Jennifer Crane explores how gifted children were imagined as potential peacetime leaders, or as dangerous future citizens who might use their unique talents to subvert authority.
Gifted Children as Hidden Persuaders in the Cold War
Tag: Social Sciences History and Philosophy
Healing and Haunting at Kingston’s Prison for Women
In this second essay of a two-part series, philosopher Lisa Guenther explores what a meaningful memorial might be for the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario – a former site of prisoner abuse and psychiatric experimentation on vulnerable women.
Memory and Forgetting at Kingston’s Prison for Women
In the first of a two-part series, philosopher Lisa Guenther introduces the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. As the former home of hundreds of incarcerated Canadian women, it was a site of unethical human experiments and other forms of prisoner abuse.
Disalienation: Philosophy, Politics, and Radical Psychiatry in France
In this lecture, hosted by the Hidden Persuaders project and the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Camille Robcis explores the intersections of politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in 20th century France.
‘Free Associations? Psychoanalytic History, Democracy and the State We Are In’
What is ‘the state we are in’? In this wide-ranging lecture, Daniel Pick reflects upon the history of psychoanalysis, politics and democracy.
Manipulation Out of Control: J.A.M. Meerloo’s ‘Menticide’
Maarten Derksen uncovers the history of ‘menticide’, an alternative way to understand brainwashing made popular in Meerloo’s 1956 The Rape of the Mind.
A “Common Madness”: TV Psychics and Hypnosis in the Soviet Union
Did Soviet broadcasters use hypnosis to persuade their viewers to conform to communism? Simon Huxtable explores the story of TV ‘psychotherapist’ Anatoly Kashpirovsky, and the rise of parapsychology and suggestion in the last years of the Soviet Union.
On UFOs and the Cold War Human Sciences: An Interview with Greg Eghigian
The flying saucer era, argues Greg Eghigian, began at the dawn of the Cold War period and came to be viewed through its prism.
A New Documentary Film: ‘David Hawkins: A Battle of the Mind’
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.
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.
