Kira Lussier, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, discusses a recent New York Times article on Amazon employees, placing its critique within the history of how motivational psychology has been used in the workplace.
Category: Commentary
Reviewing Laing’s ‘Asylum’ in the Age of Neuroscience
Asylum, Peter Robinson’s 1972 documentary about one of R.D. Laing’s residential ‘clinics’, has just been released on DVD. Katie Joice reviews the film in the context of both Laing’s therapeutics and current debates on mental illness.
Critical Incidents: Laura Stark on APA Ethics Policy
A still from the film Obedience (1962), a production by the psychologist Stanley Milgram made in the course of his ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments at Yale University. It is now widely believed that these experiments could not be recreated today due to ethical guidelines established by psychologists in 1973. By Laura Stark ‘I… Read more »
What we’re reading now: The APA report
The American Psychological Association’s Independent Review on ethics, national security and torture—in historical context By Marcie Holmes The Hidden Persuaders project studies the history of ‘brainwashing’ and other forms of mind control as they relate to the expertise and status of the psy professions during the Cold War. Our inquiries here chart important chapters… Read more »
New video essays by Ian Magor
Image: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (dir. Fritz Lang 1922) In July 2015, the Hidden Persuaders project and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image hosted a workshop, Brainwash: History, Cinema and the Psy Professions. Birkbeck graduate and video essayist Ian Magor presented several of his recent pieces at the event. These works comment on… Read more »
Hiding in plain sight
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 »
Reflections on Enhanced Interrogation
When the Senate Intelligence Committee released their report on the CIA’s use of ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, Dick Cheney was quick to respond. (The report, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, can be downloaded in full here) On NBC’s Meet the Press the former Vice President kicked against the accusations… Read more »