Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject

Abstract

Edward Hunter, the man popularly credited with coining the term brainwashing , had a deep appreciation of the power of his new construct. In his book on this new form of mind control, first published in 1951 and then expanded on in 1956, he referred often to the “eerie sensation” this term inspired in him. 1 Many Americans shared this sensation in the first decade of the Cold War. The fear and fascination surrounding the term brainwashing presumably stemmed from the conviction that in this uncanny phenomenon the totalitarian enemy revealed its true face. If a name was needed to accompany that face, Hunter supplied that as well. The ultimate source of the “eerie sensation” emanating from behind the Iron Curtain was identified by Hunter as Ivan Pavlov, the Nobel Prize‐winning scientist and inventor of the methods the Soviets and their allies were allegedly employing on American prisoners of war (POWs) in Korea, on prominent dissidents in Eastern bloc coun tries, and on a mass scale on their own citizens. Hunter saw evidence of a deep connection between the POW camps and Pavlov’s experiments on reflex condition ing, and he furthermore claimed that the “Chinese, as a race, are undergoing mind treatment inside a Great Pavlovian Wall.” 2 From the start the problems both with Hunter’s account of brainwashing and with his picture of Pavlov as the mastermind behind it were readily apparent. Not the least of these was that Pavlov had never been a Bolshevik, and his most impor tant research had been carried out before the Bolsheviks came to power. The exact nature of the relation between Pavlovian conditioning and brainwashing was also problematic, as was, some skeptics suggested, the entire concept of brainwashing. Despite such skepticism, Hunter’s construct proved remarkably resilient—attesting not just to the skill with which the journalist and intelligence operative had woven his account but also to the degree to which it tapped into deep undercurrents of anxiety in the contemporary public. Joost Meerloo, a Dutch psychiatrist who taught