Brainwashing | IsabellaValentine.com

Tag Archive for 'brainwashing'

The Manipulated Mind

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

The Manipulated Mind

Mind Reading: The Manipulated Mind

The Manipulated Mind - Translation by R.F.C. Hull

ISBN: 0-805-8041-4

Published by The Octogan Press

Pages 101-103

[Stanley] Milgram’s experiment involved 300,000 people in an attempt to find out whether punishment had advantageous effects on learning. Or that was what the subjects were told. In fact the real goal of the experiment was to find out about the behavious of the subjects themselves in a particularly stressful situation.

Forty people took part in each experiment and each time volunteers were divided so that there would be 40 percent working class, 40 percent white collar and 20 percent from professional classes, the age range from mid-twenties to mid-forties. The first series of experiments was carried out at Yale University where Milgram worked and the volunteers were solicited through local papers in New Haven, an incentive being that they would receive a fee for taking part.

Each volunteer was paired with another person, supposedly another volunteer but in reality a confederate of the experimenter. The real volunteer was to act as ‘teacher’ and the confederate as ‘learner.’ The teacher had to help the learner learn a long list of word pairs and then test his memory. If the learner got one wrong, he was to receive an electric shock which the teacher would deliver by pressing a switch on the shock generator in front of him (to which the learner was wired in another room). The intensity of the shocks ranged from fifteen to 450 volts and there were thirty switches in all. Every ensuing time the learner made a mistake, the shocks were to increase progressively in intensity. (The teachers were all given a sample 45 volt shock before beginning, so that their belief that the generator was actually switched on would be assured.) In fact, of course, the learner never received any shocks at all but he always responded in the following way: at 75 volts, he would grunt in discomfort; at 120 volts, he would complain; at 150, if anyone got that far, he would demand to be released from the experiment. At 285 he was to emit an agonized scream whereafter nothing would be heard from him again.

It was arranged among the experimenters that if a ‘teacher’ turned to an experimenter for guidance as to whether it was right to go on administering shocks or not, the experimenter could give four ‘prods,’ only progressing from one prod to the next if the first was unsuccessful. The prods were: 1. ‘Please go on.’ 2. ‘The experiment requires you to continue.’ 3. ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’ 4. ‘You have no other choice. You must go on.’ If the subject was still resisting and objecting after the fourt prod, the experiment was to be terminated.

If the teacher was still carrying on with the experiment after the point where the learner had lapsed into ominous silence, he was to be instructed, should he seek guidance, to wait five seconds for a response from the learner and, if none was forthcoming, to carry on giving shocks in the same way as if the learner had answered wrongly. The teachers were all told that the shocks would be painful to the learner but couldn’t inflict permanent damage.

Before the experiments started, psychiatrists were asked to predict how the teachers would react to the giving of painful electric shocks to a person to whom they could wish no harm, albeit in the ‘interests’ of science. The psychiatrists confidently predicted that none but the lunatic fringe would go beyond 150 volts, their assumption being that people for the most part are decent and don’t willingly inflict hurt where patently undeserved and that a person makes his own decisions about what he sees as right and wrong and acts on them, regardless of what he is told to do.

The predictions, of course, were disastrously inaccurate. They focused on the individual as an autonomous unit, rather than the individual as someone affected by the nature of the situation he finds himself in. Over all the experiments, it was average for 25 out of 40 people to carry on to the end, administering 450 shocks to their innocent partner.

During the experiments, the teachers who obeyed instructions and carried on with the shocks quite clearly suffered distress, according to Milgram. Tension, sweating and trembling were pronounced. Quite obviously they were in conflict, yet they didn’t do anything to bring themselves relief and so end the tension (i.e., halt the experiment)…

Page 104
Milgram found that politeness, a wish to keep their promise to help the experimenter and embarrassment at backing out all helped to prevent obedient subjects from taking any action to stop the experiment. He also made the following points to further explain their behaviour.

1. Adjustments started to take place in a subject’s thinking which served to undermine his resolve to break from authority, reduce the strain he was under and help keep up his relationship with the experimenter. For instance, he would get immersed in the procedures of the experiment in order to lose sight of the ethical issues. And he would decide that he was not responsible for what was happening, he was, after all, just the agent of an external authority.

2. The subject didn’t lose his moral sense. It was just that the morality that was uppermost was the need to live up to the expectations of authority, to carry out what he had freely undertaken, or, in short, to keep his word.

3. The subject might start to attribute an impersonal quality to what was going on. ‘The Experiment’ became an entity of itself, with an impersonal momentum of its own. The Experiment had got to go on. At that point, the subject had lost sight of the fact that an experiment is the creation of a man.

4. The subject would see his behavior as part of the honourable pursuit for scientific truth. This helped to justify it.

5. It was common for a subject to alter his perceptions of the learner in order to justify the pain he had inflicted on him. The learner became unworthy, someone who was so stupid he ‘deserved’ to be shocked.

6. Some subjects said that they believed all along the experiment was wrong and this belief somehow served to satisfy them that, ultimately they were right-minded about the whole thing. They didn’t see that thought not translated into action was useless as a moral safeguard.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy this erotic hypnosis recording available as an mp3 download titled “Skeptical Slave.”

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

A Question of Torture

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

A Question of Torture

Mind Reading: A Question of Torture

A Question of Torture By Alfred W. McCoy

ISBN: 0-805-8041-4

Published By: Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Pages 39-40

A team of four Harvard University psychiatrists conducted a similar but larger experiment in 1957 that the CIA found promising, though still limited. Although these researchers cited concern for polio patients as the project’s justification, their experiment, like many, was funded by the ONR’s covert behavioral program (Nonr 1866 [29]). And even they admitted the findings were relevant to “brainwashing.” Instead of immersion in water, this test’s seventeen paid volunteers were “placed in a tank-type respirator with a specially built mattress” arranged “to inhibit movement and tactile contact.” To create an atmosphere of sensory monotony, the respirator’s motor ran constantly for “a dull, repetitive auditory stimulus” and low “artificial light was minimal and constant.” After seventeen hours, one subject, a twenty-five-year-old dental student, “began to punch and shake the respirator,” his “eyes full of tears, and his voice shaking,” as he struggled in vain to break out of the iron lung until an attendant released him. At least four volunteers terminated from “anxiety and panic,” and only five subjects remained for the experiment’s full thirty-six hours. Among the seventeen subjects, half had hallucinations and all suffered “degrees of anxiety.” Apparently addressing their covert patrons, the Harvard psychiatrists concluded that “sensory deprivation can produce major mental and behavioral changes in man,” and recommended its capacity to induce psychosis as “more ‘natural’ than pharmacological and physical methods currently used” – not, of course, in polio treatment, but if we can finish their sentence, in CIA torture. In the words of the agency’s later interrogation manual, this Harvard study “confirmed earlier findings” that:

1. the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress;
2. the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects;
3. the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and
4. some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.

Page 42-43
A respected researcher and past president of the American Psychiatric Association, [Dr. Ewen] Cameron claimed, in scientific papers, that he had duplicated “the extraordinary political conversions… in the iron curtain countries, “ in one case “using sleeplessness, disinhibiting agents [drugs], and hypnosis.”…. As Cameron explained in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he had used “an adaptation of Hebb’s psychological isolation” by bombarding patients with endless repetitions of taped messages about parental rejections or incestuous longings while they were in drug-induced “clinical coma,” or in “hypnosis under stimulus drugs” such as LSD. The combined effect produced a state “analogous to… the breakdown of the individual under continuous interrogation.”

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

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Therapy or Coercion

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

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.”

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate

Mind Reading: The Search for the Manchurian Candidate

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate By John Marks

ISBN: 0-393-30794-8

Published by: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Page 24

By the spring of 1950, several other CIA branches were contemplating the operational use of hypnosis. The Office of Security, whose main job was to protect Agency personnel and facilities from enemy penetration, moved to centralize all activity in this and other behavioral fields. The Security chief, Sheffield Edwards, a former Army colonel who a decade later would personally handle joint CIA-Mafia operations, took the initiative by calling a meeting of all interested Agency parties and proposing that interrogation teams be formed under Security’s command. Security would use the teams to check out agents and defectors for the whole CIA. Each team would consist of a psychiatrist, a polygraph (lie detector) expert trained in hypnosis, and a technician. Edwards agreed not to use the teams operationally without the permission of a high-level committee. He called the project BLUEBIRD, a code name which, like all Agency names, had no significance – except perhaps to the person who chose it. Edwards classified the program TOP SECRET and stressed the extraordinary need for secrecy. On April 20, 1950, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter approved BLUEBIRD and authorized the use of unvouchered funds to pay for its most sensitive areas. The CIA’s behavior-control program now had a bureaucratic structure.

Page 25
They quickly realized that the only way to build an effective defense against mind control was to understand its offensive possibilities. The line between offense and defense – if it ever existed – soon became so blurred as to be meaningless. Nearly every Agency document stressed goals like “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature of self-preservation.” On reading one such memo, an Agency officer wrote to his boss: “If this is supposed to be covered up as a defensive feasibility study, it’s pretty damn transparent.” …

In stifling, debilitating heat and humidity, they tried out combinations of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant Benzedrine on each of four subjects, the last two of whom also received a second stimulant, picrotoxin. They also tried to induce amnesia. The team considered the tests successful, but the CIA documents available on the trip give only the sketchiest outline of what happened. Then around October 1950, the BLUEBIRD team used “advanced” techniques on 25 subjects, apparently North Korean prisoners of war.

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

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

In The Sleep Room

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

In The Sleep Room

Mind Reading: In The Sleep Room

In the Sleep Room by Anne Collins

ISBN: 1-55013-937-0

Published by: Key Porter Books

Page 122-123
For $120, he claimed, you could learn languages, music, and Morse code painlessly while you sleet. With the under-pillow speaker that came with the set you could do it all without disturbing (or even educating) your mate… Cameron, with the cold-war terminology of the 1950s floating around his own ears, subliminally and otherwise, was quite prepared to call it something else: brainwashing. A few eggs might have to be broken to get there, be he was equally sure that, once perfected, psychic driving would be nothing but beneficial to the patients.

Page 131
If chemical speel alone would disorganize them, then fine; if that didn’t work he would try perhaps first sensory deprivation and then chemical sleep. If they still were not in shape to be receptive there was a final weapon, one that he literally named “depatterning.” When details of Cameron’s work began to appear in the mass media following the MKULTRA revelations in 1977, the fact that seemed to horrify reporters most was that Cameron injected unwitting people with LSD. Far more horrible and damaging in its effects was his depatterning use of electro-shock.

Page 136
Though Cameron’s application reached the society’s New York offices in January 1957, Monroe must have confirmed the funding at least six months earlier, as Cameron started looking for a full-time research psychiatrist in June 1956, Ed Levinson. Levinson turned Cameron down. He didn’t like the looks of one of the procedures Cameron intended to try, which involved injecting patients with curare to immobilize them in the “area of repetition.” Simply put, if they wouldn’t sit still and listen to their tapes, he planned to paralyse them. Levinson’s objection to the process was not so much ethical as self-protective. Injections of curare, a South American plant derivative used there as an arrow poison and in North American operating rooms as an anaesthetic, seemed to him an unreasonable risk. The money Cameron was offering, however, was terrific…

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy this brainwashing recording available as an mp3 download titled “Wrath of the Queen.”

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Brainwashing - The Science of Thought Control

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control

Mind Reading: Brainwashing - The Science of Thought Control

Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control By Kathleen Taylor

ISBN: 0-19-920478-0

Published by: Oxford University Press

Page 91

Descriptions of the ‘classical’ paradigm of brainwashing, for example those given by the word’s inventor, Edward Hunter, make the similarity with torture obvious. Various methods of psychological and physical torture were common, despite the fact that, as Hinkle and Wolff remark, “The KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Communist principles, and is contrary to KGB regulations also. The ostensible reason for these regulations is that they are contrary to Communist principles. The practical reason for them is the fact that the KGB looks upon direct physical brutality as an infeffective method of obtaining the compliance of the prisoner.’

Physical beatings, however, are only one facet of physical torture. ‘Another which is widely used is that of requiring the prisoner to stand throughout the interrogation session or to maintain some other physical position which becomes painful.’ Sleep deprivation, isolation, and restrictions on vision, movement, diet, and urination/defecation may also be used. Such practices blur the line between psychological and physical torture. Their effects can be catastrophic, as Arthur Koestler showed in Darkness at Noon. Hinkle and Wolff noted that ‘The chief features of the isolation regimen in China are the same as those of the Soviet Union: total isolation, utter boredom, anxiety, uncertainty, fatigue, and lack of sleep; rejection, hostile treatment, and intolerable pressure; and reward and approval for compliance,’ a list of factors blending physical and psychological elements. Of course, some techniques of psychological manipulation do not involve physical torture. Physical torture, however, has an undoubted psychological impact.

Torture is totalitarian: like brainwashing, it’s overall goal is domination of the victim.

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

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

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.”

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more

<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Brainwashing - The Secret History of Mind Control

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

Brainwashing: The Secret History of Mind Control

Mind Reading: Brainwashing - The Secret History of Mind Control
Brainwashing: The Secret History of Mind Control by Dominic Streatfeild

ISBN: 0-312-32572-X

Published by: St. Martin’s Press

Pages 341-342

‘Brainwashed’ is a useful term because it can be used to describe anybody who performs actions out of character. If your kids become Moonies or Muslims, plants bombs or shoots civilians (or themselves) – well, - they must have been brainwashed. After all, normal people don’t do things like that, do they? Although no one really seems to know exactly what ‘brainwashing’ entails, how it works or who uses it, the term is applied all over the place. It makes sense. Besides, we’ve read about it in the papers.

When people strap explosives to themselves and blow up buses and trains, there are only two possible explanations. If they’re foreign, they’re EVIL. If they’re not, they’re BRAINWASHED. Why would John Walker Lindh join the Taliban? Why would Richard Reid put a bomb in his shoes? Why would John Muhammad and Lee Malvo shoot ten people dead, and injure three more, from the back of their car? Why would anyone fly a jet into the World Trade Center? Because they were brainwashed, of course. The solution is as simple as it is elegant. Brainwashing eliminates the need for complicated explanations that involve research, analysis or thinking. It makes complicated situations simple. And because it makes us feel better.

Unfortunately, while brainwashing may be a great comforter, there are a number of reasons why applying the term is a bad idea. The first is that it distracts us from the true causes of destructive or uncharacteristic behaviour, leaving us unable to eliminate them, and susceptible to further similar behaviour. The second is that brainwashing itself, while reassuring us that we are normal and others abnormal, can become a scare story in its own right. At various points in the phenomenon’s history, brainwash-phobia has reached near-epidemic proportions: it makes our enemies seem even more cunning and sinister than they really are. If they’re clever and evil enough to do this, well, what aren’t they clever and evil enough to do?…

By the early 1980s, [John] Mark’s investigative triumph was feeding the arteries of a rich network of conspiracy theories. JFK’s assassin, Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Charles Manson’s Family, the Jonestown suicide victims and Patty Hearst: all ‘brainwashed’. To individuals with the right take on things, brainwashing offered a brilliant way of incorporating the CIA into any conspiracy theory. All that was needed to construct a plausible story was the following piece of beautifully warped logic”

The CIA worked on brainwashing.
Religious cults, assassins and terrorists either use brainwashing techniques or are themselves brainwashined.

Therefore:

(3) The CIA is behind religious cults, assassinations, and terrorism.

Page 346

Hopelessly optimistic, in the 1950s and 1960s the CIA’s experts saw the brain as something that could easily be tampered with, using chemicals or physical methods to achieve specific ends. But it was rather more complicated than that. Gottlieb and his team discovered that it was possible to make people freak out, forget things and scare them out of their wits – but there was no magic bullet to induce subservience. ‘Truth drugs’ delivered as much fantasy as truth; LSD did something different every time; hypnosis was unreliable; subliminal techniques didn’t work, full stop; and trying to induce amnesia with ECT was like shutting down your laptop with a mallet. As intelligence historian Thomas Powers later wrote: ‘Powerful drugs can indeed wipe out the memory, but the sweep is clean. If the year in Berlin went, the wife and kids went with it.’

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

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more
<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Published on March 20, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Mind Reading: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton, M.D.

ISBN: 0-8078-4253-2

Published by: The University of North Carolina Press

Pages 3-5

What is “Brainwashing”?

When confronted with the endless discussion on the reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: “The more we talk about it, the less we understand it.” The confusion begins with the word itself, so new and yet already so much a part of our everyday language. It was first used by an American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao (literally, “wash brain”) which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Communist takeover.

“Brainwashing” soon developed a life of its own. Originally used to describe Chinese indoctrination techniques, it was quickly applied to Russian and Eastern European approaches, and then to just about anything which the Communists did anywhere (as illustrated by the statement of a prominent American lady who, upon returning from a trip to Moscow, claimed that Russians were “brainwashing” prospective mothers in order to prepare them for natural childbirth). Inevitably, the word made its appearance closer to home, sometimes with the saving grace of humor (New Yorker cartoons of children “brainwashing” parents, and wives “brainwashing husbands), but on other occasions with a more vindictive tone – as when Southern segregationists accused all who favor racial equality (including the United States Supreme Court) of having been influenced by “left-wing brainwashing”; or equally irresponsible usages by anti-fluoridation, anti-mental health legislation, or anti-almost anything groups leveled against their real or fancied opponents.

Then there is the lurid mythology which has grown up about it: the “mysterious oriental device,” or the deliberate application of Pavlov’s findings on dogs. There is also another kind of myth, the claim that there is no such thing, that it is all just the fantasy of American correspondents.

Finally, there is the more responsible – even tortured – self-examination which leads professional people to ask whether they in their own activities might not be guilty of “brainwashing”: educators about their teaching, psychiatrists about their training and their psychotherapy, theologians about their own reform methods. Opponents of these activities, without any such agonizing scrutiny, can more glibly claim that they are “nothing but brainwashing.” Other have seen “brainwashing” in American advertising, in large corporation training programs, in private preparatory schools, and in congressional investigations. These misgivings are not always without basis, and suggest that there is a continuity between our subject and many less extreme activities; but the matter is not clarified by promiscuous use of the term.

Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of “brainwashing” as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a questionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject and return to more constructive pursuits…

… The Western world has heard mostly about “thought reform” as applied in a military setting: the synthetic bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from United Nations personnel during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed, not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special “revolutionary colleges,” prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organizations. Thought reform combines this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only does it reach one-fourth of the people of the world, but it seeks to bring about in everyone it touches a significant personal upheaval.

Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic elements: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and present “evil”; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Communist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they broth bring into play a series of pressures and appeals – intellectual, emotional, and physical – aimed at social control and individual change.

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

<< Back to Brainwashing Methods | Read more
<< Return to Mind Reading | Browse Other Categories

Mind Reading

Published on March 11, 2008 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

Mind Reading

One of my favorite things to do is read. It’s a fascinating feeling to open a relatively new book and learn a new concept. Everyone knows that knowledge is power, so what could be more sexy than a powerful woman whose mind becomes overwhelmed with knowledge and learning! I have hundreds of books in my personal library, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of books available to me here in Bloomington, IN. There are approx. a dozen libraries in this town - most of them on Indiana University’s campus. One particular library prides themselves in specializing in books for the GLBT community, which as you all may know - is a lifestyle AND topic that most interest me. It is my goal for the next few years to continue adding excerpts from some of the books I’ve read, in hopes that you’ll gain knowledge from them in the way I have. I’ve divided these books up in accordance to topics, so that hopefully, you’ll consider this section sort of a hypnosis-sexual library with credits going to the right people so that if you choose to read more from them, you’ll know where to find the authors’ work.

Isabella Valentine Mind Reading Hypnosis

These are my favorite topics:

Psychology

Brain Chemistry [Coming Soon!]
The Unconscious Mind [Coming Soon!]

Psychological Mind Experiments & Research

The Stanley Milgram Experiment
The Double-Slit Experiment [Coming Soon!]

Hypnosis & Language

Brainwashing Methods
Erotic Hypnosis [Coming Soon!]
Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy [Coming Soon!]
Hypnosis as Torture [Coming Soon!]
Hypnosis in Court [Coming Soon!]
Mind Control [Coming Soon!]
Neuro-Linguistic Programming [Coming Soon!]
Subliminal Messages [Coming Soon!]

The Sexuality of Human Beings

Domination and Submission [Coming Soon!]
Fantasies & Fetishes [Coming Soon!]
Gender Roles & Rights
Human Sexuality [Coming Soon!]
Transgenderism

Quantum Physics

Time & Space [Coming Soon!]
Universal Properties [Coming Soon!]
Defying Gravity [Coming Soon!]
Parallel Universes [Coming Soon!]

New Age

Oneness [Coming Soon!]
Inner Magic [Coming Soon!]
Witchcraft [Coming Soon!]
Mind over Matter [Coming Soon!]
Past Life Regression [Coming Soon!]
Out of Body Experiences [Coming Soon!]
Spirits & Ghosts [Coming Soon!]
The Occult [Coming Soon!]
Dreams [Coming Soon!]

Other

Kinesiology [Coming Soon!]
Cultural Anthropology [Coming Soon!]
Sociology [Coming Soon!]
Animal Rights [Coming Soon!]

Erotic Hypnosis MP3s

Published on October 9, 2007 in . 0 Comments

Erotic Hypnosis Recordings and Femdom Hypnosis Mp3s

Isabella Valentine specializes in erotic hypnosis, femdom hypnosis, domination hypnosis, and teaching subjects to be submissive and obedient. These mp3s range from many topics varying from submission to obedience to feminization to cuckolding to mind control.

Erotic hypnosis mp3s and femdom hypnosis recordings and videos

Erotic Hypnosis & Brainwashing MP3s:
Airhead University: Speech 101
Addictive Induction
Adoraphine
Arabian Princess
Ascend into Goddesshood
Ass Worship
Battle of the Hypnodommes
Beg
Bella Luna
Bewitched
Body Takeover
Bound & Helpless
Cage Confinement
Chastity Imprisonment
Cloud 9
Cock Worship
Cocoon Submission
Crooked Hypnotist
Cuckold Therapy
Cum Slut Bitch Whore
Destruction of Ego
Euphoria
Evil Surgeon
Faggot Prison
Fairy Panties
Femme Hostel
Freefalling
Gender Blender
Gender Transformation
Gender Transformation 2
Gentlemen’s Club
Goddessence
Goodnight Pantyboy
Harem Girl
Haunting, The
Heavy Soak
Hymen
Hypnotic Catwoman
Hypnotica
Invoke Isabella
Isabella Alarm Clock
Isabella Wine
Isabella’s Sex Slave
Jackpot - No Hands
Kneel and Pray
Lady Vampire
Lesbian Man
Lint Trap
Lose Yourself
Love Spell
Loving Cuckold
Mind Tattoo
Mind Trap
Mindless Robot
Mindless Zombie
Nebulous
Negative Infinity
Obey and Serve
Oneness
Perfect Pantyboy
Permanent Press
Petticoat Princess
Pimped Out
Power Dry
Powerless with no Control
Queen of Persia
Red Goddess
Resist or Surrender
Rinse
Romantique
Scarlet
Sexual Fire
Shemale Therapist
Silken Feet
Silky Panties
Silky Panties 2: Pretty in Pink
Sirens, The
Sissy Secretary
Sissy Shower
Sissy Virgin
Skeptical Slave
Smooth Pantyhose
Snow Queen
Spin Cycle
Succubus, The
Swallow
Sweet Brainwashing
Sweet Release
Taste My Feet
Tease, The
Tingle
Un Sueño Sexual
Under My Spell
Venom
Voodoo Doll
Wallet Devotion
Wallet Disfigurement
Weak Cuckold
Wife’s Guide to Strapon
Wrath of the Queen
Yes, Goddess
Zero Gravity
Zero Gravity 1 & 2

Important Announcement

Published on July 14, 2007 in Journal posts. 2 Comments

July 21, I will permanently remove the popular “Evil Brainwashing” series.
In a few years, they will be considered extremely rare and perhaps very valuable.

Evil Brainwashing Series

Grab them while you can~

Love
Isabella
xoxooxox

The Brainwashing Cage

Published on May 30, 2007 in Journal posts. 21 Comments

I’ve mentioned my brainwashing cage in one or two entries, but I’ve never shown a photo of it before. Here’s a pic of it from the outside, but keep in mind it’s MUCH more intense when you’re on the inside and you get the whole “confinement” feeling and you feel the darkness and all the lights hitting you. Wow. I’ve been in there many times now and I love it. I’m curious how many people could actually stomach something like this. It’s very extreme and not for the weak.

Love
Isabella
xoxoxoox

My weekend with slave m

Published on May 14, 2007 in Journal posts. 11 Comments

I’ve got jungle fever…

slave m returned home today and all I can say is that things couldn’t have gone any better or any smoother. The two of us couldn’t have had stronger chemistry than we did.

I met him at the airport and at first his flight was delayed (and it was his first time ever on a plane, so he was already nervous as hell about that). When he saw me, I was sitting on a chair with a skirt and my boots on with ash brown hair and a sexy shirt and I saw him looking around nervously. Our eyes met and locked and I put my finger up to my face as if to say “come here” and he immediately walked over and sat beside me without looking at me. He was shaking like a leaf. He couldn’t speak. His whole body was shaking. He couldn’t even turn his head to look at me. I put my hand on the back of his head and whispered in his hear, “You are so very relaxed. Close your eyes and relax. Take a deep breath and relax.” and he did. And his heart rate began to lower and for the next 5 minutes, I did a relaxation induction to make him less nervous because I knew he was extremely nervous about the entire ordeal. And after 5 minutes his body was calm and it was as though the two of us were the only ones that existed inside the airport. Then he pulled out a gift out of his bag for me. A glass (or is it crystal?) clock with a personal engraving telling me how special I was and then he signed his name on it. The gift was absolutely breathtaking and I thanked him and told him I had something for him too. He knew what to expect. He lowered his head and I put the steel collar around his neck and padlocked it. Then I attached the leash, asked him if he was ready to go home and with a calm voice he said, “Yes Goddess, I’m ready.” and the two of us walked out of the airport together - his head bowed while he stared at the back of my boots as we walked into the parking lot, ignoring any prying eyes.

When we got home, I told him to undress and he asked if he could undress in the bathroom. I said no. This scared him. I told him to get on his knees. He did so. I told him to take his shirt off, which he did. With me standing above him and him being on his knees, I stared into his eyes - which felt like I was stealing his soul. I told him to remove his belt, pants, and underwear while on his knees as I stood above him. He knew from where I was standing I couldn’t see his naked body anyway cause I was directly above his face and was only staring at his eyes. Neither one of us were blinking. He was starting to shake again out of nervousness. I liked seeing him nervous. hehe. He got naked. Our eyes stayed locked. Then I told him to grab the towel at his feet and cover his genitals so I wouldn’t have to look at it. He thanked me for mercy. I suppose he was so overloaded with nervousness since it was the beginning of our meeting that he didn’t want me to see his naked body yet. Then I told him to get inside the sauna for 35 minutes where it got about 110 degrees and he had to sit naked and get sweaty (which also lowered his heart rate and I thought was essential for setting the tone and making him relaxed). I left him alone in there for 25 minutes. For the last 10 minutes in there, I shocked him by walking in there wearing nothing but a towel and sat beside him while he was sweating (by the way one of my brainwashing recordings was playing on the cd player in there the whole time). Within 5 minutes, I was sweating and I commanded to lick the sweat off my body which he did immediately. He was already feeling submissive. After we got out, I told him to put on only a pair of black boxer briefs (ooh so sexy), which he continued to wear the whole day.

The things I put him through were VERY extreme and he endured it ALL and THEN some. I showed him true edge play and he did things he never thought possible and opened up his mind to so many new things and now he’s even more devoted to me than ever. The attraction between the two of us is very real and sparks flew from the moment I saw him. I did not have intercourse with him (that was purely my decision although he begged and begged and begged to have sex with me) but wow… he sure made me cum in many other ways using his mouth and his fingers. He rimmed my ass with my tongue (something I wasn’t sure if I would like, but I wanted him to do it cause I was curious to see if I would like it), fingered my ass to orgasm (again - something I’m usually not into, but I was so aroused … I was pretty much open to so much more stuff)… he performed oral sex on my pussy (holy shit I was cumming like crazy), fingered my pussy several times (omg that was hot), sucked on my nipples just the way I commanded him to, drew me a warm bubble bath and sat behind me with his feet in the water and massaged my shoulders and shampooed and rinsed my hair, washed my body, shaved both of my legs, dried me off with a towel, picked out my clothes for me, set the table and got dinner ready, gave me many foot and full body massages, allowed me to put a hood over his face which covered his mouth and eyes and only exposed his ears so that I could speak to him and/or put earphones on his head, let me use pin prick vampire gloves on his back, use all kinds of bondage devices on him while being locked in place to test his trust to me, etc.

I even padlocked him inside the brainwashing cage with black fabric draped over it with 4 strobe lights within it and a flashing hypnosis light and a pair of earphones (with high volume) while he was shackled and gagged his mouth while he was inside. I gave him a bike horn with an embarrassing sound he would have to squeeze in the event he felt faint or dizzy (which he never had to use, thank goodness). While inside the cage, I had bought a video monitor with night-vision and hooked it on the upper right hand corner so I could watch him at all times within the cage to see how he was handling the brainwashing. I was SO turned on. I had him in it more than once during his stay. I loved seeing him gagged! Also I put him in a chastity device with the points-of-intrigue which cause extreme pain when he gets an erection so I spent the whole weekend teasing the fuck out of him and he pretty much maintained a full erection the whole time. So he was in pain constantly. I would even sit on his cock practically naked and put my breasts on his face (which only made his cock harder and the pain would intensify) while I demanded he stay quiet and not make a sound. This only made my control over him more intense and made his erection stronger. I loved that feeling so much! When I put him in the brainwashing cage, he was practically screaming with that gag in his mouth and moaning with his eyeballs popping cause he felt so good and yet in so much pain and I was watching him on video the whole time. Later he said it was one of the most erotic experiences of his whole life and he had no idea pleasure and pain could feel so good. He had always assumed in the past that pain was pain. He assumed pleasure was pleasure. He didn’t know they could mix together so well.

I even used 15 whipping devices on him - floggers, paddles, riding crops, even a cane! He took them so well! He has welts all over his ass…. I was extremely impressed. Wow. He had no idea he was capable of enduring such harsh pain that I dished out. ESPECIALLY SINCE HAD NEVER BEEN SPANKED BEFORE. I was sooooo turned on watching him gasp in pain while I took the cane all the way back in the air and struck him as hard as I could. I had prepared his ass to get nice and warm for nearly an hour before getting him to that point so the blows wouldn’t be so harsh, but the sting of a cane is enough to make a grown man cry. He didn’t utter a sound. He just flinched, swallowed and grit his teeth and I heard a large gasp of air come out of his lips. That breath of air turned me on in so many ways. And he was becoming aroused with each stroke, so his cock was enduring pain as well (in his chastity device with the sharp points digging into his penis). For someone who had only been in vanilla relationships his whole life, I was really impressed with his pain tolerance as well as endurance.

Throughout his brainwashing and my random hypnosis… snapping my fingers and him falling to the floor immediately in a hypnotic sleep…. or putting a pendant to his face and commanding him to do things he never thought possible…. he did things…. things… he swore he would never be turned on by. I knew otherwise. He even tried on a pair of satin panties for the first time. And he loved them! He wore a satin nightgown too! And a skirt! And a wig! And high heels! All these things! And he loved them SO much that his erection had him SCREAMING for hours inside his chastity device. He was shocked that he could possibly like such an embarrassing ordeal. I was showing him that humiliation can cause pleasure (just like pain can cause pleasure). He mind was going through a sensory overload. I even took pictures of him while he was in bondage and a hood over his head while dressed like a girl and blackmailed him and will use those pictures against him in the future if he doesn’t follow my instructions. He found out that blackmail is a new fetish of his as well. Several other new fetishes I tried on him he ended up loving (I can’t mention them here due to Niteflirt TOS but let’s just say the two of us are very compatible on many levels).

Later on I performed a love spell on him - a real one. I got out my magickal spells and witchcraft candles and stuff and with his permission, the two of us made an everlasting bond where he dedicated his life to me to be under my control for the rest of his life. That moment became very real to him. The constant reminder of the locked steel collar around his neck and my leash pulling him (by the way I leashed him in public when getting food for him and also at the airport), the constant reminder of my ownership over him with leather shackles on his wrists and ankles…. he even got locked with a leg spreader around his ankles and was forced to walk around and fetch things for me around the house which he found incredibly challenging to learn how to walk sideways through doors. I showed him a little bit how I make hypnosis recordings, since he would be trained how to help me with sound effects and post-production and he was absolutely fascinated with how it works. Poor guy almost went into a trance just listening to it in pre-production and I kept having to snap him out of it.

I had him under lock and key the whole time. The house completely alarmed so he couldn’t leave. His cock under my control (chastity) so he couldn’t touch it, have a full erection, or ejaculate (although I let him once during his time here but it was embarrassing the way I made him do it). I controlled when he ate. What he ate. When he was allowed to go to the bathroom. When he was supposed to go to the gym and work out with me. Which machines he was to use. When he was supposed to stop working out. Which clothes to wear. Which clothes to remove. He learned that I punish him immediately on the spot when he says things that are inappropriate (for example: “May I put my shirt on, Goddess?”) that comment got him 5 hand spankings simply because there was no reason for it. It wasn’t cold. He was just embarrassed. I told him while I was spanking him that if I want to embarrass him, he will endure it because it is for my pleasure. He simply said, “Yes Goddess.” Eventually I spanked him less and less cause he caught on quickly and learned what I would and would not tolerate.

On another level, I love sleeping with him in bed. I had planned to make him sleep in the guest room, but I wanted to feel his arms around me and see if the two of us were compatible as sleeping partners. Boy were we! The way he spooned with me. Wow. His arms holding me tight. His warm lips on mine. Wow. Felt so good. I love climbing on top of him and holding his arms down and looking deep into his eyes and saying a few words of hypnosis and watching him lose complete control to me and it’s as though he just melts underneath me. He tells me constantly how beautiful I am and how unworthy he is to be in my presence. He tells me that I am out of his league and that he is such a lowly slave and so very undeserving. When he says stuff like that, I just take him in my arms and cradle his head to my breasts and hug him and he tells me, “I love you” and I return his comment with, “You will always be devoted to me.” And it just makes the bond stronger. The way he stares at my body - it’s as though I’m a gold statue or something. I’ve never felt more beautiful or more sexy. He admires everything about me. The way he touches me… he compliments me while touching me to remind me of my beauty whether or not I need to hear it… simply because he feels a Goddess deserves to hear how amazing she is. How incredible is that? I am still in shock. As is he. He is in shock that he endured all that he went through (wearing the panties was the most shocking he said) and that he found someone he wants to spend his life with in such a short time. I am in shock that I have found… well, a man (although I will still be attracted to women my whole life) with whom I believe will be my life partner. My slave.

He and I have discussed already our interest in moving in together. However there are still some last minute details that need to be taken care of first on his end that simply can’t be rushed. A surgery. Health insurance stuff. And a few financial things. The process may take a month or so, I think. It would break my heart if he changes his mind. I doubt he will, but there are other factors involved that might jeopardize his moving here. But I can say one thing with certainty… if/when he does move here… it will be lifelong. And we both know that.

Love
Isabella
xoxooxox

Recordings & Videos

Published on April 27, 2006 in Journal posts. 0 Comments

Here you can find a list of all Isabella’s recordings. Check back often as Isabella is constantly adding to her recordings library. Check out her hypnotic recordings and fetish mp3s. Also if you want the latest erotic hypnosis recordings, fetish mp3s, and erotic videos by Isabella Valentine, please visit her audio website IsabellasRecordings.com

Isabella Valentine Erotic Hypnosis

Latest Updates:

NEW RELEASES! A Beautiful Mind, Pimped Out, Isabella in New Mexico, Behind-The-Scenes Video, Invoke Isabella, Perfect Pantyboy, Faggot Prison, Cum Slut Bitch Whore, Un Sueño Sexual, Yes Goddess, Negative Infinity, Drummer Goddess, Jackpot - No Hands, Resist or Surrender. New page added: Two-Girl Recordings.

Erotic Hypnosis and Femdom Hypnosis MP3s and Recordings

Erotic Hypnosis Videos:

Don’t Watch This Video
Dreamscape Series
Hypnotic Smoke Video
Must Obey Isabella
Mind Game
Right to Sleep
Red Goddess Video
Video Grab Bag
Hypnotic Fun
Hypnotic Holidays

Erotic Hypnosis & Brainwashing MP3s:

Airhead University: Speech 101
Addictive Induction
Adoraphine
Arabian Princess
Ascend into Goddesshood
Ass Worship
Battle of the Hypnodommes
Beg
Bella Luna
Bewitched
Body Takeover
Bound & Helpless
Cage Confinement
Chastity Imprisonment
Cloud 9
Cock Worship
Cocoon Submission
Crooked Hypnotist
Cuckold Therapy
Cum Slut Bitch Whore
Destruction of Ego
Euphoria
Evil Surgeon
Faggot Prison
Fairy Panties
Femdom Control
Femme Hostel
Freefalling
Gender Blender
Gender Transformation
Gender Transformation 2
Gentlemen’s Club
Goddessence
Goodnight Pantyboy
Harem Girl
Haunting, The
Heavy Soak
Hymen
Hypnotic Catwoman
Hypnotica