Re Dogs and Men

Only two generations later, I sit here reading with excited approval a book in which Charles G. Finney is cited as one of the most accomplished early practitioners of the brainwashing techniques brought to perfection by the monsters of Stalin’s GPU.

Einstein remarked that probably no other theory ever “gave a key to the interpretation of such a heterogeneous group of phenomena as the quantum theory.” But Dr. Sargant’s theory, if you can call it that, is certainly a close runner-up. Starting with Pavlov’s schemes for producing and manipulating neuroses in dogs, he makes that a key to the interpretation of brainwashing by the Communists, conversion by the religious revivalists, witch-trials by the witch-finding committees, heresy-hunting by the Inquisition, shock treatment of certain forms of insanity, the festivals of Astarte, Arthur Koestler’s leap from a self-sickening debauch into the bosom of the Communist Party, voodoo in Haiti, Mau Mau in Kenya, dancing manias of the Middle Ages, Quaker meetings before they quit quaking, snake-handling cults in our South (one of which he watched and photographed), the Crusades, the revels of Dionysus, eliciting of confessions by the American, and (although he hates to admit it) also the British police, initiation into the Greek Mysteries, and—here hold your breath!—“uncritical use of therapeutic techniques” by the psychoanalysts.

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Max Eastman

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Only two generations later, I sit here reading with excited approval a book in which Charles G. Finney is cited as one of the most accomplished early practitioners of the brainwashing techniques brought to perfection by the monsters of Stalin’s GPU.

Einstein remarked that probably no other theory ever “gave a key to the interpretation of such a heterogeneous group of phenomena as the quantum theory.” But Dr. Sargant’s theory, if you can call it that, is certainly a close runner-up. Starting with Pavlov’s schemes for producing and manipulating neuroses in dogs, he makes that a key to the interpretation of brainwashing by the Communists, conversion by the religious revivalists, witch-trials by the witch-finding committees, heresy-hunting by the Inquisition, shock treatment of certain forms of insanity, the festivals of Astarte, Arthur Koestler’s leap from a self-sickening debauch into the bosom of the Communist Party, voodoo in Haiti, Mau Mau in Kenya, dancing manias of the Middle Ages, Quaker meetings before they quit quaking, snake-handling cults in our South (one of which he watched and photographed), the Crusades, the revels of Dionysus, eliciting of confessions by the American, and (although he hates to admit it) also the British police, initiation into the Greek Mysteries, and—here hold your breath!—“uncritical use of therapeutic techniques” by the psychoanalysts.