betty Friedan’s pioneering, second wave feminist text, The Feminine Mystique (1963), directly compared the plight of women — coerced by social expectations into becoming compliant homemakers — with that of the 21 POWs.

In his new book Brainwashed, the psychoanalyst historian Daniel Pick seeks to chart an ambitious “new history of thought control”, one that both describes the reality of widespread psychological suggestion and unpacks overblown fears of pervasive mental control.

Of the 21 POWs, only two settled permanently behind the “bamboo curtain”. According to Pick, many of them were actually rational actors, disillusioned by racism or poverty in the US. That same year, however, the CIA was getting on with its “Manhattan project of the mind” in response to “communist ‘advances’ in the field of human-behaviour management”. With CIA director Allen Dulles’s blessing, secret research programmes such as “Artichoke” and “MK-Ultra” set out to discover, among other things, “what happens when people are kept awake for days, put into induced comas [and] loaded with LSD”.

For Pick, the story of thought control is rooted in a distrust between the cold war-era blocs. Both practised their own forms of mental manipulation and both harboured flawed assumptions about the other’s capacity for brainwashing. The Beatles, for instance, were, in their heyday, at once agents of communist subversion, according to writers like David A Noebel (author of the 1965 pamphlet “Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles”) and, on the other side of the iron curtain, were viewed with distrust and suspected of undermining the foundations of Soviet society.

Pick expounds the brutal, Stalinist variety of brainwashing, the kind recalled by the imprisoned Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, but also the thought control that we in the west have come to accept from boardrooms, advertising campaigns and correctional facilities.

Czesław Miłosz, the Polish defector and author of The Captive Mind — the renowned nonfiction work analysing the hypnosis of “socio-political doctrines” — is Pick’s guide here. “To say something is white when one thinks it is black . . .” Miłosz writes, dispelling the notion that citizens of totalitarianism are mindless automatons, “play[s] one’s adversary for a fool . . . Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.” For Miłosz, rather than fear, the captive mind is driven by the strange sense of liberation it attains convincing others it is actually free.

Brainwashing and groupthink have run very deep, particularly in consumer culture. Pick explains how figures such as Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the father of modern PR, and motivational research pioneer Ernest Dichter used the teachings of psychoanalysis to formulate advertising “strategies of desire”. One such campaign secured the profits of the California Prune Board, transforming a once unpalatable product into a “‘wonder fruit’ . . . linked to youth and hedonism”. This approach was implemented on a massive scale, and has since become hegemonic.

Brainwashed is thorough and illuminating, its 300-odd pages thick with fascinating case studies and meditations about the mind. As a psychoanalyst, Pick has an expert understanding of our hidden drives but, true to psychoanalytical form, he prefers taking the scenic route to the point. Regardless, this book will make you think differently about our paranoid world, your own mind and the maddening distrust between them.

Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick, Wellcome Collection £20, 368 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café