Therapy or Coercion | IsabellaValentine.com

Therapy or Coercion?

Does Psychoanalysis Differ from Brainwashing?

Mind Reading: Therapy or Coercion

Therapy or Coercion By R.D. Hinshelwood

ISBN: 1-85575-143-7

Published by Karnac Books
Pages 157

Can a person be coerced into knowledge?

The act of learning involves self-reflection. It cannot be done to someone else. There is no way of getting around the patient as the active agent in that process. This is different from doing something, for example, in the course of an operation on a patient under anaesthetic. This is closely linked to the difference between treating the patient technically as a physical body that is subject to the laws of natural science and as a subject within human science – a subject that has an agency (in terms of professional ethics, their autonomy), a being “for-itself.”

Though giving self-knowledge is “doing something to” another person’s mind, it cannot be effective without that mind’s agency in his own self-knowledge. He has to reflect on himself. Otherwise, as Freud said, “he does not receive it instead of his unconscious material but beside it” (Freud, 1916-17, p. 436), and that makes very little difference. When it comes to self-knowledge and self-reflection, agency has to be preserved, otherwise it has merely knowingness (a close relative perhaps of rationalization). The risk, then when knowingness replaces self-reflection, is that the mind is dismantled by punching a hole in self-reflection.

Pages 207-208

The progressive destruction of a person under brainwashing and torture removes the capacity for thinking, discrimination, and responsibility and creates an enduring loss of reality, so that he is finally reduced only to a relation with his body or his bodily needs. Internal resources to survive as a person are notoriously limited, as the experiments of Asch and Milgram convey. We can conclude that the primitive processes are deeply implicated in certain social occurrences, including:

1. spreading, or “emotional contagion”;
2. the social moulding of personal identity;
3. the allotting of one-dimensional roles, or stereotyping, which includes scapegoating, racisim, sexism, and other prejudices;
4. the demolition of the personality under organized state coercion.

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