Battle for the Mind

How can an evangelist convert a hardboiled sophisticate? Why does a POW sign a "confession" that he knows is false? How is a criminal pressured into admitting his guilt? Do the evangelist, the POW's captor, and the policeman use similar methods to gain their ends? These and other compelling questions are discussed in this definitive work by William Sargant. Sargant explains and illustrates the basic techniques used by evangelists, psychiatrists, and brain-washers to dissolve existing, established patterns of belief, and then substitute new beliefs and behaviors. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Politicians, priests and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man's beliefs. When, towards the end of World War II, I first became interested in the similarity of the methods which have, from time to time, been used by the political, religious and psychiatric disciplines, I failed to foresee the enormous importance now attaching to the problem-because of an ideological struggle that seems fated to decide the course of civilization for centuries to come. The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world. Great Britain and the U.S.A. therefore find themselves at last obliged to study seriously those specialized forms of neuro-physiological research which have been cultivated with such intensity by the Russians since the Revolution, and have helped them to perfect the methods now popularly known as "brain-washing" or "thought control". In August, 1954, the United States Secretary of Defence announced the appointment of a special committee to study how prisoners of war could be trained to resist brain-washing. He admitted the desirability of reviewing the existing laws, government agreements, and policies of military departments, with regard to prisoners captured by nations in the Soviet orbit. This committee reported back to the President in August, 1955