Captive minds? A talk with Daniel Pick

Captive minds? Psychoanalytic thought, politics, and hidden persuasion in the post-war ‘Free World.’
How free are we to think for ourselves? Daniel Pick, psychoanalyst, and professor of history at Birkbeck College (University of London), considers the language of mind control, and asks how ‘the talking cure’ shaped and was affected by popular discourses on brainwashing in the second half of the twentieth century. This workshop will explore ideas about the mind and society that emerged to prominence after 1950, and ask how far those ideas still inform such diverse contemporary concerns as clinical ethics, ‘radicalisation’, consumerism, the crisis of democracy, the ‘paranoid style in political thought’, and conspiracy theory. One aim will be to show the melodramatic, ideologically freighted, sometimes satirical, features of this history of ideas; another, to consider the deeper, underlying psychological anxieties at stake. ‘Brainwashing’, Daniel Pick argues, is a term we need, but must also historicize, and treat with a good deal of caution. His talk ranges from early clinical explorations of schizophrenic patients’ fears of a so-called ‘influencing machine’, through mid-century studies of ‘captive minds’ under ‘totalitarianism’, to recent concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and the ‘attention economy’.
Hidden Persuaders www7.bbk.ac.uk/...
Brainwashed: A New History of Brain Control profilebooks.c...
Referenced conversation at Heyman Center in 2014: sofheyman.org/...
Presenter: Daniel Pick Ph.D., is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a practicing psychoanalyst whose books include Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control (2022), Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848-1918 (1989), Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (2000), The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (2012), Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction (2015), and, as co-editor, Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (2016). Dr. Pick is also an historical consultant and frequent contributor to the BBC.

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