When James Brown returned to George Orwell’s dystopia in an age of pervasive social media intrusion and a global pandemic, it felt a very different novel to the one he had read as a teenager.
On re-reading 1984
Category: Resource
A Cultural History of the Brain in the 1950s
Historian Andreas Killen on the history of the brain at the start of the Cold War.
Chasing Marie Langer: A film by Lily Ford
Filmmaker Lily Ford on the experience of making the documentary Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society.
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.
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.
Beyond Brainwashing: Propaganda, Public Health, and Chinese Allegations of Germ Warfare in Manchuria
Mary Augusta Brazelton explains how one of the first scandals involving ‘Communist brainwashing’ also serves as an entry point for understanding how the Chinese Communist Party used biomedical expertise to consolidate its political power at home.
Albert Mason on the medicine and magic of hypnotism
Dr. Albert Mason talks to Marcia Holmes about his career in medical hypnotism and psychoanalysis, and describes his experiences as scientific consultant for The Ipcress File film and testing for ESP with Arthur Koestler.
Deceptive Subjects: Reading the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System
Hannah Proctor looks afresh at the methodologies of a key Sovietological study, The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, and uncovers the surprising ways that anxieties and assumptions about totalitarianism structured social scientific research.
What happened at Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit?
Jacy Young discusses the troubled history of Oak Ridge Psychiatric Unit, Ontario, in the light of recent allegations of unethical treatment by psychiatric staff during the 1960s and 70s, including the use of LSD and other drug therapies.
Zygmunt Bauman on Brainwashing
“We are tightly wrapped in a spider net of electronic surveillance”… deliberately confused by “an incessant flow of dismembered and dislocated fragments” (Zygmunt Bauman on brainwashing, surveillance, and modern society).* In July 2015 Daniel Pick interviewed Zygmunt Bauman on the subject of brainwashing. His wide ranging responses travel from the Cold War to the virtual… Read more »
