Nasheed Qamar Faruqi writes on the making of her film about the youngest of the 21 American POWs who ‘chose’ Mao’s China at the end of the Korean War.
Category: General
Questions of Authority, Persuasion, and Belief: An Interview with Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett talks to Hidden Persuaders’ Daniel Pick about his ideas on ‘thought reform’, truth, narrative and belief.
Dialectics of Liberation
Alexander Dunst writes on depth psychology and the “Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation”, an event that invites questions about some of our accepted notions of the Sixties’ counterculture and its afterlives.
Brainwashing in Communist Czechoslovakia – And After
Sarah Marks on how ‘brainwashing’ was used as a Cold War code-word for Communist mass indoctrination; and to express anxieties about consumerism after ’89.
Agents of Pacification, Agents of Change: Radical Psychiatry in 1969
How did mental health professionals respond to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s? Lucas Richert explores the radical psychiatry movement.
Dictators on the Couch
Producer David Stenhouse on psychological profiling, as featured in BBC Radio 4’s Dictators on the Couch, presented by Hidden Persuaders’ Daniel Pick.
Psychotherapy for Champions: Autosuggestion, ‘Self-Perfection’ and the Training of Soviet Athletes
Aleksandra Brokman on the USSR’s use of psychological techniques to improve athletes’ performance, when sport was a key arena of Cold War competition.
What We’re Reading Now: Across the Iron Curtain
Sarah Marks reflects on histories of the human sciences across East and West, and what we could still learn about the ‘psy’ professions in the Cold War.
A Psychedelic Renaissance – Will we avoid tripping this time?
Erika Dyck discusses the legacies of LSD’s Cold War reputation, and the implications for the recent renaissance in ‘psychedelic science’.
Comic Books and Conditioning: Frederic Wertham’s 1954 ‘Seduction of the Innocent’
Can comic books negatively condition children’s behavior? In the 1950s that question provoked a furore, when the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham alleged comics had serious, deleterious effects. Dennis Doyle, who teaches history at St Louis College of Pharmacy, explores the story.