Cinema, psychoanalysis and the history of brainwashing Ian Christie, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, is a distinguished and influential cinema scholar. When Prof. Christie recently interviewed Daniel Pick about popular interest in brainwashing, their conversation quickly became a lively dialogue between two historians on mid-twentieth-century cinema’s fascination with psychoanalysis,… Read more »
Tag: Interview
Interview: Robert Jay Lifton on brainwashing and totalism
In April 2014, Daniel Pick sat down with Robert Jay Lifton for a wide-ranging discussion about Prof. Lifton’s life and research. In this first excerpt from the interview, Prof. Lifton speaks about writing his 1961 book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which describes the processes of re-education (considered by some to be ‘brainwashing’)… Read more »
Interrogating minds in the Korean War
In November 2014 the Hidden Persuaders project hosted Monica Kim, author of the forthcoming book Humanity Interrogated: The Wars over War in the Interrogation Room, 1942-1960 and assistant professor of history at New York University. In a seminar that was jointly organized with the Psychoanalysis Working Group of the Birkbeck Institute of Humanities, Dr. Kim… Read more »