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.
Brainwashing in Communist Czechoslovakia – And After
Tag: psychological conditioning
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.
Grey Walter in the Age of Brainwashing
Despite his influence on Cold War pop-cultural, and countercultural, discussions about the brain, Grey Walter was curiously reticent on the subject of ‘brainwashing’. Andreas Killen shows how, nevertheless, Walter’s work played a key role in debates about mind control.
Psychic Driving at the Museum of the Normal: ‘Stop Thinking about Death… and Stop Shouting at People’
‘Psychic driving’ is a Cold War-era technology for reprogramming the mind that has a sordid history. David Saunders reports on its continuing appeal.
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.
