The Brain-Washers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 16

The Brain-Washers

BATTLE FOR THE MIND, by William Sargant; Heinemann, N.Z. price 25/-.

(Reviewed by

Harold

Bourne

MONG the few peculiarities of our species, its liability to. guilt is most characteristic. Others — the upright posture, sexual sublimation, prolonged immaturity, vocal and symbolical eommunrication-are distinctive but less Singular. The only animal given to remorse, relizion, pain-seeking, and suicide is man. Self-accusation, consequently, is as deep seated in human nature as is transgression itself and delusory corfessions were misléacing judges long before psychiatry ever made itself heatd. By no means all the myriad admissions of witchcraft in the centuries of the Inquisition were extracted by torture or disowned before execution by those it burnt alive. However, six genérations later, when the Moscow trials were staged for an astonished world of the 1930's, the memory of the Inquisition had faded. The least likely explanation for the avowals by the Bolshevik old guard of counter-revolutionary conspiracy was that they were true; indeed, they were cemonstrably fictitious. Nevertheless, it was the one accepted by the American ambassador, President Roosevelt, and Sir Winston Churchill. The most likely was that they were extorted by a Stalinist refinement of the police practices

Herzen noted a century earlier for pressing Tsar Nikolai’s opponents into sélf-condemnation (practices from which the American and British police are n6t immune.) The most sensational explanation was that Russian scientists had discovered some novel technique for destroying the mind. In the 20 years since, information has immensely accumulated to support the theory that séemed probable originally. Experimental isolation and artificial insomfia in the psychologist’s laboratory will devastate the mental faculties, and, in prison, these combined with physical privations and incessant interrogation, must ultimately break down the strongest and unleash unconscious guilt of all kinds. After months or years of this. the brainwashed subject will confess to anything, though even then he may not remain "reliable" efiough for a public trial, where retfactions are commoner than is generally supposed. In fact, it

is clear now that through the Russian pufges, for every individual brought into open court, thousands were disposed of behind the scenes, after signing confessions as a formality. The upheaval in Communist sdciety (and in world affairs) associated with these events is one of the more grotesque episodes in civilised history, For posterity, its aftistic monuments will be an e@xtfaordinary novel, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, afd 4 great biography, Weissbetg’s Conspiracy of Silence. Meariwhile, in the age of the concéntration camp, psychiatrists cannot overlook the scientific problems it offers in deviant human behaviour. Dr Sargant, a London psychiatrist, advances a neW intérpretation of the brain-washing process. As a_ sciéntific contribution, his book is unconventional since it is based on no personal observation of the phenomena to be ex: plained, and yet almost ignores the opinions of those on whose accounts he depends for his faects-victims of the Communist penal system and those who have examined such victims. The oiitcome is a theory with ingredients from those mentioned before as the most probable and the most sensational. Dr Sargant’s points of departure were his experiences with neurotic casualties of battles and aif-raids, and his coincident discovery of the theories of Pavlov. By the time, a few years ago, that Soviet fe’ ists were terrorised into obedience to e absurd genetics of Lysenko, medicine had been, with less publicity, securély placed in a Pavlovian strait jacket. Unlike most of his Western colleagues, who were remote from compulsioti in the matter, Dr Sargant

also swallowéd Pavlov hook, line and sinker. Since Pavlov could séé no unconscious mind in his neurotic dogs, Dr Sargant, in parody of Darwinism, dispensed with it in his neurotic soldiers. Soon he found it unnecessary for understancing them to theorise about their minds~at all, when the eéléctric¢al patterns supposéd by Pavlov to exist in the brain, sé¢etmned to make evérythirig intelligible. Simultaneously with finding Pavlov, he turned "accidentally" to an interest in the dramatic religious conversions of John Wesley, at once detecting both a similarity to his bomb-shocked patients and further support fot Pavlov. Finally, it dawnéd ofi him that his new insights into cerebral workings would hot only account for the effects of psychoatialysis and shock tfeatment, but also that they were available to the Soviet authorities and secret police, Brainwashing is revealed as an applied exercise ift conversion by simple Pavlovism. All this is illustrated by a scissors and paste account of religious conversionincluding St Paul with "inhibitory hy# teri¢al manifestations" on the road to Damascus, Voodoo, and other social excitements down to Rock ‘nh’ Roll. My own impression from individuals who "corfessed" in Russia is of nothin s6 colourful. Drs Hinkle and Wolff, psychiatrists With unfivalled access to purge victims while working for the American intelligence services, are effphatic that the "confessions" aré a readily undetstandable result of police practices elaborated from Tsarist times and dépendent on no Pavlovian finesse in the N.K.V.D. ej Dr Sargant is a religious man and his effort, if mechanistic, is a sincere one

to make a terrible ingredient of contemporary life susceptible to rational explanation. But science . .. give me ‘Weissberg every time!