Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism

Sunday, January 08 2006 Robert Jay Lifton, MD | UNC Press
E-mail Print

Excerpts from Chapter 22 of Robert Jay Lifton's book,"Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China." Lifton, a psychiatrist and distinguished professor at the City University of New York, has studied the psychology of extremism for decades. He testified at the 1976 bank robbery trial of Patty Hearst about the theory of "coercive persuasion." First published in 1961, his book was reprinted in 1989 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Topics

Milieu Control
Mystical Manipulation
The Demand for Purity
The Cult of Confession
The "Sacred Science"
Loading the Language
Doctrine Over Person
The Dispensing of Existence

< Prev   Next >
 
Twitter CAFETY on YouTube CAFETY on Wikipedia
tumblr_logo

Subscribe to Cafety Newsletter

Register here to receive CAFETY's newsletter.







Areas of Research

CEDU Documentary

Director: Liam Scheff
Surviving Cedu,” tells the story of a half-dozen teenagers who were each sent to the Cedu School, variously described to them as a standard boarding school, a wilderness adventure school, or a therapeutic learning environment in the Western mountains of the United States. But the experience of the school was something entirely different. Students quickly found themselves in a new, strange, uncomfortable and often frightening world of intense group relationships and heightened, invasive and violent group therapies. Relationships at the school between students - and staff - seemed to have little formal structure or sense of normal boundary - and a student’s life was always under threat of intense and unpredictable disciplining and punishment.