This talk will be held virtually. Registration required.
ICLS Psychoanalytic Studies Program
Captive minds? Psychoanalytic thought, politics, and hidden persuasion in the post-war ‘Free World.’
A talk with Daniel Pick.
This event will be held virtually on October 19, 2022. Registration is required and can be found here.
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’.
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.
Discussant: Ben Kafka, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychoanalyst on the faculty of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and the faculty of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York (IPTAR) . In 2022-23 he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Dewitt-Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Author of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012), he is currently working on a book about the interpersonal and organizational dynamics that drive us crazy.
