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

juridical concept. There is no civil wrong (tort)
of brainwashing, no crime of brainwashing, and
brainwashing is not recognized in any
jurisdiction as a defense to civil or criminal
misconduct. According to Lunde and Wilson
(1977), “No reported case in Anglo-American
law has accepted brainwashing as a defense to
criminal liability” (pp. 354–355).4
I also had another concern in mind at that time.
Brainwashing, mind control, thought reform,
and similar labels, while initially used to
describe real events involving real victims and
real manipulators in places such as Hungary, the
Soviet Union, Korea, and China, had long since
stopped being publicly recognizable historical
references. Most people today know little or
nothing about the social events in those
countries that gave rise to the fears that the mind
was more malleable than we ever imagined. The
1950s were a long time ago. Brainwashing and
similar terms had passed into the realm of
rhetoric, science fiction, and Hollywood horror
movies. Talk about brainwashing, and people
were less likely to take you seriously. Even
when used in reference to cultic groups, these
words had acquired a derisive meaning that
undercut any serious discussion of the important
topic they raised—freedom of the mind from
external malevolent manipulation. These terms
had passed from fact into fiction. Indeed, they
mostly dwelt in the realm of cultural insult—if
you didn’t like someone’s opinion, you would
say that person had been brainwashed. Most
importantly, however, these terms had lost any
scientific significance, which made expert
testimony virtually impossible.
The Scientific Objection
In the landmark decision Daubert v. Merrell
Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the United
States Supreme Court provided a four-prong
test, now referred to as the Daubert test, to
determine the admissibility of expert testimony:
4 Interestingly, when attorney F. Lee Bailey agreed to represent
heiress Patty Hearst after she had been kidnapped and
indoctrinated by a militant organization that involved her in a bank
robbery, he did not mention brainwashing as his defense rather, he
said it would be “induced insanity” (Footlick, Howard, &Monroe,
1975).
(a) Whether the expert’s theory or technique
can be tested
(b) Whether the expert’s theory or technique has
been subjected to publication or peer review
(c) Whether the expert’s theory or technique has
a known error rate and
(d) Whether the expert’s theory or technique is
generally accepted in the relevant scientific
community.
The Daubert test applies in all federal and most
state courts.
Courts have been disinclined to give scientific
credence to what they consider to be political
concepts. In United States v. Fishman (1990),
federal judge Jensen concluded that
brainwashing/thought-reform theory did not
meet the criteria of general acceptance in the
relevant scientific community, and therefore
could not be the basis for expert testimony.
Other judges since have relied on his opinion to
reach similar conclusions.
The Prejudice Objection
Expert testimony that might otherwise be
admissible may be excluded if its probative
(evidentiary) value is substantially outweighed
by the danger of unfair prejudice. Prejudice
occurs where the testimony is likely to cause the
jurors to make their decision based upon their
confusion, passion, or emotion, and not on the
evidence presented. As an example, extremely
gory pictures that accurately depict the crime
scene might be excluded from consideration by
the jurors because the photos will so inflame
them that they will be distracted from engaging
in a careful consideration of the evidence.
Even if judges were to accept the scientific
validity of brainwashing by recognizing that it is
merely a colorful label for extreme social
processes that are studied in courses on social
psychology, they are still reluctant to have these
issues raised. As a federal appellate court
recently noted, “Cult-brainwashing arguments
rarely succeed” (Robidoux v. O’Brien, 2011).
Judges often look at such arguments as at best a
Hail-Mary pass or as an admission that no other
recognized theory will help the client.
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