Brainwashed

In an era of Cold War paranoia and experimentation on ‘altered states’, the idea of brainwashing flourished, appearing in everything from critiques of CIA research on LSD to warnings of corporate groupthink, from visions of automaton assassins to conspiracy theories about ‘global elites’. Today, brainwashing is almost taken for granted – built into our psychological and political language, rooted in the way we think about minds and societies. How did we get to this point – and why? Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick delves into the mysterious world of brainwashing in the 20th and 21st centuries, from ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ to ISIS, TV advertising to online algorithms.