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CKLN-FM Mind Control Series -- Part 6
Lecture by Dr. Alan Scheflin
The History of Mind Control:
What we can prove and what we can't
Back to CKLN Series Table of Contents
From the Ryerson CKLN FM (88.1 in Toronto) Mind Control Series
CKLN-FM 88.1 Toronto the International Connection
Producer/interviewer Wayne Morris
Contents
Part 1
Part 2
Part 1
Alan Scheflin:
... for you in the next two hours, is that mind control is a valid subject, we can prove a good deal of its history and its postulates, and especially in this litigious climate when people argue that therapists and others are crazy in believing in things like mind control, it's my function to show that the subject has validation across several centuries, and especially a rich history in this century. What I want to do is use slides to illustrate my talk, and so if we could lower the lights you'll be able to see the slides better, and let's begin. let me begin. Can we... Yeah. Great. Let me see... {pause} All right. Naturally, the history of mind control begins with the proverbial hole in the head. This is the, an illustration of a trephined skull, the first known medical intervention for mental illness. There are many such skulls that have been recovered from civilizations throughout the world, suggesting that trephining, which is as you can tell an early form of lobotomy, was well-practiced by many ancient civilizations. The reason why the proverbial hole-in- the-head here is important to us, is that this was a therapeutic procedure built upon a medical philosophy, and the philosophy is one of possession. It seems to me that in many ways as I'll suggest to you, these notions have come back again in the twentieth century, and so I thought it appropriate to start with them now. The possession idea carried through well into the Middle Ages, when possession theories of mental illness were prevalent, and cures based on them were equally as prevalent and indeed necessary. This is an illustration of medieval Moon Madness, and some of the dancing episodes that went throughout the Middle Ages. The treatment of choice was exorcism which you seen an illustration of here, if you look all the way over on the left, the woman being held by a group of men, there's a devil coming out of her head. This was, of course, the early equivalent of Multiple Personality Disorder and the notion of possession theory, the body being inhabited by other beings, is an important aspect of dissociation. The theory may have changed somewhat, but there is certainly a direct history from the possession ideas to the dissociation ideas that we experience today. The first, the first real treatise, I think, in mind control, which brought together possession ideas in to a textbook, is THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM, which is written in 1484, it's called THE WITCH'S HAMMER, and I was interested to note that in the latest issue of, I think, NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE, with the cover story on the brain, there is a one-page description of THE MALLEUS MALEFICARUM by a novelist who wrote a woman's novel based on its terms. THE MALLEUS was used as a bible for witch-hunting, and it tells you how to identify witches and how especially to interrogate them, and how to cure them--the cure usually being killing them--but the value of THE MALLEUS, I think, is two-fold. It is probably the second known text book in history on cross-examination techniques, the first one being THE PLATONIC DIALOGUES. And so, we get in THE MALLEUS, a systemization of the knowledge of how to do interrogations to lead people to give confessions that you want them to give, and so in the history of mind control it plays a very important role, because this is, this is the work that was used by the inquisitors throughout the Middle Ages and thereafter to obtain confessions and indeed false confessions. THE MALLEUS itself then was read by police departments centuries later and used as the beginning of the development of police manual. Let me jump ahead a couple of centuries until last century, the #1800's, with the birth of psychiatry, and it perhaps is no surprise that there is a common link to possession theories and the birth of psychiatry, in that most psychiatric treatments had the same elements of violence that we see in THE MALLEUS and that we see in the exorcism, and beyond that. It's the cast-the-demons-out... I'm gonna run through a series of slides here, all taken from psychiatric text books, on the way in which people were treated. This one is an individual who was chained to a wall, and this is a form of a straitjacket as you can see, where a person is tied directly to a drain pipe in the wall. Here is an early version of the, of the straightjacket itself. It was beliefs that these people were inhabited by demons, and that in order to get those demons out exorcism was replaced either with violence or with severe restraint. But a century ago they also had something that we tend to consider as modern but is not--shock treatment. The shock done, however, was usually a different form than electricity since they had not yet invented electricity. This is a water shock treatment, and another version of it appears here, where an individual is left blind-folded on the platform, suddenly the platform falls from beneath him and he's dumped into a bucket of ice cold water. This was intended to be shocking. Another form of shock treatment was to fire a cannon behind somebody without them knowing that it was gonna happen. Again, the idea was to use a form of violent cure because of a theory of violent possession. Interestingly enough, even electric shock has a history in antiquity. It did not... We did not need the development of electricity to have electric shock.
The ancient Egyptians used to take a torpedo fish and slap it on the forehead of people who were possessed, and the fish would discharge an electric current, and that's the earliest record of electroshock treatment. This is a device that {pause} nobody can ever guess the importance of. It's an ovary compressor, and I'll leave it to your imagination to, to consider how painful it must be to have experienced it. Seclusion in its worst form is the wooden crib here. This is a form of containment in which you can see that person is totally strapped into a crib with no way to move. This, however, was not the worst form of restraint. It took a leading psychiatrist to develop that. This is the rotating chair. A person could last only a few seconds in this chair without becoming nauseous and eventually losing consciousness. And then there was the tranquilizing chair, all of these devices were used in the late #1800's, the last two of them were developed by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration Of Independence, and his face appears on the seal of the American Psychiatric Association as its founder. It's not my desire to criticize psychiatry here, but rather to make the point, in terms of mind control, that we began studying the human mind and mental illness with a theory of possession and a theory of cure based on violence, and from that we'll see the various refinements. Perhaps the first of the refinements, and the one that's notoriously wrong, was the leading psychological theory of the 1800's, and that is phrenology--that you can measure the exterior of the brian or rather of the skull in order to understand the interior of the mind, and this is an illustration of a phrenologist's chart, the theory being that there is a direct correlation between a person's characteristics as an individual, and their skulls and the lumps and other aspects to be found on the skull. The theory, of course, is completely wrong, but it occupied a good deal of the 1800's and was the leading theory of psychology at that time. It led to further variants in terms of face- reading... The importance of the theory is not that it was wrong, but rather that it led people to begin to try to measure internal states. And so, from an erroneous theory people began to look inside the brain to see how you can find external correlations with the brain, and we come across what I think is the great paradox in all of healing, and that is that the more you learn how to cure people the more you learn how to harm them, and for every step forward in relieving mental illness you can take a step backwards in causing it. And so, for people whose interest is in control of the mind, their data comes from how to help the mind, and so there is no step forward that does not involve equally, in the hands of malevolent people, a step backwards. The idea of mind control turned more serious however and in our concerns more contemporary when we come to hypnosis. This is Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. Of course, hypnosis is not sleep and so the name itself is deceptive as to the mechanism of hypnosis, but hypnosis began the modern era with Mesmer, whose theories were also wrong not only wrong but plagiarised, on inter planetary or planetary magnetism affecting mental states and so forth. What Mesmer really happened upon without realizing it was the beginning of the idea of the laws of suggestion, and what he did is set up what is called a baquet, and you can see here it's an oak tub from which iron bars extrude, and the French nobility would come and touch the iron bars which were in the tub, the tub was filled with water with iron filings, and people would then have convulsive states which were pleasant enough for them to repeat quite frequently. Some slides of the baquette... This was high society, not only treatment but also entertainment. You can see at the left a woman has fainted. That was quite common. Here's a colour slide of the same kind of event.
Mesmer was, his work was studied by a Presidential Commission or rather a King's Commission. King Louis XVI appointed a special commission to study Mesmerism. At the time it was receiving rave notices from the public and condemnation from medical societies. Here's a cartoon of the time of animal magnetism, you can see the animal doing the hypnosis, and another cartoon debunking animal magnetism. The report that was issued on the work of Mesmer's student des Lond, was highly critical. The commission found that there was nothing to the interplanetary theories and the magnetic theories, but they were then forced to explain why Mesmer got so many curs, and they attributed the cures to the power of imagination, and rather than study the power of imagination as a way to cure individuals, the commission left the issue alone, and it took a hundred years for people to pick up that essential point, that manipulation of the imagination could be used to manipulate the mind. The commission also issued a secondary report that was stamped "eyes only" for the King's eyes only, and in that report the commissioners said that there was an aspect of magnetism that was so dangerous that the practice would be stopped at once. It was a menace to morals, that the attraction that developed between the magnetizer and the subject being magnetized was so great that seductions were inevitable, and therefore we have the first inkling of the relationship between hypnosis and hypnotic seduction in this secret report for the King's eyes only. Mesmer died in disgrace and in exile after the report appeared, and hypnosis, which was still called animal magnetism at the time, fell into disgrace but not into complete abandonment. It wasn't until about fifty or sixty years later that James Braid, a Scottish physician, coined the term hypnosis and hypnotism, and it wasn't until about fifty years after that that hypnosis begins to be studied in a serious way, and the problems of mind control, using hypnosis as the vehicle again resurface. The Victorians were interested in hypnosis 'cause it was fun to be hypnotized. They lacked the joys that we have, such as Geraldo, and so they had to entertain themselves by using hypnosis for their parlour games. And you can see a man here drinking milk out of a saucer on the floor, he had just been hypnotized. And so, stage hypnosis at the turn of the century, from the 1890's to the 1910's and '20's, was one of the most well-known and well-attended and lucrative forms of entertainment. ... just a couple of artifacts from that time. Here's a brochure from a stage hypnotism show. Walter Bodey, an English hypnotist, was perhaps one of the most famous of the stage performers. He had a hypnosis and electrical show. You can see on there that, a statement, "The real Trilby," going back to Svengali. We'll return to that in a moment. This is James Bodey. He lives on in history for a reason people don't remember any more, and that is, he was the inspiration for an extremely young comic who got his start by mimicking Bodey, and here's the young comic, here's the two of them together, Bodey on the right and Charley Chaplain on the left. And so, Charley Chaplain's career began by studying Bodey's mechanisms and his mannerisms on stage, and then making comedy of them. During the middle... During the Victorian era people's exposure to hypnosis was not only as a form of entertainment, but it seemed like a form of mind control as well. You could get people to do anything that you asked of them. You could have them be suspended between two chairs, you could even stand on them when they were suspended between two chairs, and you could do a lot worse as well. If you're sensitive, please don't watch the next two slides. This is an iron bar held by eyelets, put into the eye lids of a subject, and this a stage hypnotist in Georgia, and as if that isn't bad enough to suspend an iron bar from the eye lids, he took it one step further and then pulled a young woman on roller skates. So, it's not always fun to be hypnotized, and some people have taken the idea of stage hypnosis, it seems to me, far beyond where it should be entitled to go. One of those people is Barry Konnikoff, who traffics under the name of Potentials Unlimited. In one of his later... He has self-hypnosis tapes which were available all over the place. I've heard he's gone bankrupt now and I certainly hope that's true. In his later round of tapes he argued that women who have been sexually abused or raped deserve it because of what they did in prior lives. Now, the First Amendment perhaps protects that. On the other hand, it is... There aren't words that would describe a person who would make money out of that kind of a theory, so I won't waste our time on him. I want to get back to the central theme of mind control, which starts with Jean Martin Charcot, who was the foremost neurologist of the time. While the stage hypnotists were persuading people that minds could be controlled by hypnosis, the professionals were learning hypnosis as well, and they were learning it largely from a small group of people, the most influential of whom was Charcot. Charcot, as the greatest neurologist in Europe at the time, was frequently visited by kings and princes and certainly all of the most elite of the medical profession from around the world, and in his clinic at La Sault Petrier in Paris, he would demonstrate hypnotic phenomena. He would, in his demonstrations, induce neurotic symptoms in people. People who came in with an inability to move one limb, in hypnosis would be able to move that limb, but he would transfer the neurotic symptom to the other limb, and so he could create and destroy and eliminate and transpose neurotic conditions, and this was a remarkable demonstration which impressed a number of people in the audience, but his theories were at odds with his major contemporaries, le Beau who was on the left and HipoHypolee Bernheim who was, on the right. There was in France at the time, this second school of thought about hypnosis. Charcot believed that people who could be hypnotized were hysterics and that hypnosis was a form of hysterical dissociation. Bernheim, based on the work of le Beau and his own work thereafter, believed that hypnosis was a form of suggestion, and that the manipulation of suggestion did not need a former neurotic condition. Here's Bernheim. Bernheim and Charcot often appeared against each other in a series of criminal cases that appeared throughout France, on the issue of the anti- social production of crime with hypnosis. A person who studied from both of these people and was influenced by both of them was Sigmond Freud. This is a picture of him on his wedding day, and a better-known portrait of him in his old age, and then the infamous couch. In his London office over the couch Freud had a picture of Charcot's demonstration, doing the demonstration that I showed you a few slides back. Let me get to that. This was the, a picture that hung over the couch in Freud's office in England. Now, Freud was very much influenced by the hypnosis theories, and worked with hypnosis for a year, but then abandoned it, and it wasn't clear why he did abandon hypnosis. Some theorists have argued, and I think correctly, that he was a lousy hypnotist, {laughter from audience} and that seemed to be true, and he couldn't, as a result, get deep enough trances to have effect on his patients. Other theorists have argued, and Freud's own writings tend to support a secondary hypothesis, and that is that Freud was scared of the seductive power of hypnosis, that the ability to move people into altered states of consciousness gave a feeling to the hypnotist of some such omnipotence that it was in itself seductive. And Freud wrote that in one of his patients, as soon as the hypnotic encounter had ended she jumped up and threw her arms around him and hugged and kissed him, and he did not attribute that to his handsome demeanour. He said it must be some other force at work and it so frightened him, he said, that he never used hypnosis again. And I think that he's harking back to the Mesmer Commission's noticing that there is a manipulative power in hypnosis that the subject may not be able to resist, but also the hypnotizer may not be able to resist as well. Bernheim, by the way, and Albert Muhl, a German hypnotist in the 1880's and the 1890's, had already given the world the false memory syndrome. They called it retroactive hallucinations at the time, and they wrote quite openly in their works that they were concerned that through the power of suggestion you could create an impenetrable witness for a court of law. That by hypnotizing somebody, you could induce them to tell a false story, that story would be impervious to cross- examination, because the individual would sincerely believe in the truth of what he or she was saying, and therefore you would never be able to effectively cross- examine that person, because they would continually insist on the truth of what they were reporting. And so, by the early 1890's the phenomenon of false memory had already been noted and been written about extensively, and its application for courts of law had already been written about. There is absolutely nothing new in the false memory issue. It is simply a failure to read the literature from a hundred years ago. What's more important is, where are we gonna go from now with false memory, and I think the answer is where we have already come from a hundred years ago. The next step beyond false memory was the beginning to use these techniques deliberately for purpose of mind control. And essentially the first steps are taken by A. R. Luria in his institute in Moscow. Luria reasoned that if you can get people to have false confessions with hypnosis, you probably could build affective complexes on those false confessions. In other words, you could not only get people to report things that never happened, you could get them to experience the entire range of emotions affiliated with those events. And so, Luria and his colleagues in Moscow in the 1920's began doing research on developing neuroses built upon the implantation of false memories. That work was replicated in the 1930's by Milton Erikson, Lawrence Cubey, and others, who verified the truth of what Luria was reporting. Now, Luria's work was not merely academic. It had its operational uses in the next decade in the Moscow Show Trials, which are an extremely important historical event for our purposes. During the Moscow Show Trials, Stalin purged his old enemies. Now, one way you can do that is simply have them disappear, or you could have public executions. It is generally true throughout histories that regimes try to improve their own legitimacy by discrediting their predecessors. Stalin's way of doing it was to put on trial all his former friends, and what was different about the Moscow Show Trials is that when these defendants went on trial they not only confessed to a series of crimes and sins, they could not possibly have committed, but they begged to be shot as enemies of The State. Some recent books on the prosecutor's role in programming during the Moscow Show Trials have added some new information to our understanding of them. It was at this point that American intelligence agencies began to take notice of the mind control potential that seemed to be apparent from the Moscow Show Trials. The actual paper record though is hard to trace from the 1930's, easier to trace from the 1940's, and the trial that ultimately set the C.I.A. off on its investigation of mind control was the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty.
Mindszenty was a staunch anti-Communist who was then arrested by the Communists and put in the Androsi Street Prison in Hungary. The... Six months later he was put on trial, and as his predecessors a decade before, he confessed to crimes and sins that could not possibly have been true. These are a series of slides showing him at trial. The experience of Mindszenty was so frightening to American intelligence agencies, that they began to investigate whether or not the Soviets possessed some new form of mind control unknown to The West.
Here two stories develop that are both true and completely contradictory. In secret C.I.A. files you will find both of these stories validated. On the one hand the C.I.A. argued that it was afraid that it was losing the war for control of the mind, and that the Soviets had developed this new, sophisticated psychology or whatever to control the way people think and act, and that America had to catch up. We were on the defensive now and we had to, a lot of work that had to be done. One the other hand, in a document that was extremely highly classified, eyes-only for the Director of the C.I.A.'s Eyes-only, it turned out that there was a spy in the Androsi Street Prison who was reporting back to the C.I.A. everything that was happening to Mindszenty, and this Eyes-only report which I've read is a wonderful document. It details exactly what happened to Mindszenty. It names the Soviet hypnotists who did the work and the drugs that they used to assist them in that work. It's a step-by-step manual for the programming of Mindszenty. And what's particularly interesting is if you read Cardinal Mindszenty's autobiography of the events, he really doesn't know what happened to him, and at this point the C.I.A. had a better knowledge of the programming of Mindszenty than he had of his own programming. And so, on the one hand the Soviets, the C.I.A. knew everything that the Soviets were doing, yet on the other hand they were reporting that they were afraid that they were losing the war, and I think both of those stories are true, though they're contradictory, and both are supported by secret C.I.A. documents. Meanwhile, a related event begins to happen. In the late 1940's, Edward Hunter in 1949 for the first time coins the term, "brain washing," and writes a book on it. This is one of the two books that Hunter wrote. It turned out that Hunter was an O.S.S. and later C.I.A. propagandist, and the word brainwashing was particularly useful because American prisoners of war were starting to give confessions of using germ warfare during the Korean War, and America needed a way of stopping that kind of propaganda, and the term brainwashing which had been coined by Hunter to explain the thought control programme in Communist China proved a useful vehicle. This is Edward Hunter. I was able to do one of the last interviews with him before his death. In the deep literature on brainwashing, the more academic literature on brainwashing, his view of it is called The Robot Theory, the notion that with brainwashing techniques you can turn somebody into an automaton. The Robot Theory of brainwashing is not the only theory of brainwashing, but it is the most flamboyant and it's also the most frightening. The idea of brainwashing then in the 1950's became the object of a lot of study and books like IN EVERY WAR BUT ONE, people who had actually gone through the experience wrote about what had happened to them and researchers like Biederman in books like this were reporting what happened to American prisoners of war and other prisoners of war. In Hawaii, an American camp was set up to be a mock prisoner of war camp to use the techniques that were being used of brainwashing. This an illustration from that camp. These are actually all Americans, but it's a simulated exercise in brainwashing because Americans were searching for a way to inoculate our soldiers if they should get captured and put through a brainwashing experience. Would it have been possible for us to inoculate them previously so that the brainwashing would not take? While the brainwashing studies were going on, another development was happening simultaneously important to the development of mind control, and these are the sensory deprivation experiments that began in Canada with Donald Hebb and others. It was... Hebb's original work was essentially on what's called highway trance, the phenomena that people who will drive on highways in long stretches of road that's pretty monotonous will to into trance. And this is a form of sensory deprivation, if you've got... If it's dark at night, there's a long road, there's no scenery, you probably all have had the experience of realizing that suddenly you've driven a couple of miles but have no memory for that couple of miles passing, or you've gotten very drowsy. Well, the phenomenon of sensory deprivation became the subject of a good deal of study in the 1950's. What would happen to the mind if it were deprived of sensory input, since the mind needs sensory input the way the body needs food? And in a series of studies, this is on isolation, inside the black room, students across the country in Canada and other places were put in a black room. Here's an illustration of it. There's essentially almost no sensory input at all. What happens to the mind? Floatation tanks and other ways of decreasing sensory input, all had the effect of causing the mind when it is deprived of sensory input to throw out a hallucinated world in order to get input back from that hallucinated world. And people, in fact, kept in isolation too long could become psychotic.
Books studying the phenomena of isolation and also in conjunction with manipulating people's mind through techniques of brainwashing began to appear. THE BRAIN BENDERS is one, THE BATTLE FOR THE MIND by William Sergent is the foremost British book on the subject. Robert J. Lifton's study, THOUGHT REFORM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALISM is the classic work on the Chinese thought reform programme. Edgar Shein's book on coercive persuasion on the Americans taken prisoner in the Korean War, RAPE OF THE MIND by Mirrileau, another classic. As all of this was happening, this was what you could call a form of coercive persuasion as Shein had suggested, but there was another event that was occurring simultaneously. The 1950's is, in many ways, the birth of mind control experimentation, because you have the brainwashing issue, the hypnosis issues, the isolation and sensory deprivation studies, and you now get the next stream of research, which involves obedience to authority studies. I mentioned the other night Solomon Ashe's studies on opinions and social pressure, and what Ashe did at Yale was the simplest of experiments on conformity. He drew on a blackboard a line that was one foot long and another line directly under it, parallel to it, that was two feet long. He then got six or seven people in a room, all of whom except one had been bribed, and the last one had no knowledge of the bribing of the others. He then asked them in order which one was the shorter line, and to the horror of the one who was not bribed, everyone reported that the two-foot line was the shorter line, and it was visually obvious that that was untrue, but everybody else in the room was reporting it as true. And what Ashe discovered was that the subject would report seeing the longer line as the shorter line, that he would conform to peer pressure. Cynics dismissed it on the grounds that it just showed the stupidity of Yale graduates, {slight laughter from audience} but that was not a sufficient scientific explanation, and as Walter reported the other night the experiments were done in the Navy and other places as well. Now, I want to distinguish this group of work from the others that I've just reported on. Here we're talking about a form of manipulation of the mind that does not involve physical coercion. In the brainwashing work, in the isolation work, there is a form of physical intimidation that involves taking over the body and controlling the body, controlling all of the input in the mind and so forth, and so this is... A person in that situation that he or she is in that situation, that they are captive in some way. With this kind of experiment, we have what I call conversational persuasion. This is the beginning of the attempt to develop theories of social influence on free- standing populations where people are not aware that they are being held captive in any way, and indeed they're not. The next step along the lines of obedience research, and some ways the most frightening, is the work done by Milgrim and his book OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. If you're not familiar with Milgrim's work I'll give you a very brief explanation of it. Milgrim wanted to test the hypothesis that people in Germany, good people in Germany, during the Nazi regime, were manipulated in a way to do evil, or let me restate that, Milgrim wondered why so many good people in Nazi Germany could allow such evil to happen around them knowingly. And his thesis was not the idea that there's something inherent in the German character, but rather that there's something inherent in people, and he was interested in showing whether or not if a Hitler-type character arose in the United States, that person would be able to get good people to do evil in this country. And so, he built a box, I don't have a slide of it here, he built a box with thirty switches, just little light switches, and the thirty switches were in fifteen-volt increments. They were marked in fifteen-volt increments. As you moved over towards the right of the box there began to be some writing which said, "Caution! Danger! Extreme danger!," and the last group of switches were marked in triple red X's. Now, he then put an advertisement, again this is at Yale, so you know, maybe the cynics are right. He put an advertisement in the local New Haven newspaper for people to volunteer for the experiment. People came in and they were told that the experiment involved pain and learning, and that they would be the teachers, and that there was a student and that they could see the student, and the student they were told was hooked up to an electric grid, and every time that... The teacher was to give the student a question, and every time the student gave a wrong answer one of the switches was to be pushed. When Milgrim and his associates talked about the experiment, they concluded that nobody would push all the switches, and most people would stop pushing the switches about halfway through, because each switch was intended to deliver a higher voltage shock. The subject as about half the switches were pulled, would increasingly flinch and then scream and then yell, would then say, "I don't want to do this any more," would then say, "I have a heart condition! Please stop!," and then would refuse to answer any question and would slump over. If the teacher balked at pushing the next switch, there was an experimenter there in a long, white laboratory coat with a clipboard and a pencil, who was instructed to say first, "Continue," and then, "Please continue," and then, "You must go on with the experiment," and finally, "I will take responsibility." And what Milgrim discovered is that the overwhelming number of people pushed all of the switches, and that the simple reenforcement of saying, "I will take responsibility," or that there was an experiment going on, was sufficient to allow them to do that. Now after Milgrim's experiments were replicated in other places, and what eventually evolved is that the horror of what he was proving was so ghastly that the scientific literature turned away from it and instead focussed on the ethics of doing that kind of experiment. Because after all, what he was doing was taking people from the street and not telling them that they were what he was studying. They thought he was studying the subject. And a lot of these people as you can imagine had severe emotional reaction once they realized that they had shocked somebody with a heart condition on a machine that went beyond extreme danger to triple X's in red, and so the ethics of doing that type of work then created a movement in universities and other places for institutional reviews boards, etc., and the research can't be done any more, and what Milgrim was proving, how easy it is to manipulate people by the simplest of commands, was no longer being studied and certainly not in that manner. But books like COMPLIANT BEHAVIOUR: BEYOND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY, were being written to increase and replicate and extend the work of Milgrim, and here's a report called CONFORMITY, COMPLIANCE AND CONVERSION, from the Air Force in I think around the 1950's, an Air Force report using Milgrim's work in Air Force conditioning. Let's go back and talk some more about hypnosis since it plays a central in the rest of the development of mind control. Let me say that also, given the nature of the subject of mind control, there are a lot of things I'm not talking about. I'm not gonna be talking to you about the physiological aspects of mind control, to take you through the lobotomy and psycho- surgery and electrical-stimulation-of-the-brain literature, and I won't be talking about the pharmacological aspects of mind control, the use of drugs and botanicals and chemicals for mind control, you know, but that should give you an idea of how vast the subject is. We're just concentrating here on the psychological aspects of mind control. All right. The notion of hypnotic seduction had been noticed in the secret report to the King in France, it had been noticed by Freud in his work, and it had been noticed by many others--a series of slides on hypnotic seduction. The idea of hypnotic seduction got, I think, its greatest impetus in an #1894 book called TRILBY. And this is illustration from it with the infamous Svengali as the hypnotist, and to this day the portrait of Svengali as a hypnotist is almost as powerful as Sherlock Holmes as a detective. It's almost the stereotype of the field. Trilby, today, would be a No. #1. best-seller, the equivalent of a No. #1. best-seller, and even bigger. It was probably the first block-buster novel. It was published in a magazine in serial form, and after the first issue appeared the magazine had to print an additional one hundred thousand copies because of the desire for people to continue the story. It... The author, George du Maurier, was launched into such public light that he ultimately hid from all, in order to preserve his privacy. He had lecture tours through the United States and Britain. Do you remember PATEN PLACE, how huge a novel that was at the time? This was the equivalent and even bigger. The story of TRILBY is the story of a hypnotist who gets total control over the personality of a young woman, and the novel itself I find to be incredibly boring, but the portrait of portrayed of the hypnotist is tremendously exciting and has lived on almost as an icon of the subject itself. There was a town in Florida, and I haven't checked to see whether this is still true, that changed its name to Trilby, and at the centre of town they have Svengali Square. There were TRILBY parties, TRILBY hats, TRILBY clothes. It was an enormously popular and influential novel, which introduced people to the idea of the potential for hypnotic seduction, and also even worse. Let me... Since I don't want to dwell on this aspect of mind control, let me sum it up and say that the traditional thinking has been that you cannot get people to do with hypnosis what they would not otherwise do. There is value in that thinking, because it then doesn't encourage people to try, but if you go and talk to the hypnotists who will tell you that and you talk to them in private, they will tell you the opposite story, that within certain parameters you can get people to do things they would otherwise not do, with hypnosis, and that while hypnosis is not a magic wand or a magic potion, it is an effective facilitator for seduction or anti-social conduct. There is an increase in court cases of hypnotic seduction now, but I want to turn to the more frightening prospect of using hypnosis for the creation of anti-social crimes. Can you get... "You are in my power, you will do what I tell you." How far can you get control of somebody using hypnosis and forms of social influence? This has been the subject of a lot of fiction, just from my library here are some of the books. THE DARKER THE NIGHT, WAS THE HYPNOTIST THE KILLER, SEEING IS BELIEVING, YOUR EYELIDS ARE GROWING HEAVY, MURDER IS SUGGESTIVE, TELEFON, which of course is a movie as well. And there are academic books like HYPNOTISM AND CRIME. Interestingly there has been no major work on the anti- social aspects of hypnosis either in the legal literature or in the psychiatric, hypnotic, or psychological literature for over thirty years. 1960 is the last time we have a full discussion of the issue of hypnotic coercion, and 1972 was the last time a hypnosis journal directed itself primarily to that issue. The texts suggest that there are cases in which people, through hypnosis, have been induced to commit crimes, but the hypnosis community has been divided as to whether those are pure cases. There is what I call the methodological dilemma that arises at this point. If you... Usually the hypnotic encounter requires a certain amount of time and a certain amount of trust, and so hypnosis researchers argue that it's not hypnosis that facilitates either seduction or the production of anti-social acts, rather it is the relationship between the hypnotist and the subject, and therefore hypnosis is not at fault. The experimentalists discount any clinical, anecdotal material, because it's not rigorously scientific and therefore can't prove the conclusion of hypnotic coercion. But the experimental literature itself is discounted, because as Albert Muhl wrote a hundred years ago and Martin Orne has written as well, at some level a subject always knows that he or she is participating in an experiment. And so, there is no way to test the validity of the hypothesis, that you can induce through hypnosis anti-social conduct. On the other hand, such conduct is produced on a regular basis whatever the explanation. The one place where the studies were done, where there was no fear of ethical violation or legal consequences, was in work done by the Central Intelligence Agency, and since the work has never been fully published, I have an article that will be coming out in THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CLINICAL HYPNOSIS, on the C.I.A. hypnosis experiments. It's not my function here to criticize the intelligence agencies or to condemn what they have done. I'm instead trying to argue the point that the hypnosis community in general and psychologists and psychiatrists as well, need to know the data that was produced and which still exists in C.I.A. files. If we are going to be accused by the false memory people of using undue suggestion to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, we need to know the limits of those possibilities, and that material is in C.I.A. files, therapists are being sued across the country, they need access to that information to help defend themselves. And so, it is in the spirit of science and in the spirit of protecting therapists and patients, you know, for the good of the country, that I present this material so that we can hope that the full amount of it is ultimately revealed. I also must make a caveat. I can only report on information that I've seen, either through my search of C.I.A. files and my interviews with C.I.A. hypnotists and other hypnotists. There may be mistakes in what I present. I cannot correct that unless I have access to all of the material. And so, if I have made a mistake, it is a mistake that comes from not being given the material. Of course, I have in good faith worked through the material I have to tell as accurate a story as I know how. The C.I.A. began experimenting as soon as it was born in the late 1940's. The experimentation in mind and behaviour control had already begun in the O.S.S. with hypnosis experiments, truth cerems, truth tablets, and lethal pills, as well as other kinds of experiments, but it was after the Cardinal Mindszenty episode that the C.I.A. began to really become concerned about the possibility of hypnotic coercion, and let me quote to you from a C.I.A. document at the time. This is a February 10, 1951, C.I.A. Top Secret Memo, called DEFENSE AGAINST SOVIET MEDICAL INTERROGATION AND ESPIONAGE TECHNIQUES, "Hypnotism has been reported to have been used in some cases by the Soviets as an adjunct to interrogation. It would be possible for a skilled Soviet operator to lower a prisoner's resistance to questioning, and yet leave him with no specific recollections of having been interrogated. With respect to inducing specific action on the part of a subject by hypnotism, it would be possible to brief a prisoner or other individual, subsequently dispatch him on a mission, and successfully debrief him on his return, without his recollection of the whole proceeding." A June 1951 C.I.A.Memo says, "C.I.A. interest is in the specific subject of devising scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals." And so, in the late 1940's some essentially uncontrolled experimentation was begun by various people within the C.I.A., and a more structured programme was also undertaken which had the name Blue Bird, and that name was then changed to Artichoke, and under Projects Blue Bird and Artichoke the attempt was made to bring together all known knowledge of interrogation techniques, truth serums, polygraphs, and hypnosis, to create essentially an elite interrogation team with facility in all of those endeavours, and have them do the work that would be needed, first of all to protect against infiltration by enemy agents, and also to protect the minds of American agents who might get captured by Communist individuals.
Contents
Part 2
Wayne Morris:
We have been in the middle of an extended series on mind control here on the International Connection. This is Week #11, and we have heard so far, if you haven't been listening for the last few months a lecture by Dr. Colin Ross and an interview with him about the U.S. government CIA and military use and creating Manchurian Candidates by creating Multlple Personality Disorder. We also heard testimony given at the Human Radiation Hearings ... survivors of this ... and we also heard the story of Ronald Howard Cohen, writer and activist who was abducted and drugged by CIA military. We are hearing this week, a lecture Part Two of a lecture given by Dr. Alan Scheflin, and this is entitled "The History of Mind Control: What we can prove and what we can't". This was given back in 1995 in Dallas, Texas at a conference and we are going to listen to Part Two today.
Alan Scheflin:
It is not my function here to criticize the Intelligence Agencies or condemn what they have done. I am instead trying to argue the point that the hypnosis community in general and psychologists and psychiatrists as well need to know the data that was produced and still exists in CIA files. If we are going to be accused by the False Memory people of using undue suggestion to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, we need to know the limits of those possibilities and that material is in CIA files. Therapists are being sued across the country. They need access to that information to help defend themselves. And so, it is in the spirit of science and in the spirit of protecting therapists and patients, and for the good of the country, that I present this material so we can hope that the full amount of it is ultimately revealed.
I also must make a caveat. I can only report on information that I have seen, either through my search of CIA files and my interviews with CIA hypnotists and other hypnotists. There may be mistakes in what I present. I cannot correct that unless I have access to all of the material. If I have made a mistake, it is a mistake that comes from not being given the material because I have in good faith worked through the material I have to tell as accurate a story as I know how.
The CIA began experimenting as soon as it was born in the late 1940's. The experimentation in mind and behavior control had already begun in the OSS with hypnosis experiments, truth serums, truth tablets, lethal pills as well as other kinds of experiments, but it was after the Cardinal Josef Mindszenty episode that the CIA began to really become concerned about the possibility of hypnotic coercion. Let me quote to you from a CIA document at the time.
This is a February 10, 1951 CIA top secret memo called 'Defence Against Soviet Medical Interrogation and Espionage Techniques': "Hypnotism has been reported to have been used in some cases by the Soviets as an adjunct to interrogation. It would be possible for a skilled Soviet operator to lower the prisoner's resistance to questioning yet leave him with no specific recollections of having been interrogated. With respect to inducing specific action on the part of the subject by hypnotism, it would be possible to brief a prisoner or other individual, subsequently despatch him on a mission and successfully debrief him on his return, without his recollection of the whole proceeding." A June, 1951 CIA memo says, "CIA interest is in the specific subject of devising scientific methods of controlling the minds of individuals."
In the late 1940's, some essentially uncontrolled experimentation was begun by various people within the CIA, and a more structured program was also undertaken which had the name BLUEBIRD and that name was then changed to ARTICHOKE, and under projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the attempt was made to bring together all known knowledge of interrogation techniques, truth serums, polygraphs and hypnosis to create essentially an elite interrogation team with facility in all of those endeavours, and have them do the work that would be needed. First of all, to protect against infiltration by enemy agents, and also to protect the minds of American agents who might get captured by Communist individuals.
In the early 1950's, Walter Smith, the Director of Central Intelligence in an EYES ONLY MEMO said he wanted to know the issue in order to know the answer to the question, "...whether effective practical techniques exist whereby an individual can be caused to become subservient to an imposed control, and subsequently that individual be unaware of the event." The purpose of the CIA experiments by the early 1950's was to discover the ways to control the minds of individuals. BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE were only one part of it. There were other parts as well.
The CIA's facility in Langley did not exist at that time. They used office buildings throughout the Washington area, and safe houses around the country and throughout the world. Eventually in 1953 we get a new program from the CIA which is the most expansive mind control program in the history of the world. It's genesis begins in 1953 with a speech given by Allen Dulles who was the new CIA Director. In his speech, Dulles said that we were losing control of the battle of the mind, that we were at war with the Soviet Union. He called it brain warfare, and the Soviets possessed knowledge with the United States did not. A top-secret memo two months later in June, 1953 states, "...interrogations of the individuals who had come out of North Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom recently, apparently had experienced a blank period or a period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Manchuria." By 1953 in other words, the notion of the Manchurian Candidates in almost those exact terms, had been theorized by the CIA. I will come back to that point in a moment, but in Dulles' public speech on April 10, 1953 to Princeton Alumni in Hotsprings, West Virginia, he argued we had to do something to make sure we did not lose the war with the Soviet Union. About a week and a half later, he signed into law what was called MKULTRA. Walter Bowart has speculated, and I think it is a good speculation, that the MK stands for Mind Kontrol, and ULTRA was the code name given to breaking the Japanese and German codes, and so this was the code name given to breaking the code of the human mind. MKULTRA was the umbrella for 149 sub-projects. All of them were under the auspices of Sidney Gottlieb, and later directed by his boss, Richard Helms. The 149 sub-projects -- you can read something about this in government documents. This is a project MKULTRA from a Joint Hearing from the United States Senate and some of the material has been made public by the Congress. Other material has not been made public but the existence of MKULTRA is not a secret, and its contours are known to some extent. Another government document explores the same territory. This one is on biomedical and behavioral research by the government.
The goal of all 149 sub-projects was mind and behavior control. Some of them involved botanical. Some of them involved psychosurgery and electrical stimulation of the brain. 9 of the sub-projects involved hypnosis. Some of the sub-projects involved things like voodoo. One of them involved circumcision to create anxiety and then manipulate the anxiety. Almost anything you could think of and things you wouldn't think of were funded and studied. Maybe more one of the more well known studies, and one of the more notorious is the work that was done by Ewen Cameron in Canada. Cameron was the President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association. In his work at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal he had a theory that sounds unique but actually exists in "Brave New World Revisited" and even goes back to the Ancient Greeks -- his notion was that you could completely erase personality by regressing an individual back to an infantile state - process he called de-patterning. Then you could program that individual with a new personality - a process he called psychic driving. In order to destroy the original personality, Cameron put his subjects to sleep for up to two months, injected them with LSD, mescaline and other psychoactive chemicals, and essentially engaged in a form of regression therapy. Age regression may be a hypnotic phenomenon, but in this sense regression was an actual regression. This was the attempt to manipulate people back to a state of infantilism. These were people who came to him who were depressed ... this was the local psychiatric institute. This is where you went when you needed help. One of the people who came to him, I don't have a slide of her, but I have done some TV shows with her, was the wife of a Member of the Canadian Parliament, Val Orlikow was her name. She is dead now. Val had just had a baby and she was suffering from post-partum depression. This meant she didn't feel she was able to care for her baby, or for herself, and in general she was feeling unequal to the task of wifehood and motherhood, and her husband suggested maybe she could benefit from some psychiatric care, and she thought that was a good idea. They made the mistake of winding up going to Ewen Cameron and Cameron destroyed her life. She along with 10 or 11 other people ultimately sued the Canadian government and the CIA because the CIA contributed funding to Cameron's experiments. SIXTY MINUTES did a show on this that I show from time to time. One of the people went there because he was feeling badly, and he went through the same kind of process, and they later discovered he had a minor skin disease and a single shot of cortisone would have cured it. His life was ruined, and as he put it, "Where do I go for help? I don't trust any psychologists, or psychiatrists or therapists any more after what they did to me, and I know I need their help, but I am programmed to not trust them, so where do I go for relief?"
The experiments have been written about in detail in a number of books. This is the least reliable, Gordon Thomas' "Journey Into Madness". Harder to find, a Canadian book "I Swear By Apollo" is more accurate. Perhaps the best of the books is Anne Collins', "In the Sleep Room". In some ways the most compelling and the most, I wouldn't want to say important, but the one that is most emotional perhaps, is Harvey Weinstein's, "A Father, A Son and the CIA". This is the Canadian edition. There is a slightly revised version printed by the American Psychiatric Press, "Psychiatry and the CIA". Harvey's father was one of those people who was depressed and went into the Allen Memorial Institute as a human being and came out as a vegetable. He never did become a whole human being again. Indeed, it was what happened to his father that led Harvey into psychiatry and Harvey's conclusion is something that should be read by everybody in the mental health field. "After all of the knowledge of the CIA experiments, and the Army experiments and Air Force and Navy experiments have come out, after all of what we know ... NOT A SINGLE RESEARCHER HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO A SINGLE LAW SUIT OR EVEN CENSURE BY A PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WORK THAT WAS CLEARLY ILLEGAL AND CLEARLY UNETHICAL, EVEN AT THE TIME. THE MESSAGE MUST BE, IF THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES TO DOING THIS KIND OF WORK, THE WORK WILL CONTINUE." And indeed, this is most likely what has happened. Harvey's conclusion is that if the professional organizations are not going to step up and condemn this kind of experimentation, then it will be repeated and other generations will suffer the horror that his family suffered.
Cameron's experiment was simply considered a part of a series of brainwashing tests to regress people back to this infantile state. Now the Greeks had sleep temples that had a similar focus, but modern technology added to Cameron's work. He used a tape loop. He would interview an individual. You have heard about Erikson's "power words" ... Cameron would use words that were important to his patients, and he would program those words in messages that he would construct on tape loops that would be played into their brain one half a million, to a million to a million and a half times ... in fact these people were quite literally "programmed".
In a state of infantilism Cameron wrote that they could endure sensory deprivation indefinitely, whereas most people would crack in about 8 hours, those people could stay there indefinitely. The psychic driving in which the tape loops were used was the attempt to reconstruct the personality and I wondered where such a fiendish idea would have come from and I found it in a 1951 science fiction novel called "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester, and if you are a science fiction buff I certainly encourage you to find that book and read it. Basically the theory of the novel is that when somebody commits a crime, that shows a certain boldness that society should appreciate, but it's in the wrong direction. What they do is take criminals to the hospital and they regress them back to infantilism and then they re-build a new personality -- exactly the idea that Cameron was working on with his subject had been written about a few years before he began as a science fiction novel. I won't ever know if he had read that novel, but the studies from his work shows that it did not work and indeed it caused a great deal of pain to a great number of people.
The idea of manipulating people with hypnosis in ways that are effective, and in ways that are quite bizarre, was born in the brain of George Estabrooks. Estabrooks, a very interesting character, was working in Morton Prince's laboratory at Harvard in the 1920's and he had the idea that if you could cure a multiple personality with hypnosis, maybe you could create one with hypnosis. Why in the world would anyone want to create a multiple personality? Estabrooks had the solution. You could create then, a super spy or a super assassin, somebody who would do the bidding of his country and have no knowledge that he was engaged in those acts. Estabrooks said in 1928 that "...my views are somewhat different than most psychologists. I believe the hypnotist's power to be unlimited, or rather only to be limited by his intelligence and his scruples." In the 1920's he went around trying to convince the military to create hypnotically controlled individuals, create a multiple personality and use that one as a courier. They thought he was crazy and ignored him until the Moscow Show Trials, and then they took him seriously, and in the archives of his work at Colgate ... there is a notation that he stopped publishing in the mid-1930's because his work had then become classified. If you read his book, this is Morton Prince's "Dissociation of a Personality" ... the classic work on multiple personality ... if you read Estabrooks' book "Hypnotism" through its various editions, what you discover is that each edition is more assertive about the validity of creating hypnotically programmed couriers and finally in an interview he gave in a local Rhode Island newspaper in 1963, he claims that, "... this is not science fiction, it is fact, I have done it." Working for the FBI and the CIA, he would create a multiple personality, program that personality to be a courier, send that personality somewhere in the world have them return and be amnesic for all of that.
The idea may have originated with Estabrooks but he may not have been the first to actually publish it as such. Writing in "The Psychoanalytic Review" of 1947, Major Harvey Leavitt of the U.S. Army Medical Corps described the hypnotic creation of a secondary personality, "... hypnotically induced automatic writing was established early in the course of treatment as a means of expeditiously gaining access to unconscious material. After this procedure as utilized for a time, a hypnotic secondary personality was produced by suggesting that the writing was under control of a certain part of his personality unaware to him." Leavitt then said that he created another personality in direct contrast to the one already established so he could work the two created personalities off against one another. He concluded, "... regardless of whether the production of multiple personalities by means of hypnosis could be construed as additional proof that hypnosis is an artificially induced hysteria or whether the multiple personalities were artificial entities resulting from direct suggestions ... there exists a close relationship with personalities spontaneously arising in hysterical dissociation. The importance of producing multiple personalities experimentally lies in the fact that certain elements of the original personality may be isolated which manifest a minimum of censorship influences and thus may serve as helpful ajuncts in hypno- analysis."
That was not the purpose for the intelligence agencies in working with the idea of creating a multiple personality. The story of the intelligence agencies creating multiple personalities to use as couriers and assassins may have begun with Estabrooks, and indeed in CIA documents you can see Estabrooks' theories worked out and discussed, but the genesis of the work begins in 1951 in the CIA Office of Security where an official named Morris Allen got the idea that CIA agents should be trained in hypnosis and in order to train them in hypnosis, he arranged with them to go up to New York and get training from a stage hypnotist. As soon as he and the agents got to New York, the stage hypnotist spent an hour and a half with them, regaling them with tales of hypnotic seduction - of how when the hypnotist went on the road, the he would sleep with a different woman each night - some of them he would give hypnotic hallucinations that he was their husband, others he would use other techniques - but this was a technique he had found very productive for his own sexual favours. The CIA was of course delighted to hear all of this and reported so in the documents. If he could use the technique to manipulate people that way, this was what they wanted to learn and so that's how they got trained.
Then from 2-3,000 pages of documentation going from 1951 to 1954 - Morse Allen and his group replicated all of the known hypnosis experiments involving people putting their hands in acid or jars of snakes, in shooting people dead, involving the French and Germans - there are all of those experiments American researchers, Estabrooks and others had conducted. But they (CIA) wanted to go further and explore the possibility of using hypnosis to create a programmed courier and a programmed assassin. The multiple personality itself may have come from Jekyll and Hyde which was very popular at the time. Another illustration of that idea in which two entirely different people can be within the same body - one being the embodiment of good, the other the embodiment of evil. It was good fiction, but it also was part of the genesis from Morton Prince's work. {slide: an Italian depiction of multiple personality - you can see the two faces pointing in other directions}
By the 1950's, the popular press was reporting in "The Three Faces of Eve", the existence of multiple personality - the three faces of course were more than three faces - and the final face was not the final face. Eve was Chris Sizemore finally telling the story with her real name and then telling it again in "A Mind of Her Own". Well, her mind may be her own, but her life isn't. She is now suing the film company which claims that the movie, "The Three Faces of Eve", means they own the story of her life. She claims they only own up to the time she had three faces, and that the other faces still belong to her. So she is still not in control of her identity and the fight goes on. [slide: here she is in person}
Sybil was then the next known or highly reported case of multiple personality disorder. Herb Spiegel tells me that Sybil was not a multiple, and that when he treated her in Cornelia Wilbur's absence, that Sybil never had any need to express any other personalities with Herb. Herb admits she was brilliant, and also extremely mentally ill, but that she was not a multiple, and he refused to participate in the writing or publishing of the book if that was the spin they were going to take on her case. On the other hand Herb believes that multiples exist, but that the condition is extremely rare and so people have argued that she was smart enough to know he wouldn't believe it, and therefore smart enough to know to conceal the personalities so the debate goes on.
The use of hypnosis to create multiple personalities and in general for intelligence purposes appears in a number of confidential secret documents just a few of which I will throw up on the screen. Some stories have leaked out about how the CIA hid it, and they didn't tell anybody about it. It's very simple. The CIA explodes the old theory of hypnotic moral curb. They came to the conclusion that people can be induced to do things that would violate their moral codes, and the folklore that you can't get people to do things against their will was simply untrue, and they carried those experiments further in to stud
