religious speech—the ability of government to
eliminate the individual freedom to choose what
a person believed or worshiped. Their concern
was the censoring of external expressions of
conscience. Although people could neither
publicly express nor practice their beliefs, they
were still free to harbor secret thoughts,
opinions, and beliefs.
Today we confront a more frightening prospect:
that people could have their minds internally
invaded and controlled, so that they cannot
formulate and cherish their own personal,
private opinions. This new threat, more insidious
than anything that has preceded it, is my topic.
Brainwashing
Social influence is the sea in which human
communication and interaction swims. We may
all, individually, be atoms, but we strive to
connect with others to become molecules.
Influence is the bond that accomplishes that
process.
While influence is inevitable, it is not always
lawful. There are moral and legal limits to the
manner in which one person may treat another.
Nowhere is this point clearer than in the social
interaction called brainwashing.
Edward Hunter coined the term brainwashing in
the late 1940s as part of his job as a government
public-relations specialist seeking to discredit
the communist ideology. The genesis of the term
was not scientific it was political. Hunter’s
creation of the term brainwashing, intended to
call attention to disturbing social occurrences in
the Soviet Union, Korea, and China, was hugely
successful for propaganda purposes. The word
shocked and frightened people, and it created
support for American opposition to communism.
Because brainwashing was a political term,
many professionals saw it simply as rhetoric, not
science. They ignored the underlying facts that
made brainwashing an effective image for real
events. For example, Dr. Thomas Szasz, an
outspoken psychiatrist who often wrote cogently
against the inherited wisdom of his profession,
once colorfully said that one can no more
“wash” another’s brain “than he can make him
bleed with a cutting remark” (Szasz, 1976,
p. 11). Szasz, however, failed to see that
sometimes there is fire behind the smoke.
Other professionals were more savvy. They saw
the real threat of extreme mind manipulation. On
April 10, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles
delivered a speech to Princeton alumni at Hot
Springs, Virginia. He said that the United States
and the Soviet Union were in a “battle for men’s
minds,” and that the Soviets possessed the
power to
wash the brain clean of the thoughts and
mental processes of the past and ...
create new brain processes and new
thoughts which the victim, parrotlike,
repeats. In effect, the brain under these
circumstances becomes a phonograph
playing a disc put on its spindle by an
outside genius over which it has no
control. (pp. 354–355)
A few days later, Dulles authorized the CIA to
begin the most massive covert scientific
program on mind and behavior control ever
conducted (Scheflin &Opton, Jr., 1979).
When brainwashing as a technique of intense
indoctrination and mental hijacking passed from
government to private cultic organizations, the
need for expert testimony to protect innocent
victims became crucial. To understand and
explain government extreme-influence efforts,
these experts, of course, used the scientific
literature that had developed. So the experts
talked about brainwashing, thought reform, and
mind control. But these experts faced problems
in their efforts to bring brainwashing
explanations into the courtroom.
Objections to Brainwashing As a Defense
When I became President of ICSA in 2003,3 one
of my first concerns was that we shift the
dialogue away from the use of terms such as
brainwashing or mind control or thought reform.
It’s not that I opposed these colorfully
descriptive words and the accurately disturbing
images they correctly conjure up in one’s mind
it’s that I found them to be ineffective when
used in courts of law. Brainwashing is not a
3 Then known as The American Family Foundation.
70 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015
eliminate the individual freedom to choose what
a person believed or worshiped. Their concern
was the censoring of external expressions of
conscience. Although people could neither
publicly express nor practice their beliefs, they
were still free to harbor secret thoughts,
opinions, and beliefs.
Today we confront a more frightening prospect:
that people could have their minds internally
invaded and controlled, so that they cannot
formulate and cherish their own personal,
private opinions. This new threat, more insidious
than anything that has preceded it, is my topic.
Brainwashing
Social influence is the sea in which human
communication and interaction swims. We may
all, individually, be atoms, but we strive to
connect with others to become molecules.
Influence is the bond that accomplishes that
process.
While influence is inevitable, it is not always
lawful. There are moral and legal limits to the
manner in which one person may treat another.
Nowhere is this point clearer than in the social
interaction called brainwashing.
Edward Hunter coined the term brainwashing in
the late 1940s as part of his job as a government
public-relations specialist seeking to discredit
the communist ideology. The genesis of the term
was not scientific it was political. Hunter’s
creation of the term brainwashing, intended to
call attention to disturbing social occurrences in
the Soviet Union, Korea, and China, was hugely
successful for propaganda purposes. The word
shocked and frightened people, and it created
support for American opposition to communism.
Because brainwashing was a political term,
many professionals saw it simply as rhetoric, not
science. They ignored the underlying facts that
made brainwashing an effective image for real
events. For example, Dr. Thomas Szasz, an
outspoken psychiatrist who often wrote cogently
against the inherited wisdom of his profession,
once colorfully said that one can no more
“wash” another’s brain “than he can make him
bleed with a cutting remark” (Szasz, 1976,
p. 11). Szasz, however, failed to see that
sometimes there is fire behind the smoke.
Other professionals were more savvy. They saw
the real threat of extreme mind manipulation. On
April 10, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles
delivered a speech to Princeton alumni at Hot
Springs, Virginia. He said that the United States
and the Soviet Union were in a “battle for men’s
minds,” and that the Soviets possessed the
power to
wash the brain clean of the thoughts and
mental processes of the past and ...
create new brain processes and new
thoughts which the victim, parrotlike,
repeats. In effect, the brain under these
circumstances becomes a phonograph
playing a disc put on its spindle by an
outside genius over which it has no
control. (pp. 354–355)
A few days later, Dulles authorized the CIA to
begin the most massive covert scientific
program on mind and behavior control ever
conducted (Scheflin &Opton, Jr., 1979).
When brainwashing as a technique of intense
indoctrination and mental hijacking passed from
government to private cultic organizations, the
need for expert testimony to protect innocent
victims became crucial. To understand and
explain government extreme-influence efforts,
these experts, of course, used the scientific
literature that had developed. So the experts
talked about brainwashing, thought reform, and
mind control. But these experts faced problems
in their efforts to bring brainwashing
explanations into the courtroom.
Objections to Brainwashing As a Defense
When I became President of ICSA in 2003,3 one
of my first concerns was that we shift the
dialogue away from the use of terms such as
brainwashing or mind control or thought reform.
It’s not that I opposed these colorfully
descriptive words and the accurately disturbing
images they correctly conjure up in one’s mind
it’s that I found them to be ineffective when
used in courts of law. Brainwashing is not a
3 Then known as The American Family Foundation.
70 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015
