Customer Reviews

Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book may date from 1961, but it continues to be an essential work for understanding the techniques of mind control that continue to be utilized by authoritarian governments as well as by destructive cults. Those who have been watching with horror the crackdown by the Communist Chinese government on the peaceful falun gong religious sect will recognize in Lifton's book the same tyrannical mindset as it operated at its origins. Obviously, not much has changed in 40 years. Especially worthwhile in this book is the description of the eight conditions underlying any thought reform program. "Milieu control", for example, is the imposition of an entire controlling environment that permits a person no unapproved interactions, no free time, and no access to unapproved information. "Doctrine over person" is a state of affairs where, in any situation where ideology is contradicted by real experience, the ideology, not the experience, is believed. This can lead to a situation where a fictitious construct -- "the People" -- is defined differently from that of real people, who are not considered to be "real" people if their experience differs from ideology. Lifton calls this viewpoint "dispensing of existence." Cult survivors such as myself (a former 10-year member of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church) will recognize these and the other conditions Lifton enumerates.

Upon seeing the review below, from the reader in Rio de Janeiro, I had to write my own thoughts and share them. As a former cult member myself and current volunteer in anti-cult activism, I can personally attest that what Dr. Lifton wrote about concerning destructive groups and mind control absolutely exists. The famous chapter 22, where Dr. Lifton lays out the famous "eight criteria", to me isn't a chapter in a book but how my adolescense was in this particular group. It's true; it exists. The reader from Rio said that mind control was a failure; well, ultimately, yes it is, total control over a person's mind isn't 100%, and won't last forever. However, individuals and destructive groups (cults) know how to exploit mind control techniques to allow them control over a person's thoughts and actions long enough to get that person to do what they want, and often when people leave cults they suffer psychological damages for years afterward. This is also not about West superior over East; Dr. Lifton also chronicled how many Chinese were hurt by the mind control imposed by the Communists. All in all, this is a terrific book about mind control and its damaging effects; I highly recommend it.

This book has created a lot of controversies envolving new religious movements. Although it describes a research made with POWs e somes Chinese intellectuals, it has been frequently used attacks against some new religious movements.

The concept "brainwashing" first came into public use during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs defected to the Communists. The two most authoritative studies of the Korean War defections (and this book was one of them) concluded that "brainwashing" was an inappropriate concept to account for this renunciation of U.S. citizenship. When several new religious came into high profile during the youth counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s the concept "brainwashing" was again employed as a culturally acceptable explanation to account for the fact that some idealistic "flower children" came under the influence of "cult" leaders. A quarter-of-a-century of scholarly research on why people join new religions has come to essentially the same conclusion as the Korean War studies -- "brainwashing" is not a viable concept to describe the dynamics of affiliation with new religions. Defenders of "brainwashing" have used other concepts like "mind control" and "thought reform," but they have failed to produce a scholarly literature to support their claims. Thus, whatever euphemisms may be employed, the basic conclusion against the brainwashing thesis is not altered. Still, the mass media continues to report claims of "brainwashing" as if the alleged phenomenon were real. And, as a result, the concept "brainwashing" sustains considerable currency in popular culture. It is, to be sure, a powerful metaphor. "Brainwashing" communicates disapproval of influence by persons, or groups, the user of the term considers to be illegitimate. If you want to understand the origins of the concept, read Lifton's work. Just take care to not get caught by the "cult mind control" rhetoric.

Many who have written reviews here obviously are in a defensive stance in regard to some personal feelings about new religions.
Lifton in this book does not write about new religions per say but he does consider the Chinese cultural revolution as a mass country wide cult situation. One that was so successfull by the way that millions of poeple starved to death simply because they were told to stop doing agriculture. Thiis book is case studies of both westerners in prison and some about average chinese that simply went to thought reform "classes" and were never coerced physically. He has written many other books and they should be taken as a whole. He also considers the Nazi Germany episode as a mass national cult. He also deals in other books with much small thought reform cults such as the new age Aum Shinrikyo.new age Heavens Gate, new age Charles Manson, Jim Jones etc. Lifton also, in another book, deals with the mass cultic national insanity of the United States in our creation and stockpiling of omnicidal weapons. Lifton also points out the underlying new ageism of Nazi Germany. In essence China was also involved in this type of "new era" thinking.
Lifton is an important thinker and an activist whose greatest contribution to neofreudian concepts is his ideas about "desymbolization".
Desymbolization is the underlying mental illness that leaves modern humans vulnerable to thought reform. In this book he does not talk about desymbolization but there is an excelent chapter about totalism that can serve as a template for understanding "new thought" and "new age" religions and how limiting and destructive they can be for individuals and society as a whole.
To answer the people who seem afraid of these books as an attack on themselves. Lifton's books are meant as a call not to attack totalistic new thought movements although they need to be seen for what they are. But rather his call is to heal our world so that the psychological conditions that are currently present in modern societies that gives rise to totalistic movements can be corrected. Chapter 23 of this particular book is about a model for human change that can be open minded and not totalistic and can value human differences instead of trying to create some type of cultic "unity". Nothing could be more positive.

This book divides the population studied into western and eastern groups and then creates subgroups based upon personal history and reactions to thought reform. The book reads very much like a series of case studies.

I had to read this book for a class. It was really thorough and I learned a lot from it. It was an interesting topic but sometimes it got slow or dull. It's a fairly long book so it takes quite some time to get through it but it's worth it. It's such an interesting topic and Lifton is a good writer.

Lifton provides content and commentary regarding attempts by the People's Republic of China to 're-educate' Westerners and citizens according to Communist ideology. Actual contents of his one-on-one interviews are particularly useful, as are Lifton's evaluations of the effects and causes of 're-education'.

Lifton's principal shortcoming is the overarching psychotherapeutic interpretations, which sometimes stretch the imagination.

Lifton's book is often misunderstood and misrepresented as a polemic against 'brainwashing' and religious 'cultism'. 'Brainwashing' usually means the hypnotic manipulation of one's thoughts forcing someone to change their beliefs counter to their awareness or conscious will; Lifton denies emphatically that this happened in China or that it can happen. It appears that many who cite his work (and some of the reviewers here) have never read the book, other than through excerpts and summaries.

Lifton himself admits that 'brainwashing' is a misnomer; he denies that 're-education' was effective or that it converted people against their will. Furthermore, he argues that the principal difference between Chinese methods of thought-reform and normal, usual persuasion is the Chinese use of physical violence and imprisonment.

Lifton never intended for his book to be used by the anti-cult industry to attack religious non-orthodoxy and constitutionally guaranteed religious expression.

As I said before, this book is very misunderstood. People likes to use it to support their own ideas about "brainwashing" and "mind control", and sometimes they forget and old-age word that describes well the same thing without any "mind control theory": fanaticism. But there is no fanaticism without fanatics who want to believe, just believe and nothing more. People who need a simplistic vision of the world, some attention and love and will do anything for that. They just want to be guided, no matter whether by Hitler or Jesus.

There are people who join the cults and leave spontaneously a few years later. It's a fact. It's just a step in their spiritual journey. But there are also some of them who prefer to say that the years spent in the cult were the result of very effective "brainwashing"/"mind control" techniques, which turned them into some kind of religious zombie. They say they were not responsible for what they did, for what they believed, and that all the guilt should go to the cult leader. But, if this were true, how could all the others leave the cult without deep traumas, deprogramming etc.? If the author, Robert Jay Lifton himself, did recognize that physical coercion was a key-point to his totalist model and that no one of his samples did not really adhere to the Communists ideas (i.e., the Chinese program was a failure), what else is to be said? And even if Lifton had discovered that brainwashing exists (and he did not), why 99% of the other scientists who investigated the issue have not detected it in the cult dynamics? What "mind control science" is this that is essentially based on just one book with an inconclusive research and some few late sensationalists "researchers" (e.g. Singer, Hassan) whose methods and theories are not recognized by the scientific community? Is this science or a modern myth with a pseudo-scientific support?

If you like Psychology and is interested in the cult issue, read this book. It's an important work. But read it entirely, whithout pre-judgements, and compare with other scientific works about "mind control". It is worth the effort.

Lifton's work here is an excellent effort to understand the ideological manipulation of the Chinese Communists.
Although the researches on those individual "victims" are thorough, however, these are only other facets of the polyhedron of the "brainwashing".

Surprisingly unknown to the Westernworld, but there is the salient fact of very successful cases of "brainwashing" in China and Japan which had, and still has, a devastating effect in terms of the issues of post war compensation between China and Japan.

One case that represents the "brainwashing" against the Manchus is of their Last Emperor, Pu-Yi.
You can read and see some glimpses of his experience of the "thought reform" in books such as "From Emperor to Citizen", his Communist authorised autobiography, and in the film "The Last Emperor", so I leave it to your option.

Another is a completely untold (to the Westerners) story of former Japanese Imperial Army soldiers.

Followings are excerpts of the accounts of two Chinese officials, one of them worked for Mao Tse-tung as an interpreter for 18 years. They appear in a special feature issue of the Japanese left-wing magazine called "Sekai" (May, 1998), on the cofession papers of soldiers mentioned above, that "found" in China by a Japanese photo-jounalist, who also interviewed the two Chinese officials.

In July 1950, by the direct order from Stalin, 969 Japanese soldiers were transferred from Siberia, where those soldiers had been kept for slave labour suffering from starvation and despair for 6 years after war ended, to Fushun (Fuxuan) War Criminal Camp, in China, where, by the way, Pu-Yi was also transferred to at the same period.
At this point, the soldiers' mental health had already been deteriorating.

Unlike the people whose experiences were cited in this Lifton book, the Japanese, as well as the Manchus, received no phisical violence. Instead, they were treated rather too well for their status of "war felons".
It was Premier Chou En-lai himself who had given such instruction in which the camp authority were ordered to treat the Japanese and the Manchus especially well.
Because panishing the "criminals" was not their aim. Releasing them as ideological advocates was.

In a few years, their "reform" were gradually, yet steadily progressing.

The first stage of the "reform" is: Self-consciousness of the guilt.
After the unsuccessful military campaign of the U.S.A. in the Korean War, the Japanese soldiers' hopes of being rescued by the U.S. Army was dashed, and as if they were clutching at straws, they became absorbed by reading Marx's works and Japanese proletarian literatures. Those intense reading and study of communism in groups made the "Imperialist" soldiers re-think their righteousness little by little.

Then, came a significant breakthrough when a Japanese officer did "Tan-pai" (Chinese word for "to recognise and to criticise one's own guilt, and to cofess them) in front of the whole Japanese inmates. A "confessions" of a soldier triggered everyone's "confessions" as if it was competition.

The inmates soon realised that the more barbaric crimes they confessed, the more the camp leaders were pleased for their "honesty" and they even mentioned their early release. Thus the gruesomeness of their atrocities escarated on and on... They called this movement as "creative study".

As the Chinese authority planned, all Japanese "war criminals", who "confessed" their terrible crimes such as "Three All campaign" (Kill all, Burn all, Rape all) and numerous massacres including "Nanking Massacre", were released and back to Japan where they formed "Association of the Soldiers Returned from China" and many of them still stick together to this day and are actively working as anti-Japanese Imperialism advocates.

Like Father Luca Lifton mentioned in this book, the Japanese soldiers are still in a state of confusion. They cannot distinguish the reality from their own creations.
And left-wingers who have used them in their anti-nationalist campaign just not allow them to realise that they were "brainwashed".

Maybe it it the communists themselves who were "brainwashed" by their own thought that if they are against the communism they would fall down to some "interectual hell", just like the members of the cult "Aum shinrikyo" who attacked Tokyo with sarin gas in 1995 believed.

Many people related to the "Anti-Cult Movement" loves to quote chapter 22 of this book, where Lifton describes what he calls a "totalist environment" based on interviews with a heavily biased sample of only 40 people (including POWs) after the Korean War. The idea was "How could someone defect the Western way of life and choose other? There must be something very wrong here." His investigation was about induced changes in one's behaviour and thought patterns through physical coercion, maltreatment and peer pressure (the so called "brainwashing"). Unfortunately, almost everyone who quotes it as a "seminal book about mind control" forgets to read the other chapters, too. There, Lifton warns against taking brainwashing "as än all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, *irresponsible accusation*, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism." The conclusion is what anti-cult paranoids do not tell their readers: Lifton says the Chinese "brainwashing" program was a FAILURE and even his totalistic model could only have some effect through *physical* coercion. So, where is the intellectual honesty of the "researchers" who use this book as a "proof" of cultic "magical and irresistible" threat against families? If you are interested in the cult controversy and "mind control", take a look at this book. But, please, read it ENTIRELY and use some other academic literature (some of which can be found online in sites about New Religious Movements). The world does not need more extremism and paranoia as the Anti-Cult Movement and self-appointed specialists try to spread.