| Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism | |
| Translator: | Richard Jaffe (Chinese) |
| Author: | Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. |
| Cover Artist: | Shelley Gruendler |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Psychology Brainwashing Mind control |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Publisher: | Norton, New York (1961, first edition) University of North Carolina Press (reprint) |
| Release Date: | 1961, 1989 (UNC Press reprint) |
| Media Type: | Paperback |
| Pages: | 524 (1989 reprint) |
| Isbn: | 0-8078-4253-2 |
| Dewey: | 153.8/53/0951 19 |
| Congress: | BF633 .L5 1989 |
| Oclc: | 19388265 |
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China is a non-fiction book by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the psychology of brainwashing.
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 these interviews, which in some cases occurred regularly for over a year, Lifton identified the tactics used by Chinese 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 by Norton in New York.[1] The 1989 reprint edition was published by University of North Carolina Press.[2] Lifton is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.
In the book, Lifton outlines the "Eight Criteria for Thought Reform":
See main article: Thought-terminating cliché.
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism popularized the term "thought-terminating cliché". This refers to a cliché that is a commonly used phrase, or folk wisdom, sometimes used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the clichéd phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissent or justifying fallacious 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:[4]
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.
In George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the fictional constructed language Newspeak is designed to eliminate the ability to express unorthodox thoughts. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World society uses thought-terminating clichés in a more conventional manner, most notably regarding the drug soma as well as modified versions of real-life platitudes, such as "A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away".
In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann as a pseudo-intellectual who used clichés and platitudes to justify his actions and the role he played in the Jewish genocide of World War II. For her, these phrases are symptomatic of an absence of thought. She wrote "When 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 against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by their existence."[5]