Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War

Abstract

In the winter of 1960‐1961, Los Angeles newspapers were filled with the story of a young man who had committed a series of murders—acts that were apparently set in motion each time he saw a particular series of images. This was not Richard Condon’s famous character Raymond Shaw, whose fictional story was very much in the press. The protagonist was Henry Adolph Busch, a real LA serial killer. However, his defense—that his actions had been carried out in a trance created by the images he had seen—echoed plot elements of both The Manchurian Candidate and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho . He claimed that the shower scene in Psycho had triggered each of his several killings. 1 Altered mental states continued to figure in the story after Busch was arrested, when his lawyer hired a prominent expert in “forensic hypnosis.” This technique trawled a witness’s mind for hitherto inaccessible records of the past in order to secure information either about a witness’s behavior or state of mind. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, forensic hypnosis grew from a little-known oddity into a fashionable extension of police work. At its peak, many police, lawyers, psy chotherapists, witnesses, and defendants came to see hypnosis as a golden key to the past. This essay reconstructs the history of forensic hypnosis, arguing that it has surprising implications for the history of mind, memory, and behavior as scientific objects during the Cold War. The 1950s and 1960s saw intense anxieties about prac tices with immense power over human perception, motivation, memory, and behavior. Psychology occupied a central place in Cold War anxieties about scientific tech niques that could be used for political purposes, and hypnosis was often center stage in the fears people expressed. Hypnosis turned up in descriptions of Communist projects to take over American minds, in accounts of American marketing “per suaders” working their subtle influence in public spaces, and in governmentsponsored projects such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) MK-ULTRA program. But along with worries about the dangers of mind- altering practices came