 Book cover, 1963 edition | |
| Author | Robert Jay Lifton,M.D. |
|---|---|
| Translator | Richard Jaffe (Chinese) |
| Cover artist | Shelley Gruendler |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Psychology Brainwashing Mind control |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Norton, New York (1961, first edition) University of North Carolina Press (reprint) |
Publication date | 1961, 1989 (UNC Press reprint) |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 524 (1989 reprint) |
| ISBN | 0-8078-4253-2 |
| OCLC | 19388265 |
| 153.8/53/0951 19 | |
| LC Class | BF633 .L5 1989 |
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China is anon-fiction book by psychiatristRobert Jay Lifton on thepsychology ofbrainwashing.
Lifton's research for the book began in 1953 with a series of interviews with American servicemen who had been held captive during theKorean War. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans, Lifton also interviewed 15 Chinese who had fled their homeland after having been subjected toindoctrination in Chinese universities. From these interviews, which in some cases occurred regularly for over a year, Lifton identified the tactics used byChinese communists to cause drastic shifts in one's opinions and personality and "brainwash" American soldiers into making demonstrably false assertions.
The book was first published in 1961, byW. W. Norton & Co., in New York.[1] The 1989 reprint edition was published byUniversity of North Carolina Press.[2] Lifton is a Distinguished Professor ofPsychiatry at theJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice,City University of New York.
In the book, Lifton outlines the"Eight Criteria for Thought Reform":
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism popularized the term "thought-terminating cliché". This refers to acliché that is a commonly used phrase, or folk wisdom, sometimes used to quellcognitive dissonance. Though the clichéd phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifyingfallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.
Examples include "Everything happens for a reason", "Why? Because I said so" (Bare assertion fallacy), "I'm the parent, that's why" (Appeal to authority), "To each his own", "It's a matter of opinion!", "You only live once" (YOLO), and "We will have to agree to disagree".
Lifton said:
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.[4][5]
InGeorge Orwell's 1949 novelNineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional constructed languageNewspeak is designed to eliminate the ability to express unorthodox thoughts.Aldous Huxley'sBrave New World society uses thought-terminating clichés in a moreconventional manner, most notably regarding the drugsoma as well as modified versions of real-lifeplatitudes, such as "A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away".
In her 1963 bookEichmann in Jerusalem,Hannah Arendt describedAdolf Eichmann as apseudo-intellectual who usedclichés and platitudes to justify his actions and the role he played in the Jewish genocide of World War II. For her, these phrases aresymptomatic of an absence of thought. She wrote that:
"[w]hen confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us againstreality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by their existence."[6]