Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China

by Robert Jay Lifton

Book Overview

2014 Reprint of 1961 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Lifton's research for the book began in 1953 with a series of interviews with American servicemen who had been held captive during the Korean War. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans, Lifton also interviewed 15 Chinese who had fled their homeland after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities. From...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1614276757
• ISBN13: 9781614276753
• Release Date: September 2014
• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Length: 522 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Speaks About Some our Politicians

This book explains how President Obama became the man he is today. He was primed by the methods in this book.

Chinese brainwashing is real and the battle still continues

Lifton's work here is an excellent effort to understand the ideological manipulation of the Chinese Communists.Although the researches on those individual "victims" are thorough, however, these are only other facets of the polyhedron of the "brainwashing".Surprisingly unknown to the Westernworld, but there is the salient fact of very successful cases of "brainwashing" in China and Japan which had, and still has, a devastating effect in terms of the issues of post war compensation between China and Japan.One case that represents the "brainwashing" against the Manchus is of their Last Emperor, Pu-Yi.You can read and see some glimpses of his experience of the "thought reform" in books such as "From Emperor to Citizen", his Communist authorised autobiography, and in the film "The Last Emperor", so I leave it to your option.Another is a completely untold (to the Westerners) story of former Japanese Imperial Army soldiers.Followings are excerpts of the accounts of two Chinese officials, one of them worked for Mao Tse-tung as an interpreter for 18 years. They appear in a special feature issue of the Japanese left-wing magazine called "Sekai" (May, 1998), on the cofession papers of soldiers mentioned above, that "found" in China by a Japanese photo-jounalist, who also interviewed the two Chinese officials. In July 1950, by the direct order from Stalin, 969 Japanese soldiers were transferred from Siberia, where those soldiers had been kept for slave labour suffering from starvation and despair for 6 years after war ended, to Fushun (Fuxuan) War Criminal Camp, in China, where, by the way, Pu-Yi was also transferred to at the same period.At this point, the soldiers' mental health had already been deteriorating. Unlike the people whose experiences were cited in this Lifton book, the Japanese, as well as the Manchus, received no phisical violence. Instead, they were treated rather too well for their status of "war felons".It was Premier Chou En-lai himself who had given such instruction in which the camp authority were ordered to treat the Japanese and the Manchus especially well.Because panishing the "criminals" was not their aim. Releasing them as ideological advocates was.In a few years, their "reform" were gradually, yet steadily progressing.The first stage of the "reform" is: Self-consciousness of the guilt. After the unsuccessful military campaign of the U.S.A. in the Korean War, the Japanese soldiers' hopes of being rescued by the U.S. Army was dashed, and as if they were clutching at straws, they became absorbed by reading Marx's works and Japanese proletarian literatures. Those intense reading and study of communism in groups made the "Imperialist" soldiers re-think their righteousness little by little.Then, came a significant breakthrough when a Japanese officer did "Tan-pai" (Chinese word for "to recognise and to criticise one's own guilt, and to cofess them) in front of the whole Japanese inmates. A "confessions" of a soldier triggered everyone's

An important book

This book has created a lot of controversies envolving new religious movements. Although it describes a research made with POWs e somes Chinese intellectuals, it has been frequently used attacks against some new religious movements.The concept "brainwashing" first came into public use during the Korean War in the 1950s as an explanation for why a few American GIs defected to the Communists. The two most authoritative studies of the Korean War defections (and this book was one of them) concluded that "brainwashing" was an inappropriate concept to account for this renunciation of U.S. citizenship. When several new religious came into high profile during the youth counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s the concept "brainwashing" was again employed as a culturally acceptable explanation to account for the fact that some idealistic "flower children" came under the influence of "cult" leaders. A quarter-of-a-century of scholarly research on why people join new religions has come to essentially the same conclusion as the Korean War studies -- "brainwashing" is not a viable concept to describe the dynamics of affiliation with new religions. Defenders of "brainwashing" have used other concepts like "mind control" and "thought reform," but they have failed to produce a scholarly literature to support their claims. Thus, whatever euphemisms may be employed, the basic conclusion against the brainwashing thesis is not altered. Still, the mass media continues to report claims of "brainwashing" as if the alleged phenomenon were real. And, as a result, the concept "brainwashing" sustains considerable currency in popular culture. It is, to be sure, a powerful metaphor. "Brainwashing" communicates disapproval of influence by persons, or groups, the user of the term considers to be illegitimate. If you want to understand the origins of the concept, read Lifton's work. Just take care to not get caught by the "cult mind control" rhetoric.

Refutation of Prior Review - This Is An Excellent Book

Upon seeing the review below, from the reader in Rio de Janeiro, I had to write my own thoughts and share them. As a former cult member myself and current volunteer in anti-cult activism, I can personally attest that what Dr. Lifton wrote about concerning destructive groups and mind control absolutely exists. The famous chapter 22, where Dr. Lifton lays out the famous "eight criteria", to me isn't a chapter in a book but how my adolescense was in this particular group. It's true; it exists. The reader from Rio said that mind control was a failure; well, ultimately, yes it is, total control over a person's mind isn't 100%, and won't last forever. However, individuals and destructive groups (cults) know how to exploit mind control techniques to allow them control over a person's thoughts and actions long enough to get that person to do what they want, and often when people leave cults they suffer psychological damages for years afterward. This is also not about West superior over East; Dr. Lifton also chronicled how many Chinese were hurt by the mind control imposed by the Communists. All in all, this is a terrific book about mind control and its damaging effects; I highly recommend it.

The Seminal Work on Mind Control.

This book may date from 1961, but it continues to be an essential work for understanding the techniques of mind control that continue to be utilized by authoritarian governments as well as by destructive cults. Those who have been watching with horror the crackdown by the Communist Chinese government on the peaceful falun gong religious sect will recognize in Lifton's book the same tyrannical mindset as it operated at its origins. Obviously, not much has changed in 40 years. Especially worthwhile in this book is the description of the eight conditions underlying any thought reform program. "Milieu control", for example, is the imposition of an entire controlling environment that permits a person no unapproved interactions, no free time, and no access to unapproved information. "Doctrine over person" is a state of affairs where, in any situation where ideology is contradicted by real experience, the ideology, not the experience, is believed. This can lead to a situation where a fictitious construct -- "the People" -- is defined differently from that of real people, who are not considered to be "real" people if their experience differs from ideology. Lifton calls this viewpoint "dispensing of existence." Cult survivors such as myself (a former 10-year member of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church) will recognize these and the other conditions Lifton enumerates.