Maarten Derksen uncovers the history of ‘menticide’, an alternative way to understand brainwashing made popular in Meerloo’s 1956 The Rape of the Mind.
Posts By: ubsmar004
UKRI Future Leader Fellow
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.
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.
Institutional Psychotherapy in France: An Interview with Camille Robcis
Hidden Persuaders’ Katie Joice interviews Camille Robcis on the French tradition of Institutional Psychotherapy and its experiments in therapeutic practice.
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.
