‘Ben, it’s a terrible thing to hate your mother’: mind control in Hamlet and The Manchurian Candidate

Summary

In September 1950, a journalist for the Miami News ran a story that staggered the American imagination and intensified the anti-Communist feelings that were fostering the Cold War. Edward Hunter, who was also a CIA agent, warned Americans that post-revolutionary China was using insidious and heretofore unknown psychological techniques to force the Chinese into the Communist Party. He labelled these techniques with the term ‘brainwashing’, a derisive translation of the Chinese his-nao, which literally means ‘to cleanse the mind’. Hunter’s theories not only reached a receptive audience, but were also quickly verified by other experts, who described similar techniques in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union . Americans were alerted to the possibility that the Communists had ‘cracked the brain’s code’ and were capable not only of controlling but of changing the will of their fellow citizens. Psychologist Joost Meerloo, a Dutch émigré from Nazi-occupied Holland, warned in his 1956 book Rape of the Mind that brainwashing techniques, which he dubbed with the far more sinister appellation menticide, were being used on an unsuspecting American public:

It is now technically possible to bring the human mind into a condition of enslavement and submission ... the totalitarians [Meerloo’s euphemism for any Communist government] ... influence the mind so slowly and indirectly that we may not even realize what they have done to us.

The reaction of Americans was rather spectacular. Quite rapidly, a panic over the threat of brainwashing spread throughout the country. Americans had already been conditioned to fear nuclear war, but the imagined loss of cherished American autonomy and free will was even more terrifying. Brainwashing embodied cultural fears of losing control and Meerloo’s paradigm for menticide became America’s paradigm for anxiety.