Vsevolod Pudovkin, dir.

Mechanics of the Brain,

1925–1926.

42
Homo pavlovius:
Cinema, Conditioning,
and the Cold War Subject
ANDREAS KILLEN

Edward Hunter, the man popularly credited with coining the term brainwashing,
had a deep appreciation of the power of his new construct. In his book on this new
form of mind control, first published in 1951 and then expanded on in 1956, he
referred often to the “eerie sensation” this term inspired in him.1 Many Americans
shared this sensation in the first decade of the Cold War. The fear and fascination
surrounding the term brainwashing presumably stemmed from the conviction that
in this uncanny phenomenon the totalitarian enemy revealed its true face.
If a name was needed to accompany that face, Hunter supplied that as well. The
ultimate source of the “eerie sensation” emanating from behind the Iron Curtain was
identified by Hunter as Ivan Pavlov, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist and inventor
of the methods the Soviets and their allies were allegedly employing on American
prisoners of war (POWs) in Korea, on prominent dissidents in Eastern bloc coun-
tries, and on a mass scale on their own citizens. Hunter saw evidence of a deep
connection between the POW camps and Pavlov’s experiments on reflex condition-
ing, and he furthermore claimed that the “Chinese, as a race, are undergoing mind
treatment inside a Great Pavlovian Wall.”2
From the start the problems both with Hunter’s account of brainwashing and
with his picture of Pavlov as the mastermind behind it were readily apparent. Not
the least of these was that Pavlov had never been a Bolshevik, and his most impor-
tant research had been carried out before the Bolsheviks came to power. The exact
nature of the relation between Pavlovian conditioning and brainwashing was also
problematic, as was, some skeptics suggested, the entire concept of brainwashing.
Despite such skepticism, Hunter’s construct proved remarkably resilient—attesting
not just to the skill with which the journalist and intelligence operative had woven
his account but also to the degree to which it tapped into deep undercurrents of
anxiety in the contemporary public. Joost Meerloo, a Dutch psychiatrist who taught

Grey Room 45, Fall 2011, pp. 42–59. © 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 43
 at Columbia University and published his own analysis of brainwashing in 1956,
argued that many people had become familiar with this phenomenon in their daily
lives. Citing patient case histories and accounts by others claiming to be under the
influence of impersonal forces, he wrote, “This is not necessarily a psychiatric con-
dition . . . there are many real external influences.” Meerloo stressed in particular
the modern media’s role in “taking possession of the nervous patterns of man.” What
Meerloo called the Kremlin’s “Pavlovian front” thus represented just one aspect—
albeit a particularly insidious one—of a wider phenomenon.3
The invention of brainwashing was in this sense not simply an American propa-
ganda coup, as has been frequently argued.4 The term also became shorthand for a
multitude of forms of control, persuasion, and influence—for political but also other
purposes—experienced by many people in the aftermath of Word War II. If many of
these practices remained intangible, viscerally felt but difficult to comprehend, the
notion of brainwashing seemed to crystallize them in a powerful way, to name them
as a specific pathology not just of totalitarian society but of modernity as such.
What I explore in the following are several elements within the cultural fantasy sur-
rounding brainwashing: in particular, the way Pavlov’s name, together with certain
forms of human science and the modern visual media, became written into it.
These elements are central to the era’s iconic representation of mind control, John
Frankenheimer’s 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, an account of a hypno-
programmed assassin’s role in a plot to take over the White House. Yet, while in
many ways Frankenheimer’s film represents the apotheosis of this fantasy, it also
complicates the fantasy by suggesting that “knowledge of the enemy,” as Hunter had
defined it, was at the same time deeply self-reflexive, a form of knowledge of
American society itself.

|||||

As initially formulated, it was the specifically Communist practice of brainwashing

that made this term a key Cold War trope. And, for Hunter, understanding the true
nature of this phenomenon entailed placing Pavlov at its center. Wittingly or not,
the great scientist had given the Soviets a powerful method for controlling minds
and behavior.5 This was most vividly illustrated in two settings; namely, political
trials and POW camps—settings in which conditioning techniques (aided by drugs
and hypnosis) were chiefly used to elicit confessions to fake crimes, such as the
charges of germ warfare that a dozen U.S. POWs publicly confessed to in 1952.

44 Grey Room 45
Hunter also paid much attention to the role of the mass media as tools of indoctri-
nation or “collective reflexology.” Building on Pavlov’s theory of the “second signal
system”—the domain of communication—he argued that Soviet films strove
to imprint the Kremlin’s trigger words (“running dog,” “warmonger,” etc.) on
audiences. “Red script-writers” also turned out feature films that popularized
Pavlov’s experiments “in the Hollywood manner” and made Pavlov a magician of
“occult-like powers over men’s minds.”6 Several films were produced for the Pavlov
centenary of 1949, a date also marking a moment of major realignment in Soviet sci-
ence under the Pavlovian banner.7
But the true nature of the Soviets’ project was most vividly revealed, according
to Hunter, in one particular film that he saw as a virtual master text of their mind
control campaign. The film, The Nervous System, depicts scenes from Pavlov’s
laboratory, including his famous experiments with dogs. Crucially, the original
version also depicts scenes of experimentation on a human subject, a young boy—
the identical saliva experiments that Pavlov had conducted on dogs. As Hunter
explained, these scenes were cut from the official version, and the original was
withdrawn from circulation.
The Nervous System was a substantially altered version of Mechanics of the
Brain, a film made in 1925–1926 by Vsevolod Pudovkin, who would become one of
the most important directors to emerge in the Soviet Union, directing such classics
as Mother (1926) and Storm over Asia (1928). Mechanics of the Brain endeavors to
popularize Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex as the foundation of psychic
life.8 As such it represented a contribution to the Soviet regime’s just-launched
campaign for “cinefication of the country,” part of a Bolshevik program of mass
enlightenment for its largely illiterate population. The film, as Margarete Vöhringer
argues, was thus both a representation of the conditioning process and an enact-
ment of that process on a mass scale.9 For Hunter, what was most disturbing about
the film was not just its representation of Pavlovian theory or its scenes of human
experimentation but the underlying alliance between cinema and science at the
basis of Pudovkin’s endeavor. Together they revealed the powers claimed by the
Kremlin in its aspiration to create a “new Soviet man” and the lengths it was pre-
pared to go in remaking the human subject. No less so than Pavlov’s methods them-
selves, film was shown here to be a powerful tool of mass political conditioning.
Describing his “twinge of horror” (“an unconditioned reflex”) at this film and its
revelation of the true implications of Soviet science, Hunter alleged that Pavlov’s
own complicity was proven by a “secret manuscript” he wrote for Lenin in 1923.10

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 45
 Hunter was hardly alone in his fixation on the figure of Pavlov. Many sources of
this period concurred in seeing Pavlov as the originator of the methods of coercive
persuasion practiced in Eastern bloc countries. According to Joost Meerloo, the
brainwashed subject was, in classic Pavlovian fashion, first broken down, then con-
ditioned to accept his own confession, before finally entering into an autohypnotic
state in which he became convinced of his fabricated crimes.11 In a 1953 speech on
“brain warfare,” newly appointed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Allen
Dulles conjured the notion of human beings robbed of volition by an “outside genius,”
and in a later speech on the topic of persuasion he invoked Pavlov’s name to explain
the methods in use behind the Iron Curtain.12 Similarly, a classified report of 1955,
titled “Brainwashing: The Communist Experiment with Mankind,” offers a short
primer on the principles of reflexology and their political applications, arguing that
Pavlov’s techniques, in “perverted” form, provided the blueprint for the Soviets’
mind control project.13 The Reds, it concludes, had turned the POWs into “human
experiments”—in every sense comparable to the boy in Pudovkin’s film. Moreover,
in the propaganda films accompanying the POWs’ confessions, they, too, had been
assigned roles in a scenario designed by Red scriptwriters. In his 1953 speech,
Dulles described his own viewing of one of these films, which, he claimed, had been
based on an elaborately planned scenario that required six months of drafting,
followed by two months of “conditioning.”14
No less an authority than Hannah Arendt echoed such views. Her influential
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) placed particular stress on the uses to which
science was put in the camps that she saw as the essence of this new political system.
The camps, she wrote, were “laboratories” for the project of “fabricating mankind”
according to the specifications of a scientific blueprint:
The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human
beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifi-
cally controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human
behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing. . . .
Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all
behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reli-
ability even when going to their death, and which do nothing but react.15
Reflecting wider concerns with the ethical and humanistic impact of modern
science, Arendt’s view lent considerable philosophical weight to the narrative of
totalitarian science run amok.

46 Grey Room 45
 Despite the cumulative weight of these views, however, by the mid-1950s most
available evidence seemed to point to the conclusion that the methods used against
U.S. POWs and Eastern bloc dissidents were not especially Pavlovian, scientific, or
esoteric. Several CIA reports of this period acknowledge that signed confessions
were likely the result of little more than the standard police tactics long used by
authoritarian regimes.16 And yet despite such findings, which were confirmed
by later reports, the Western discourse of totalitarianism remained deeply marked by
this specter of the Pavlovianized self. Americans continued to be powerfully fixated
on what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, himself a skeptic, described as the “lurid
mythology” of brainwashing as “mysterious Oriental device,” an “irresistible, unfath-
omable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind.”17 In
popular consciousness, wrote one Sovietologist in 1957, the figures of Pavlov and
Fu Manchu had been fused.18 Precisely this fusion serves as the basis for the fevered
scenario of The Manchurian Candidate and its vision of brainwashing. The scien-
tific premise for this scenario is spelled out, in the Richard Condon novel on which
Frankenheimer’s film is based, by Yen Lo, the Fu Manchu–like director of the
“Pavlov Institute,” when he observes, “The first thing a human being is loyal to is
his own conditioned nervous system.”19

|||||

Like Pudovkin’s The Nervous System, the film The Manchurian Candidate hinges
on a complex staging of the relation between science, the conditioned subject, and
the moving image. In addition to wedding these elements to the political thriller
genre, Frankenheimer’s film also introduces several new elements, the crucial one
in this context being the fact that cinema has been superseded by television as a tool
of conditioning. In the film, TV is associated with McCarthyism and anti-Communist
hysteria, and this linkage reflects not only the fact that brainwashing has by now
migrated across the political spectrum but also that the phenomenon of political
conditioning, as Timothy Melley suggests, has been overlaid by more pervasive
forms of social conditioning.20 At the center of these is television. The proliferation
of TV screens across 1950s America is visually and thematically integrated into
Frankenheimer’s film in several ways. In an early scene depicting a Red-baiting
senator’s accusations concerning the presence of Communists in the U.S. military,
on-screen events are simultaneously shown on live television monitors. By the end
of the film the power of the small screen has emerged as a crucial plot point: the

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 47
 conspirators count on the live transmission of the planned assassination to send the
American public into hysterical frenzy. In this doubling of the screen, or represen-
tation of a screen within the screen, Frankenheimer’s film thus incorporates a com-
ment on the power of the moving image.21
The shift signaled in this scene conjures up a series of larger shifts in American
society, the emergence of a new constellation of anxieties about corporate and media
power, and corresponding new discourses on control and persuasion. These feature
a handful of prominent names, including Sigmund Freud, John Watson, and Norbert
Wiener (all mentioned in Vance Packard’s exposé of the advertising industry, The
Hidden Persuaders).22 These in turn echo earlier discourses. Francis Galton, Henry
Ford, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, for instance, had all featured in Huxley’s Brave
New World (to which Huxley published a sequel, including a chapter on brain-
washing, in 1958).23 Yet Pavlov remained in many ways emblematic, the paradigm of
the scientist as “engineer of souls,” his status now elevated into that of a Svengali-like
figure by the combined power of the moving image and the Communists’ propaganda
apparatus. In a 1953 paper titled “Pavlov and Propaganda,” the psychologist A.M.G.
Little made explicit the basis for this by directly connecting Pavlov’s theory of the
second signal system to Moscow’s psychological operations. Stressing the signifi-
cance of the fact that Pavlov’s recognition of the privileged status of the word as
stimulus went back to his research on hypnotized subjects, Little concludes that
conditioning via words and images had become the Soviets’ “magic formula”—the
basis of a planned “cinefication” of the world according to Pavlovian specifications.24
In Edward Hunter’s account, Pudovkin’s The Nervous System became the primal
scene of the secret history of the Red mind control project first developed in the
1920s and then unleashed on the world in the 1950s. At the same time, brainwash-
ing’s emergence as a central tenet of modern psychological warfare was deeply
inscribed by an older set of anxieties: it offered a Cold War–era variation on a theme
going back to the dawn of the cinema and to its first emergence as a medium of scien-
tific research and experimentation, as well as of mass education and entertainment.
As his repeated references to the “eerie feelings” the topic of brainwashing aroused
in him suggest, Hunter was a man in the grip of a peculiar modern fascination, con-
cerning the power of the visual media and their place within larger modernist
projects of social engineering and control. Pudovkin’s film, moreover, was particu-
larly well-calculated to elicit this reaction, due to its position at the convergence of

48 Grey Room 45
several major strands in the history of the relation between science and the moving
image: (1) the cinema’s origins in late-nineteenth-century experimental and clinical
sciences; (2) its use as a tool for popular-scientific enlightenment; (3) its role within
the modern state’s propaganda apparatus of methods for exploiting the “second signal
system.”25 At the most basic level, Hunter’s response to this film resonates with a larger
history that scholars like Jonathan Crary and Stefan Andriopoulos have described in
terms of the discursive construction of film as a medium of mind control.26

|||||

New and more extreme variations of this theme soon found their way into public
consciousness. In testimony given to a Congressional committee investigating brain-
washing in 1958, Hunter again cited the role of Pavlov, once more alluding to the
“weird feelings” his investigations into this topic aroused in him, and further invok-
ing Pudovkin’s film as evidence of the scientific basis for Soviet psychological
warfare.27 Two years earlier Hunter’s treatment of The Nervous System as a kind of
horror film had been anticipated in the account of Lajos Ruff, a Hungarian dissident
who had spent two years in prison in the early 1950s. In his sensational Congressional
testimony, delivered in fall 1956 (and later fleshed out in his book The Brainwashing
Machine), Ruff described in great detail the conditioning process he had undergone
at the hands of a doctor who kept him locked in a “magic room,” where he was
administered drugs and compelled to watch pornographic and other films designed
to destroy his sense of reality.28 When, at a certain point in this process, Ruff him-
self began to appear (in an apparently drugged state) as an actor in the films being
projected on the walls of the room, the doctor announced that he had gone clinically
insane and informed him, “You have a split personality.”29
Ruff’s account of these “demonic” methods drew considerable attention from,
among others, Guy Debord, who cited the account in the first issue of the Situationist
International (1958) in the context of a broader discussion of the “techniques of con-
ditioning” (he also included subliminal advertising and sensory deprivation) being
perfected by modern scientists.30 Though questions surround the provenance and
authenticity of Ruff’s account, it remains interesting for several reasons.31 One is
that it attests to the perceived dramatic power, and predictive value, such narratives
of scientifically calculated manipulation and derangement had acquired at this
moment (accounts echoed, for instance, in Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited).
Another concerns how, amid the new geopolitical realities of the divided, Cold War

John Frankenheimer, dir.

The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 49
 world, narratives concerning the phenomenon of split personality seem to have
become peculiarly compelling. First discovered in the late nineteenth century,
multiple personality had reemerged as an object of knowledge, and, as Ian Hacking
puts it, “a way to be.” This development would be dramatized that same year (1958)
in the release of the highly acclaimed film The Three Faces of Eve, based on a true
case history of a female “multiple” (i.e., a woman with multiple personalities). But
the clinical knowledge at the heart of Ruff’s case was put to operational use as a
means of breaking him down and eliciting highly scripted “confessions” for a trial.32
Well before Ruff’s account, the idea of using such methods in an operational
setting had proved tempting to American psychologists. For example, in an experi-
ment designed to explore the production of multiple personality for intelligence
purposes, the psychologist George Estabrooks proposed a hypothetical scenario
in which, via hypnotic conditioning, a subject could be split into two persons:
Person A, a rabid Communist; and Person B, an equally rabid anti-Communist. Such
a “super-spy,” he claimed, would be able to gain access to enemy secrets undetected
and, in the unlikely event of being caught, would be unable to remember and thus
divulge anything under questioning.33 Invoking Pavlov as one of the authorities for
such methods, Estabrooks transposed the realities of a world in which national enti-
ties had developed split personalities (North and South Korea, etc.) to the level of
individual psychology. He approached the CIA for funding to explore his proposals
more fully, while at the same time—in a development symptomatic of the feedback
loop between paranoid fiction and paranoid practice that marked the entire Cold
War—he wrote a novel titled Death in the Mind, an account of hypnoprogramming
that indirectly served, according to John Marks, as a blueprint for the CIA’s own
subsequent efforts to build a “Manchurian candidate.”34
Estabrooks’s invoking of Pavlov’s name in this context and his proposals to the
CIA are indicative of two things. First, even as Pavlov’s work became part of the
Cold War demonology it remained widely identified with an array of influential
practices in the human sciences. Reflex conditioning became one of the era’s pre-
eminent technologies of the self. Pavlov was, for instance, frequently cited in the
literature on treating war-related psychological trauma. In a 1945 article on group
psychotherapy for war neurosis, a U.S. Navy doctor described using films of
combat scenes as part of a method of “de-conditioning” soldiers from the horrors
of wartime experience. The doctor also sought to reinforce the treatment by
explaining to his patients some aspects of Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned
reflexes, which he illustrated by showing further films demonstrating the artificial

50 Grey Room 45
production of neurosis in cats.35
Yet the innovative therapeutic approach outlined here could in other contexts
easily assume more ambiguous features. Whether understood as conditioning, hyp-
notic treatment, reeducation, or otherwise, the phenomena described in brain-
washing discourse have much in common with other forms of human and clinical
science that, as McLuhan, Packard, and Debord note, many people in this period
experienced in their daily lives.36 The thematization of control and persuasion in
sociological, journalistic, and cultural treatises of this period registers a host of
anxieties about the degree to which the self was becoming enmeshed within a new
matrix of sciences and practices, many of them promising to remake the self accord-
ing to new insights, prescriptions, and blueprints for behavior—many of which
were optimistic and progressive but also highly invasive.
Second, while the cultural demands of the Cold War were reflected in the
projection of malign intentions onto the Soviet regime’s control over science (and,
through this control, its citizens’ psyches), the postwar period marked a moment of
new alliance between state and science everywhere, not least in the United States.
If the Cold War was to play itself out as a series of variations on the theme of modern
warfare as a “battle for the mind,” then such an alliance was nothing less than a mat-
ter of political necessity.37 As Ellen Herman and others show, psychology emerged
from World War II as one of the most militarized of the social sciences.38 Moreover,
while Western Cold Warriors ritually denounced the Communists’ violation of the self,
its reduction to a totally malleable or automatized function, the Cold War mobilization
of psychology in the United States was itself marked by a transition from “human”
to “behavioral” science, with results that posed a profound challenge to the same
ideals of individual volition and agency that these figures professed to uphold.39
Nowhere is this more evident than in the CIA’s own mind control program, which
mobilized a small army of researchers in the sciences of psy and which both drew
upon and catalyzed trends in those fields. When in his “brain warfare” speech Allen
Dulles noted that “the brain under these circumstances [i.e., under Communist
influence] becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside
genius over which it has no control,” and went on to state that the West was handi-
capped in its response to such methods by having no “human guinea pigs,” he did
so having just authorized the classified program MK-ULTRA, which presided for a
decade over a series of deeply transgressive experiments in behavioral control con-
ducted by leading figures in the clinical and behavioral sciences.40
If experimentation and conditioning became trigger words of Cold War rhetoric,

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 51
 this in part reflected a wider sense of anxiety shared by many Americans. This anx-
iety was rooted in a new constellation of pressures and discourses that were being
brought to bear on the self, many grounded in the claims of modern science to pro-
duce knowledge about the human subject, to make him or her legible in new ways,
to remake him or her according to new blueprints. The fascination with psycholog-
ical theory and method in popular film, where it became a favorite theme of this
period (above all in Hitchcock’s oeuvre), reflects the degree to which this era was
one of ambitious experimentation in the field of the human sciences, one in which,
notwithstanding Dulles’s claims of Western disadvantage, American researchers
engaged in far-reaching explorations of human behavior in war, consumption, sex-
uality, race relations, and other areas of everyday life.
The fascination surrounding Cold War behavioral experiments left deep traces in
the careers of many scientists working within the new terrain defined by the alliance
between state and behavioral science. Moving back and forth between the public
worlds of medical and scientific practice and the shadow worlds of covertly funded
research, these figures applied, or reverse engineered, knowledge gained in a clinical
context for use in an operational context. According to the logic of a well-established
cultural trope, they became at night what they condemned by day and, in so doing,
became the medical counterpart to the split or multiple personality that was the
focus of much of their research. As Hacking notes, fiction, in the form of Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, might have preceded the first accounts of male multiples in
the medical literature of the late nineteenth century.41
Such a Cold War scientist might, like the neurologist Harold Wolff, be known for
breakthroughs in treatment for stress and migraines, on the one hand, and, on the
other hand, be prepared to perform, in the name of national security, experiments
that violated deeply held ethical and professional codes. Wolff, an eminent
researcher based at Cornell Medical Center in New York, politically well connected
as a result of his personal friendship with Dulles, is an especially interesting case of
the scientific split personality. His medical itinerary included a stay at Pavlov’s
laboratory in the 1930s, and he attended the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting on the top-
ics of hypnosis and the conditioned reflex, held in May 1942 in New York City—
a meeting often cited as a precursor to the cybernetics meetings of the late 1940s.
Subsequently he would go on to become a founding member of the Pavlovian
Society and to serve as president of the American Neurological Association. Asked
by Dulles in the mid-1950s to study the brainwashing problem, Wolff and his col-
league Lawrence Hinkle produced what is generally considered to be the definitive

52 Grey Room 45
account of it. They dismissed reports that the Communists were using “occult”
techniques, arguing that no evidence existed of drugs or hypnosis or even of the
involvement of psychiatrists or other scientists.42
Yet if Wolff publicly worked to demystify brainwashing, in his capacity as
government contractor he simultaneously engaged in ambitious experiments in
behavioral control. Wolff explicitly likened his role as doctor to that of a Communist
interrogator.43 Under the auspices of a CIA front, the Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology, Wolff’s patron Dulles commissioned him to carry out and fund
research on “the brain and nervous system as factors in war.” His research from this
period reveals the continuing influence Pavlov’s findings exercised over him. As
part of a larger project of fashioning a “fully integrated science of man,” Wolff con-
ducted studies on hypnosis and stress, on “experimentally produced sleep,” on the
“induction of nervous breakdowns,” and on failures of the conditioning process
leading to “experimental neuroses.”44 His papers include a report on one experi-
ment in which he explored the implications of Pavlov’s theory for brain-damaged
patients. Notable here is Wolff’s statement of conviction that reflex conditioning
represents an almost infinitely flexible method, suitable for investigating the “high-
est integrated functions of the central nervous system.” The experiment involved an
apparatus consisting of a stimulus panel, with auditory stimuli and flashing lights
and images, coupled with a response panel. Failure on the subject’s part to learn the
appropriate response was accompanied by an electric shock. As Wolff explained,
“The avoidance type of instrumental conditioning depends on the ability of the
organism to respond so as to avoid a punishment, as, for example, a shock.”45
The quasicinematic configuration of Wolff’s experiment anticipated in many
respects the aversion therapies widely used throughout the 1960s. Practitioners of
these therapies often combined nausea-inducing drugs with films that depicted var-
ious forms of addictive, stigmatized, or self-destructive behavior, in an effort to cure
their patients of smoking, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and homosexuality.46
Such procedures in deconditioning or deprogramming were in turn frequently
reenacted in cinematic explorations of the topos of mind control. Perhaps most para-
digmatically, this scenario was reproduced in the so-called Ludovico technique
in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, in which the violent psychopath Alex
undergoes treatment by being forced to watch footage of violent films.47 Such methods,
and the larger nexus of concerns out of which they grew, have reemerged in the
present day in the form of efforts to apply what one CIA officer calls the “Clockwork
Orange kind of approach” in programs of “enhanced interrogation” at Guantánamo

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 53
 Bay and elsewhere. In addition to waterboarding and the use of stress positions,
these methods have reportedly included forcing detainees repeatedly to watch footage
of the attacks on 9/11.48
Insofar as the reenactments staged in films like A Clockwork Orange, The Parallax
View, or Videodrome frequently include a representation of a screen-within-the-screen,
the cinematic depiction of mind control is thus an exercise in self-reflexivity. These
films encode references both to the cinematic medium’s origins within scientific
milieux and to its scientifically enhanced possibilities (both real and imagined) for
educating, influencing, experimenting on, entertaining, or inciting subjects and
populations. They serve as reminders that, from its inception in late-nineteenth-
century experimental and clinical sciences through its use in programs of mass
enlightenment or state propaganda, as well as in the aversion therapies of the 1960s,
and up to present-day practices of “enhanced interrogation,” the moving image in
its various incarnations has frequently been harnessed to projects for “conditioning”
its audience. Just as frequently, however, it has been transformed into the object of
obsessive fantasy concerning its alleged powers of mind control.

54 Grey Room 45
Notes
1. Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China (New York: Vanguard, 1951).
2. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It (New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Cudahy, 1956), 259.
3. Joost Meerloo, Rape of the Mind (New York: World Publishing, 1956), 9.
4. See, for instance, Alan Scheflin and Edward Opton Jr., The Mind Manipulators (New York:
Grosset and Dunlap, 1978); and Walter Bowart, Operation Mind Control (New York: Dell, 1978).
5. Hunter’s views were backed up by the studies of a number of Sovietologists. In his Stalin and the
Uses of Psychology (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1955), Robert Tucker argues that the conditioned reflex
was the Soviet’s “new formula for man.” For a more skeptical view, see Raymond Bauer, The New Man
in Soviet Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952).
6. Hunter, Brainwashing (1956), 27, 29. Tucker writes, the “new Pavlovianism . . . [emphasized] not
just the determinative influence of social environment but the role of the state-controlled media of
communication.” He also describes the ideally Pavlovianized subject as one who reacted predictably
to the state’s “trigger words.” Tucker, 65.
7. David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (New York: Blackwell, 1989); and Ethan
Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. The film has a complicated history marking all aspects of its existence, from production and
distribution to reception. Two versions of the film existed from the outset—one for the public, one for
a specialist audience—and whether the full version was ever screened at the time of its making is not
clear. See Adolf Nichtenhauser, Marie L. Coleman, and David S. Ruhe, Films in Psychiatry, Psychology,
and Mental Health (New York: New York Health Education Council, 1953); Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod
Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001); Margarete Vöhringer,
Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in
der frühen Sowjetunion (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007); and Barbara Wurm, “Schauen wir uns an!
Axiome der filmischen Menschenwerdung (Sowjetunion 1925–1930),” in Mr. Münsterberg und Dr.
Hyde: Zur Filmgeschichte des Menschenexperiments, ed. Marcus Krause and Nicolas Pethes (Bielefeld,
Germany: Transcript Verlag, 2007), 118–127.
9. Vöhringer alludes to Pudovkin’s ambition to make the film public itself the object of a cinematic
experiment in reconditioning. Vöhringer, 163.
10. Hunter, Brainwashing, 41.
11. Meerloo, Rape of the Mind, 8. See also Joost Meerloo, “Pavlov’s Dog and Communist Brainwashers,”
New York Times, 9 May 1954.
12. Allen Dulles, “Brain Warfare,” 1953, in box 61, folder 9, Allen Dulles Papers, Princeton University
Library; and Allen Dulles, “The Art of Persuasion,” 1963, box 61, folder 34, Allen Dulles Papers,
Princeton University Library. In the latter text he writes that Khrushchev was “acting . . . on the
Pavlovian theories of induced reflexes.”
13. “Brainwashing: The Communist Experiment with Mankind,” 19 April 1953, in OCB 702.5, Box
124, Brainwashing and Psychological Examination, Eisenhower Presidential Library. The report refers
to films on Pavlov’s work in U.S. government hands as well as to films of U.S. POWs. A good example

Stanley Kubrick, dir.

A Clockwork Orange, 1971.

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 55
 of the circularity of accounts of brainwashing is provided by the note an American intelligence offi-
cial appended to “Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psycho-politics,” in OCB
702.5, Box 124, Brainwashing and Psychological Examination, Eisenhower Presidential Library. The
official suggests, “if the [textbook] is a fake, the author or authors know so much about brainwashing
technique that I would consider them experts, superior to any I have met to date.” The book, an alleged
Soviet manual on “psycho-politics,” includes a preface in which the head of the People’s Commissariat
for Internal Affairs, Lavrentii Beria, pays homage to Pavlov. The book is, in all likelihood, a fabrication,
possibly penned by L. Ron Hubbard.
14. Dulles, “Brain Warfare.”
15. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 438, 455.
16. See Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, “Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of Enemies
of the State,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 76 (1956): 115–174.
17. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing
in China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 15–16. A year before the publication of Richard Condon’s
The Manchurian Candidate, a member of the John Birch Society wrote that the Communists were
creating a “regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action
by signals from their masters.” Sean Wilentz, “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,”
The New Yorker, 18 October 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_
fact_wilentz.
18. Raymond Bauer, “Brainwashing: Psychology or Demonology?” Journal of Social Issues 13, no. 3
(1957): 41.
19. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), 40.
20. See Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2000). Like Meerloo, the psychologist George Estabrooks saw TV as the
“most potent” of the suggestive media, citing the televised broadcasts of national political conven-
tions. George Estabrooks, Hypnotism, 2nd ed. (New York: Dutton, 1957), 136. According to Meerloo,
the number of TVs in the United States went from 172,000 in 1948 to 15.3 million in 1952. Meerloo,
Rape of the Mind.
21. On the discontinuity between film and television, see Stefan Andriopoulos, in this issue of
Grey Room. The splitting of the screen into multiple screens is just one of the many signs in The
Manchurian Candidate of the epistemological crisis associated with brainwashing. While the film
depicts television as having a demonic agency, it also thematizes, in the elaborate “ladies’ garden club
scene,” the cinema’s own relation to practices of brainwashing. At the beginning of the 1950s, anxi-
eties about cinema’s powers of “mind control” were at the center of the House Un-American Activities
Committee hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood. See Michael Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly :
Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” in Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes
in Political Demonology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). The para-
noia surrounding the influence of the media eventually crystallized in accounts of The Manchurian
Candidate as Lee Harvey Oswald’s “trigger film”: “If the Russians did not program Oswald, perhaps
The Manchurian Candidate did” (254).

56 Grey Room 45
 22. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Pocket Books, 1957).
23. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006);
Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958; New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006).
24. A.M.G. Little, “Pavlov and Propaganda,” Problems of Communism 2 (1953): 14–21.
25. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Andreas Killen, “Weimar Cinema between Enlightenment
and Hypnosis,” in Fears Past: Emotional Histories, Troubled Times, ed. Gyan Prakash and Michael
Lappan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
26. Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Jonathan Crary, “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison,” in Art
and Film since 1945: Hall of Mirrors, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Monacelli, 1996), 262–279. Crary
describes the cinema as one specific episode “within a much broader 20th century history of tech-
niques of control, conditioning, and abstract simulation” (277).
27. House Committee on Un-American Activities, Communist Psychological Warfare (Brainwashing):
Consultation with Edward Hunter, 85th Cong., 2nd sess., 13 March 1958 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1958), http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/globalism/Congress.htm. Hunter’s own texts
contain numerous moments that seem to reproduce the same sense of being controlled or influenced
by the uncanny forces he ostensibly describes as part of the pathology of brainwashing. For instance,
“One day, I was jotting down notes during an interview with a brainwashed man from Eastern Europe,
when I recognized once more that these words were alike others I had been recording, told me by
persons who had undergone this mental torture in China. . . . In Hong Kong, soon after the fall of the
mainland, I interviewed Chinese who had fled from the mainland, all of whom expressed themselves
in a strange but very similar fashion. I was stunned to hear them telling me things I had heard before.
I had that weird feeling once, while interviewing a schoolteacher who had fled from the interior of
China, after welcoming the Red Army into his city and facilitating its capture of the city. He had found
out in time how different the Reds are to how they picture themselves, and he had escaped. As I was
taking notes, I felt that I had written all this before, and yet how could I have done so? I had only
recently returned to Hong Kong. Then it suddenly struck me. Some years before, I had interviewed one
of the heads of the faculty of Leningrad University, who had escaped from Russia. This schoolteacher
from the interior of China was telling me exactly what I had heard from the Russian professor of a
different culture, many tens of thousands of miles away. I had that same eerie feeling often during that
period, of different stories being related in some strange manner. In the jungles of Malaya, I came
across the diaries taken from the bodies of slain Chinese guerrilla fighters. I had a number translated.
To my amazement, I read exactly what I had heard from these people who had fled from China. The
same ‘discussion meetings’ that were held in the schools and factories of Red China, I now read about
in these diaries as being held beneath a knot of tall trees inside the jungle” (emphasis added).
28. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States: Hearings
before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other
Internal Security Laws (Part 46), 84th Cong., 2nd sess., 14–15 November 1956 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1957), http://www.archive.org/stream/scopeofsovietact4649unit/

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 57
 scopeofsovietact4649unit_djvu.txt. See also, Lajos Ruff, The Brainwashing Machine (London: Robert
Hale, 1959), 70–91. Echoes of Ruff’s “magic room” can be found in contemporaneous psychologi-
cal experiments conducted under CIA auspices, as well as in the CIA’s KUBARK training manual.
See, for instance, Edward Deshere, “Hypnosis in Interrogation,” Studies in Intelligence 4, no. 1
(1960): 51–64; and CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation (July 1963), in National Security
Archive, George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/
01-01.htm.
29. For an analysis of the topic of brainwashing that focuses on the case of Cardinal Jószef
Mindszenty and the possible role of a Pavlovian psychiatrist in his interrogation, see Istvan Rév, “The
Suggestion,” Representations 80 (2002): 62–98.
30. Guy Debord, “The Struggle for Control of New Techniques of Conditioning,” Situationist
International 1 (1958), reprinted in Christopher Gray, ed. and trans., Leaving the Twentieth Century:
The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (London: Rebel Press, 1998), 9–11.
31. On the doubts surrounding allegations of scientific use of drugs and hypnosis in the interrogation
of Hungarian dissidents, see Rév, 63.
32. Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality,
and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–236; and Ian Hacking, “The Invention of Split Personality,”
in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, ed. Alan Donagan, Anthony N. Perovich Jr., and Michael
V. Wedin (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1986), 63–85.
33. Estabrooks, Hypnotism, 201.
34. George Estabrooks, Death in the Mind (New York: Dutton, 1947); and John Marks, In Search of
the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 21 (for Marks on split personalities, see 197).
35. Louis A. Schwartz, “Group Psychotherapy in the War Neuroses,” American Journal of
Psychiatry 101 (1945): 498–450. A major source for Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate was Andrew
Salter’s Conditioned Reflex Therapy (New York: Creative Age Press, 1949), a text greatly indebted to
Pavlov. William Sargant’s Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (London:
Heinemann, 1957) also drew heavily on Pavlov’s work.
36. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (New York: Vanguard, 1951); Packard; Debord.
37. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 124.
38. See, also, Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Christopher
Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice,
Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); and Catherine Lutz, “Epistemology of the Bunker:
The Brainwashed and Other New Subjects of Permanent War,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward
a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America , ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 245–270.
39. Herman, 133; and Marks.

58 Grey Room 45
 40. Dulles, “Brain Warfare.”
41. Hacking, “The Invention of Split Personality,” 78. See also Krause and Pethes, eds., Mr.
Münsterberg und Dr. Hyde.
42. Lawrence Hinkle and Harold Wolff, “Communist Interrogation and Indoctrination of Enemies of
the State,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 76 (1956): 115–174. For more on Wolff, see Marks,
138; and Lemov, 203–211.
43. Lemov, 208.
44. See, for example, Harold Wolff, “Studies of Impairment of Highest Level Brain Functions
Following Prolonged Stress,” n.d., in Harold Wolff Papers, Cornell Medical Center Archives; and “1957
Annual Report: Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,” in Harold Wolff Papers, Cornell
Medical Center Archives.
45. Harold Wolff, “Failure of Conditioning Process in Patients with Cerebral Lesions,” n.d., in
Harold Wolff Papers, Cornell Medical Center Archives.
46. See, for instance, A.M. Kellam, “Shop Lifting Treated by Aversion to a Film,” Behavioral
Research and Therapy 71, no. 1 (1969): 125–127. Harvard psychologist Henry Murray reportedly exper-
imented with a variant of this approach on his students, including Ted Kaczynski, who later gained
notoriety as the Unabomber. Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an
American Terrorist (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
47. See Arno Meteling, “Mind Control und Montage,” in Mr. Münsterberg und Dr. Hyde, ed. Krause
and Pethes, 231–252.
48. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on
American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 163, 208.

Killen | Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject 59