Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control

Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control

Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control By David Seed

ISBN: 0-87338-813-5

Published by: The Kent State University Press

Pages 210-211

The protagonists of A Clockwork Orange and The Terminal Man are at least partially informed about the experimental processes they undergo. Again and again in this study, however, we have seen cases of secret experimentation taking place, often without the subject’s consent, and we now need to consider narratives that explore the ethics of such experiments and that dramatize the fracturing of the self that might result.

In 1952 the Defence Research Board of Canada invited academics of McGill University to research into the possibilities of defense against brainwashing. The issue they chose to focus on was isolation from the environment. Dr. Ewen Cameron began elaborating experiments into what he called “depatterning,” combining electric shocks with sleep therapy, and playing back to the patients tape recordings of their emotionally charged statements. At about the same time Dr. John Lilly began related experiments into sensory deprivation at the National Institutes of Health near Washington. Both enterprises came to be funded by the CIA as part of an overall program to research the technology of brainwashing. Although a CIA Isolation Group concluded in 1955 that they “could find no evidence the technique [sensory deprivation] is being used anywhere in the Communist countries in interrogation matters or in intelligence work,” research continued. Ironically, one report on these experiments found that they were very close to the practices of the “professional brainwasher.” Lilly’s claim to notoriety was the design of a tank in which subjects floated in body-temperature water, unable to see or hear. Historian John Marks comments that “intelligence agents swooped down on Lilly again, interested in the use of his tank as an interrogation tool.” It was not only intelligence officers who considered this application, however. Donald Hebb, director of the McGill facility, reflected anxiously on the transposition of brainwashing to the home scene: “It’s one thing to hear that the Chinese are brainwashing their prisoners on the other side of the world; it is another to find in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base: can disturb his personal identity.”

Sensory deprivation was situated within a Cold War military context in Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s story “The Quaker Cannon” (collected in The Wonder Effect, 1961). Here the Korean War is retold as a war against the Utilitarians (or “Utes”), who use behaviorist techniques in their torture of prisoners. Lieutenant Kramer was one such prisoner who cracked under the Chinese use of “Blank Tanks” and confessed that the United States was employing viral weapons. Kramer is then retained in the army in a marginal role until an assault is planned on the Soviet Union across the Bering Straits. Posted as aide to the general organizing a bogus attack force, eh falls once again into the hands of the Utes and is subjected to another ordeal by deprivation:

The Blank Tanks are more than deafness. In them a man is blind, even to the red fog that reaches through closed eyelids. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to taste. There is nothing except the swaddling-cloths… It is something like being unborn and something like never having been at all. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, and although you are not dead you are not alive either.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy this brainwashing recording available as an mp3 download titled “Heavy Soak.”