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.
What is ‘the state we are in’? In this wide-ranging lecture, Daniel Pick reflects upon the history of psychoanalysis, politics and democracy.
Maarten Derksen uncovers the history of ‘menticide’, an alternative way to understand brainwashing made popular in Meerloo’s 1956 The Rape of the Mind.
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.
The flying saucer era, argues Greg Eghigian, began at the dawn of the Cold War period and came to be viewed through its prism.
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.
Richard Sennett talks to Hidden Persuaders’ Daniel Pick about his ideas on ‘thought reform’, truth, narrative and belief.
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.
Hidden Persuaders’ Katie Joice interviews Camille Robcis on the French tradition of Institutional Psychotherapy and its experiments in therapeutic practice.
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.
