http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/fwordpreview.htm#chapter%2030
from Understanding the “F”
Word: American Fascism and the
Politics of Illusion, David McGowan
Lies My Psychology Professors Taught
Me
[New] technologies are
conditioning a growing segment of the society to regard all deviance as sickness
and to accept increasingly narrow standards of acceptable behavior as scientifically normative ... Together the new
programs and technologies are part of a burgeoning establishment involving
welfare institutions, universities, hospitals, the drug industry, government at
all levels, and organized psychiatry (itself in large part a creation of
government) ... The ideal, in the view of the behaviorists, is the paranoid's dream, a method so smooth
that no one will know his behavior is being
manipulated and against which no resistance is therefore possible ... There is
no longer a set of impositions which he can regard as unjust or capricious and
against which he can dream of rebelling. To entertain such
dreams would be madness. Gradually, even the ability to imagine alternatives
begins to fade. This is, after all, not only the best of all possible worlds; it
is the only one.
Peter Schrag Mind Control, Pantheon, 1978
I have a degree in psychology from UCLA. I don't know exactly where it is, though I'm sure it's safely
filed away somewhere. It's not really worth much
though. I don't mean that it doesn't have much value in
the job market, though that is surely the case. No, it isn't worth much because it was awarded to me on the
supposition that I had gained a substantial level of knowledge about the field
of psychology, which in hindsight was clearly a faulty premise.
It's not
that I didn't try to learn. I actually did a very good job of regurgitating back
the information that was presented to me, even
graduating with honors. No, the problem was that -
despite the exalted reputation of the UCLA psychology department - none of my
professors seemed to be particularly interested in teaching me what psychology
is really about.
I have a much better
understanding now, though I had to fill in many of the gaps in my education on
my own. Doing so, by the way, took considerably less time than the four years I
spent being spoon-fed pseudo-knowledge at college. Society doesn't place any value on the acquisition of such knowledge
however, so I don't have any kind of degree for my post-college education.
Nevertheless, I thought I'd pass along some of the
information that I wasn't formally taught, for whatever it's worth.
One thing I was taught was that
John Watson is a much revered figure in the field of
psychology, considered the father of 'behaviorism.'
Watson, who began his career in 1908 as a professor of psychology and the
director of the psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, was
perhaps most notable for venturing into the field of infant study in 1918 - at
the time a largely unexplored area of research.
Watson conditioned a fear
response in an infant identified only as 'Little Albert,' afterwards
triumphantly declaring that "men are built, not born."
Ten years later, Watson penned what was at the time considered the bible of
child-rearing, Psychological Care of Infant and Child,
assuming the mantle that would later be worn by Dr. Spock.
Unfortunately, there are a couple
of elements of this story that seem to have been omitted from my textbooks, one
of which is that Little Albert was not just some random infant; he was, in fact,
the illegitimate son of the good doctor himself. And
how did the reigning expert on childcare fare as a father? Not too well, it
seems: Albert Watson was so traumatized by his
upbringing at the hands of his father that he committed suicide shortly after
reaching adulthood.
Watson had
long since left his position at Johns Hopkins amidst a nasty divorce from his
first wife, presumably precipitated by her displeasure with the revelation that
Watson's experiments had included impregnating his nurse and torturing their
resultant offspring. In 1921, Watson headed for Madison Avenue where he put the
behavior modification expertise he had acquired by
traumatizing infants to work on a society-wide level, ushering in the era of
modern propaganda (oops, I meant to say advertising). Along the way, he would
find
Following closely in the
footsteps of Dr. Watson was B.F. Skinner, the other revered figure in the behaviorist school of psychology. Skinner - who had received
a defense grant during World War II to study the
training of pigeons for use as part of an early missile guidance system (I don't
just make this shit up) - invented what he termed the 'Air Crib' in 1945, which
was essentially a sensory deprivation chamber built specifically for infants.
Like Watson, he used his own
child as a human guinea pig, raising her in the thermostatically controlled,
sound-proof isolation chamber for the first two years
of her life, cut off from human contact. Skinner ultimately followed a bit too
closely in the footsteps of his mentor; Debby Skinner, like Albert Watson,
committed suicide in her twenties.
In 1948, Skinner joined the
faculty of Harvard, putting him in the company of such luminaries as Dr. Martin
Orne, the head of the Office of Naval Research’s
Committee on Hypnosis and later a prominent member of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation. Skinner and Orne - as well as numerous
others at Harvard, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert - received heavy
funding from both the CIA and the U.S. Army.
In 1971, Skinner published an
unabashedly fascistic diatribe entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, advocating a
dystopian society in which freedom and dignity were
outmoded concepts. It earned him a cover story in Time magazine and the honor of having his work named the most important book of
the year by the New York Times.
Also on board at Harvard at the time was Dr. Henry Murray, overseeing the work
of Leary's Psychedelic Drug Research Program and various other CIA-funded
projects. So deified was this man during my years at UCLA that an entire
undergraduate course focused almost exclusively on his supposedly brilliant
work. Yet during that course, no mention was ever made of the fact that
Perhaps even more revered than
If you're wondering how it is possible to study the conditioning
of soldiers to survive torture without inflicting that very same torture in the
process, the answer is simple: it isn't. A few years later, West achieved a
moment of fame when he injected a beloved elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with
a massive 300,00 microgram dose of LSD to observe how
it would react; Tusko's reaction was to promptly drop
dead.
In 1964, West was called
upon to evaluate the 'mental state' of a man by the name of Jack Ruby, at the
time being held pending trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. West quickly
determined that Ruby was delusional, based on his obviously absurd belief that
there was some sort of fascist conspiracy behind the assassination of President
Kennedy. Dr. Jolly, as he was known to colleagues,
ordered Ruby drugged with 'happy pills.' Ruby subsequently died of cancer, which
he maintained he had been deliberately infected with.
Having finished up that assignment, the doctor soon after found himself a
crash-pad in the Haight where he could 'observe' the
acid subculture in its native environment by drugging unwitting 'subjects.'
West is probably most notorious
for proposing in 1972 to then California Governor Ronald Reagan the creation of
a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, to
be built on a remote abandoned missile test site in the
At the time, the two were employed at 'detention
centers' in Paraguay and Chile, which is a nice way of
saying that they were working at torture/interrogation centers run by Nazi exile communities (many of these
detention centers - including the notorious Colonia Dignidad in Chile - still
exist to this day).
Also
recruited by West was Dr. Frank Ervin, one of a trio of Harvard psychosurgeons
who had not long before proposed lobotomy as the solution to urban 'rioting'.
The center was to work in conjunction with
The goal of the center was to identify 'predelinquents' and treat them before their 'deviance' and
supposed propensity for violence could be manifest. The team believed that predelinquents could be identified on the
basis of several factors: socioeconomic status (poor), age (young),
ethnicity (black), and sex (males). Treatments under consideration included
electroshock, chemical castration, experimental drug therapy, and psychosurgery
-- better known as lobotomy (the 'surgical' destruction of the frontal lobes of
the brain).
Lobotomy was, curiously enough, developed in fascist
By the post-war years,
lobotomy was big business, warmly embraced by the Veteran's Administration and
heartily recommended for vets suffering from combat-related 'disorders.' Moniz's procedure did not prove too popular with his
patients however. In 1939 he was shot and partially
paralyzed by a former patient. Sixteen years later,
another former patient finished the job, beating Nobel laureate Moniz to death.
Electro-shock therapy was
likewise an import from fascist
One name that never came up in my
years at UCLA was that of the aforementioned Dr. David Ewen Cameron. Considering that Cameron is probably the most
honored North American psychiatrist of the last
half-century, this appears in retrospect a rather remarkable omission. During
his career, Cameron founded the Canadian Mental Health Association and served as
chairman of the Canadian Scientific Planning Committee,
president of the American Psychiatric Association, president of the Canadian
Psychiatric Association, and the first president of the World Association of
Psychiatrists. He was also the psychiatrist most thoroughly co-opted by
His intelligence career began at
least as early as 1941, when he was sent by Allen
Dulles to
By 1943, Cameron had founded the
Allan Memorial Institute in
In 1946, Cameron helped craft the
Nuremberg Code on medical research, setting ethical guidelines for human
research that were perhaps nowhere more flagrantly
ignored than at his own Institute. Cameron's MK-ULTRA operation conducted
what were undoubtedly among the most appalling of the CIA-funded mind control
experiments (those that are well documented, anyway), utilizing what he
euphemistically termed 'depatterning' and 'psychic
driving.'
During the depatterning phase, the objective was to
completely obliterate the existing personality. This was done by
restraining the victims (oops, I meant patients) for weeks on end and subjecting
them to massive doses of drugs and repeated electroshock treatments. Cameron
preferred the Page-Russell electroshock technique - controversial even among the
shock docs of the time - which employed six consecutive
shocks rather than just one big jolt. This wasn't quite
enough for Cameron though, so he cranked up the power to as much as twenty times
the normal strength, and administered the 'treatment' two or three times a day.
Concurrently given three times a day were drug cocktails containing every
combination of incapacitating and mind-altering drug imaginable.
Following some two months of this medical torture, patients were then subjected
to psychic driving, during which they were again incapacitated by drugs -
including curare, a paralyzing agent which can be lethal - while taped messages were played
continuously through speakers placed in pillows or in helmets the unfortunate
victims were forced to wear. This also went on for weeks on end, with the
subjects remaining drug-addled throughout the process. Cameron experimented with
other techniques as well, including psychosurgery and the extensive use of LSD;
one woman was kept locked in a small box for thirty-five consecutive days.
In 1960, Cameron was asked by Allen Dulles to evaluate the mental state of U-2
pilot Francis Gary Powers upon his return from the
Premier spymaster William
Buckley took the agency’s file on Lumumba to
Working with Cameron on his
experiments - some of which are believed by some
researchers to have been terminal - were Leonard Rubenstein, an Englishman and
former member of the British Army’s Royal Signal Corp, and Jan Zielinski, a
Polish-born engineer who knew only limited English and rarely spoke. These two
built a 'grid room' and an isolation chamber in the basement of Allan Memorial
and were given unlimited access to patients, despite the fact that neither had any formal medical training or qualifications.
Also on board was Dr. Hassam
Azima - rumored to be a
blood relative of the U.S.-installed Shah of Iran - and Dr. Wilder Penfield, a
prominent neurologist.
Penfield
was one of the pioneers in the field of electromagnetic control of the brain in
the 1960's. Most prominent in this area of research was Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, who made the front page of the New York Times
when one of his remote-controlled brain implants stopped a charging bull dead in
its tracks. Delgado - who brought his ideas here from fascist
In his
Orwellian titled book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, Delgado wrote that "the integration
of neurophysiological and psychological principles
[would lead] to a more intelligent education, starting from the moment of birth
and continuing throughout life, with the preconceived plan of escaping from the
blind forces of chance and of influencing cerebral mechanisms and mental
structure in order to create a future man with greater personal freedom and
originality, a member of a psychocivilized society,
happier, less destructive, and better balanced than present man."
He supported the mass
drugging of
Delgado also made the rather
remarkable observation that: "In some old plantations slaves behaved very well,
worked hard, were submissive to their masters, and were probably happier than
some of the free blacks in modern ghettos." Ahh, the good old days.
Delgado next noted that: "In several dictatorial
countries the general population is skillful,
productive, well behaved, and perhaps as happy as those in more democratic
societies."
Five years after
penning his manifesto, Delgado appeared before the U.S. Congress and proclaimed: "We need a program of psychosurgery for political
control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone
who deviates from the given norm can be surgically
mutilated ... The individual may think that the most important reality is
his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks
historical perspective ... Man does not have the right to develop his own mind." Such talk earned Delgado funding from the
Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and
the Public Health Foundation of Boston.
********************
What has been covered here barely scratches the surface of the
lies and omissions that characterized my education in the field of psychology.
There is considerably more that could be said on the
subject. I could mention, for instance, that two of the most widely referenced
psychological studies - Philip Zimbardo's Stanford
Prison experiment and Stanley Milgram's obedience
studies - were funded by, and performed at the request of, U.S. military and
intelligence services.
I could also mention that the National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH) - created in 1946 by the congressional National Mental Health Act - was
borne of the combined efforts of Robert H. Felix (head of the military's
Division of Mental Hygiene during World War II), General Lewis Hershey (director
of the Selective Service System), and the chief psychiatrists of the Army and
the Navy. In fact, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders - the bible of modern psychiatry - was also an invention of the
military/intelligence complex, developed during World War II by Brigadier
General William Menninger to codify 'deviant' behavior, and later institutionalized by the APA.
And of course I would be remiss were I not to note that the
twin pillars of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, were both fascist
sympathizers. In 1933 - the year that Adolf Hitler and
the Nazi Party ascended to power - Germany’s influential Journal of
Psychotherapy published an article by Dr. M.H. Goering, a cousin of Hermann Goering, urging psychotherapists to make "a serious
scientific study of Adolf Hitler’s fundamental work
Mein Kampf, and to recognize
it as a basic work." The editor of the journal openly calling for the Nazification of psychotherapy was Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.
Sigmund Freud had close ties to
the Reich as well, particularly to a man named George Viereck - the illegitimate grandson of the Kaiser who had
ties to SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and was perhaps the most avid supporter of Nazism in
In 1926, Viereck interviewed Freud - whom he had known for many years
- on the subject of anti-Semitism, and in 1930 published that interview in a
collection entitled Glimpses of the Great. Freud would later state that: "I can highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." And since wherever Nazis congregate,
What then is this thing
we call 'psychology'? Put in the simplest possible terms, it is just another
appendage of the national security infrastructure designed to attain social
control and enforce conformity to the fascist state. It in fact is nearly
indistinguishable from the American criminal justice/penal system. There is at
least one major difference though - the psychiatrist is allowed to serve as
prosecutor, judge and jury in seeking the involuntary confinement of 'deviants'
in mental institutions that are indiscernible in form and function from
America's rapidly growing prison complex.
The harsh reality is that
psychology has little to do with bettering the human condition and alleviating
suffering, and everything to do with lending legitimacy to the corporate
capitalist state and justifying as individual failings the ever increasing levels of suffering inflicted by the state
onto society. As Frederick Winslow Taylor - the exalted father of 'scientific
management,' an early euphemism for the deskilling of labor and the reduction of the American labor force to interchangeable, easily exploited automatons
- so succinctly stated many decades ago: "in the past the man had been first; in
the future the system must be first."
Not long ago, my teenage daughter
asked me why it was that so many people she has met in her life suffer from low
self-esteem. Why indeed? The answer, it turns out, is
quite simple: we are all victims of one of the big lies of American society -
the one that says that if we educate ourselves, work hard, and
apply our talents, there is absolutely nothing we cannot achieve.
We
are taught from birth that anyone in this great country can rise up to the
highest strata of society if they so choose, that if we have the drive and
ability, nothing can hold us back. George W. Bush articulated this very message
from the campaign trail recently when he said: "One of
the wonderful things about
Conversely, if we should fail we have no one but ourselves to blame, for we must
not be smart enough, talented enough, or educated enough - or we just didn't try hard enough. The brutal reality
though is that in the real world, the sons of the rich and powerful will assume
their fathers' seats in the boardrooms of America regardless of their
qualifications (George, Jr. being a prime example),
while the most talented of kids from America's 'inner cities' will live and die
without ever seeing the world beyond the confines of their neighborhoods.
That is the reality for the
majority of Americans. And yet we are encouraged, in
fact required, to set goals for ourselves that are impossible to attain, to buy
into the Big Lie. When we inevitably fail to achieve these goals, which the
social structure has deliberately put out of our reach, we are required to blame
only ourselves. The system has not failed you, you have
failed because you are a fucking loser. You're too
fucking lazy to succeed. You're too fucking stupid to
succeed. So stop looking for scapegoats and accept the fact that you determine
your own fate.
That is what the
system would have you believe. And it is, in the final
analysis, the psychologist's primary job to reinforce that message. That is why
it is that the nation that heralds itself as the truest form of 'democracy' is
home to more psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, social workers, and psychic friends than any
nation in the world. Not coincidentally, that same nation is also home to the
world's largest penal system. That, apparently, is the price we pay for
'freedom' in this country, a peculiar kind of freedom that does not include the
right to engage in any sort of 'deviant' behavior.
Freedom of that type, it seems,
could conceivably pose a threat to the powers that be, lest too many people
begin to question the 'right' of the wealthy and powerful to maintain their
positions at the top of the food chain at the expense of the psychologically
enslaved masses whose labors serve to fatten their
investment portfolios. Better that we remain, in the
words of George Orwell, in a state of "controlled insanity" -- for nothing could
pose a greater threat to the system than a sane population fighting for survival
in an insane world.