Mao's Cure for Thought:
KIRKPATRICK, JEANE
Mao's Cure for Thought Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. By Robert Jay Lifton. Norton. 510 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Jeane Kirkpatrick Consultant, US. Information Agency; American...
...Totalism is therefore a concept which can be applied to any institution or doctrine concerned with human education or change...
...Lifton is thus able to devote several chapters to analyzing and identifying the elements of thought reform, and to explaining its successes and failures...
...This statement, and much of Lifton's book, forgets or ignores the ideological basis of brainwashing, which he himself underlines, as well as its grim role in the process of total revolution...
...His concluding chapters compare brainwashing to certain practices in our own culture...
...In regarding "thought reform" almost exclusively as a "psychological phenomenon," Lifton has given too little weight to its social context...
...In the preface he eays, "I am critical of thought reform's psychological tactics, not because they are Communist (or Chinese Communist), but because of their specific nature...
...Lifton's theorizing is less rewarding, however...
...But it is primarily the case studies which make this work a substantial contribution to the literature on totalitarian thought reform...
...Thus, there are "tendencies toward individual totalism" in everyone, and every ideology "may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction...
...When the state decides to cure abstract "diseases in thought and politics" that threaten its peace of mind, it demands complete conformity of subjective feelings and beliefs, as well as of external behavior...
...The pages on brainwashing's assault on identity, its utilization of guilt, shame, fear, existential anxiety, the "compulsion to confess," "milieu control" and the hope to better one's situation, are all suggestive and enlightening, as is the discussion of the origins of thought reform in Communist China...
...Robert Lifton's studies of individual experiences in China, which offer detailed, concrete accounts of totalitarian "thought reform" or brainwashing, make vividly clear the Chinese leaders' impatience, determination, ruthlessness and radical, revolutionary zeal...
...In this section, the author takes a startling leap from his original subject matter...
...The interviewees include men and women of all ages, Catholic and Protestant missionaries, atheists, and supporters and antagonists of the Communist revolution...
...the latter is its ultimate goal...
...The effort to achieve objectivity, to avoid the "good we" and the "bad they," leads Lifton to abstract the idea of thought reform from the people who are reformed, from the prisons (whether jails or "revolutionary universities") in which it takes place—in fact, from Communism itself...
...Lifton is a psychiatrist trained in cross-cultural research...
...Examining the various responses to brainwashing, Lifton finds the "obviously confused," the "apparent converts," and the "apparent resisters...
...The book identifies the characteristics common to all the variations of thought reform...
...As he moves away from his specific case material, treating thought reform as one among many efforts to mould or change human character, he removes brainwashing from its unique social and historical context...
...A victim of Chinese thought reform finds his physical and psychological balance attacked by physical abuse, indoctrination and intensive demands for confession in a situation where his "teachers" literally have total control over his continued existence...
...Students of contemporary China will find these studies depressingly familiar...
...The responddents share a single characteristic: All were "patients" in Mao's revolutionary clinics for "diseases in thought and politics...
...One may disagree with the relative importance Lifton attributes to various elements, but there is little doubt that he has pin-pointed all the crucial features of the process and illuminated the psychological stages of a patient's "reform...
...Edward Hunter, Doak Barnett, Joosl Meerloo and others have described the combination of incarceration, physical abuse and torture, indoctrination, mutual and self-criticism, autobiographies, confessions and exhortations that have proved so effective in producing conformity of thinking and behavior...
...He analyzes the extent to which various American social or psychological patterns approach totalism, examining education, psychotherapy, religion, science and McCarthyism...
...The first is of course the minimal aim of thought reform...
...Lifton thinks "this is most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious—or messianic— in their claims, whether religious, political, or scientific...
...The latter phenomenon, he asserts, "had many uncomfortable resemblances, including most of the characteristics of ideological totalism...
...By this term, the author means to "suggest the coming together of immoderate ideology with equally immoderate individual character traits—an extremist meeting ground between people and ideas...
...None of these, he reports, emerged psychologically unaffected from their experiences, and his follow-up interviews confirm this...
...Classified files of the Defense Department on the Korean War contain hundreds of dossiers which repeat the story...
...In Communist China the restructuring of human character within a single generation is an acknowledged goal...
...Fortunately, Lifton was able to conduct long, intensive interviews, and in many cases he was able to re-interview his subjects several years after their departure from China...
...American Council of Learned Societies The TERROR of totalitarianism is nowhere more starkly dramatized than in its ruthless attack on the minds and bodies of individual men...
...that is, between teaching one to perform whatever is ordered (confessing crimes, denouncing friends, etc...
...He treats thought reform as one species of what he calls "ideological totalism...
...For example, however reprehensible was McCarthyism—"a bizarre blend of political religion and extreme opportunism," with its careless and exagerated charges and its exploitation of a "relationship of guilt between the accused and his environment"—it is grotesque to liken McCarthy's targets to victims of Chinese Communist brainwashing...
...Lifton's analysis of the dynamics of thought reform differentiates between "breaking" and converting a man...
...He became interested in brainwashing after the Korean War, when he encountered American troops just released from Chinese prisons...
...and producing a subjective belief in the truth, virtue and morality of the desired behavior...
...Westerners often have difficulty imagining life in a country which attempts to exercise total control over the "inner man...
...He did extensive interviewing in Hong Kong and elsewhere, collecting material for his book, which contains studies of 40 respondents—Chinese, American and European...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 29
