Brainwashing has never been used successfully as a defense in a federal court, as far as Justice Department officials can determine. However, some highly respected psychiatrists feel that the coercive practices described in Patty Hearst's affidavit, if they actually occurred, could have changed her personality so completely that she would have willingly joined the S.L.A. and taken part in its violent crimes. Technically, Patty's main defense may be mental incapacity or coercion, but the plea would be closely akin to brainwashing.
Patty said that she felt totally controlled by her captors. She claimed that she was isolated for long periods of time, threatened with death, and made to feel that she had been abandoned by her family. These are all classic techniques of brainwashing, according to Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who closely analyzed the mind-bending methods used on American prisoners of war in Korea and by Chinese Communists on their countrymen.
Though Lifton refuses to comment specifically on Patty, he notes that people who are particularly susceptible to brainwashing very often exhibit "an enormous aspiration toward social change and toward human brotherhood, which might be connected, under pressure, with various forms of individual guilt over the way one had lived one's life."
Rona Fields, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied political prisoners, feels that Patty has been put through a form of psychological torture often inflicted on such prisoners, and believes that after her release Patty acted much like political prisoners who were suddenly freed. "There's an exuberant, empty grin," says Fields, "but you had a feeling that they weren't comprehending what they were doing." The euphoria may touch off giddy and impulsive behavior, such as Patty's repeated gesture, just after her capture, of raising a clenched fist. The former prisoners, says Fields, "are almost cartoons of themselves."