Medicine: Psychology of Brainwashing

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Men have always fought for control over the minds of their fellows, but it is only recently—largely because of the furor over brainwashing—that the methods of gaining such control have been openly and widely debated. In a new book (Battle for the Mind; Doubleday, $4.50), British Psychiatrist William Sargant lays out a pat theory to explain as essentially the same not only political brainwashing and extorted confessions but religious conversions as well. The all-purpose key, according to Sargant, is to be found in the theories of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), the Russian physiologist and would-be psychologist who proved that his famed "conditioned-reflex" dogs knew for whom the bell tolled, and why.

Pavlov's conditioned-reflex theory (a dog regularly fed at the ringing of a bell will eventually salivate at the mere sound, even though no food is offered) was only the beginning. In later work, which got little attention in the West, Pavlov sought to prove that dogs are of four temperamental types, "strong excitatory," "lively," "calm imperturbable, or phlegmatic," and "weak inhibitory."* Further, he developed an elaborate theory of both positive and negative conditioned responses, which appear in varying patterns when a dog is subjected to unendurable stress ("trans-marginally stimulated"). A dog usually breaks down if the stress signal, e.g., an electric shock, is merely increased in intensity, also if an unwonted time lag is left between the signal and the food that follows, or if signals are simply mixed. A fourth way, and to Dr. Sargant the most important for human analogy, is to wear a dog dowri by subjecting it to excessive work (on a treadmill), upsetting its stomach with irregular feedings or bad food, or inducing a fever. Even if the first three fail to break down a "calm imperturbable" dog, the fourth will work, according to Pavlov.

Mind & Mouse. Psychiatrist Sargant, 50, thought he saw similar mechanisms in the breakdowns of British soldiers and heavily bombed civilians in World War II. From his evidence that the strongest-willed soldier would collapse if battle stress were sufficiently prolonged, Dr. Sargant took a flying leap to the conclusion that virtually any man's mind, if it cracks, will follow one of the behavior patterns that Pavlov thought he saw in dogs. At first, says Sargant, the mind seems to equalize all stimuli and reacts with the same intensity to a bomb attack or the squeal of a mouse. Second, it may go into a "paradoxical phase," and respond more vigorously to weak, unimportant stimuli than to strong ones. Finally, in what Pavlov called the "ultraparadoxical" phase, everything is upside down—a man who has been hounded mercilessly day and night by a relentless police interrogator may suddenly begin to look upon his tormentor as his friend and protector.

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