Psychoanalysis and American intelligence since 1940

Abstract

This chapter aims to optimize intelligence interrogation techniques and evaluate so-called 'brainwashing' methods by communist-ruled countries. Two decades later another world war renewed the need for qualified medical personnel to deal with the vast numbers of military casualties whose ailments had been re-named by military psychiatrists as 'war neuroses'. This time psychoanalytically oriented expertise and treatment techniques were much sought after and a number of psychoanalysts were appointed to high-ranking senior positions within the armed forces. From 1940 various psychoanalysts in the United States began to collaborate with the US Intelligence Community (IC). Largely funded by intelligence agencies and branches of the military services from the early 1950s to mid 1970s, medical and psychological research projects also combined drug research with studies of sensory deprivation, isolation, hypnosis and stress. In 1940, almost two years before the United States entered the war, various proponents of Freudian psychoanalysis were developing collaborations with US intelligence in order to combat Nazism.