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‘Brainwashed’ is an eye-catching term, conjuring images from science fiction and the most paranoid of Cold War propaganda. In the twenty-first century, we might laugh away the idea of a brain being fully ‘washed’ of its previous commitments, reprogrammed to destroy American democracy at the behest of communist villains. In Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control, psychoanalysthistorian Daniel Pick destabilizes this comforting dismissal of brainwashing, complicating the dichotomy between the brainwashed and non-brainwashed subject. After all, no one’s thoughts are entirely their own; our environment, education, upbringing and social milieu shape our minds. Why do we think what we think? Do we make our own choices, or do we succumb to the pressures of advertising, propaganda and groupthink? Does the psychoanalyst subtly bend the patient to their will? In other words, how can we ever be sure we are not ‘brainwashed’?
Brainwashed addresses these questions by offering an exciting cultural history of mind control during the Cold War and beyond. The book stems from Pick’s work leading the ‘Hidden Persuaders’ research group, sponsored by a Senior Investigator Award from the Wellcome Trust in the UK (p. 285). Building on this collaborative work, Pick has produced a work of public-facing scholarship that speaks to both academic and popular audiences. Brainwashed will be valuable to academics interested in media studies and the cultural history of psychology in the twentieth century, as well as non-academics interested in what it means to think in the modern world. It includes descriptive bibliographic notes and a detailed index. As a psychoanalyst, Pick is interested in understanding why we think what we think; as a cultural historian, he is careful to attend to the emergence of brainwashing as a historical phenomenon. Pick argues that brainwashing can be located on a spectrum with other post-war anxieties about the human mind, especially around advertising and political