The new face of psychiatry

By Beverly K. Eakman, New American

To ensure that psychiatry “permeate every educational activity of national life” and “infiltrate the professional and social activities of [all] people” was a global goal that originated with British Brigadier General Dr. John Rawlings Rees in a 1940 speech to the National Council for Mental Hygiene. He ended on an ominous note: “Though our knowledge be incomplete … I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity.”

Canadian colleague Dr. Brock Chisholm chimed in with sinister comments of his own at the close of the war in 1946, in a speech to the World Federation of Mental Health. He argued for “freedom from morality” and the “eventual eradication of right and wrong.” Such traditional upbringing was making children ill, he insisted. “If the race is to be freed of its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

Rees and Chisholm had company — in political, educational, journalistic, marketing, and military circles, most ensconced within interconnected foundations, associations, and “research centers” (foreign and domestic). They became Rees' and Chisholm's enablers. Together, they created Rees' dream: “a controlled psychological environment.”

Today, the Department of Defense has a new name for it: “perception management” (or “PM”), and the psychopharmaceutical industry has hit the jackpot.

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The 64-million-dollar question is: How, given what the World War II generation went through — the sacrifice, patriotism, and ideals like duty and honor — could a relatively small cast of radicals snooker an entire population?

Well, first of all, it wasn't called “perception management” right away. It came in a kinder and gentler package about “changing attitudes.”

The true believers — colleagues of Rees and Chisholm — first seized upon Russian Ivan Pavlov's “classic conditioning.” They followed that up with German psychologist Kurt Lewin's “group dynamics,” Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria's “disorganization of behavior,” and U.S. psychologist B. F. Skinner's deprivation-based “operant conditioning.” U.S. social psychologist Elliot Aronson added “cognitive dissonance.” By the 1990s, Rees' vision of a controlled psychological environment had been raised to the level of an art form.

But the darker side became known as “scientific coercion,” a term coined in 1994 by author Christopher Simpson in his watershed historical masterpiece on psychological warfare (Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, Oxford University Press). By then, the whole sorry business had morphed into the “engineering of consent” for “populations at home and abroad.” It was institutionalized in the education system as “behavior modification”; in journalistic circles as “molding public opinion”; and in commercial advertising as “psychographics.”

If you “google” the Department of Defense definition, you will find PM characterized as “actions to convey and/or deny selected information …, to influence … emotions, motives, and objective reasoning ... ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator's objectives. Perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

The Wikipedia definition adds the “imposition of falsehoods and deceptions,” seen as important to getting “the other side to believe what one wishes it to believe.”

So, PM functions, in effect, as a euphemism for information warfare.

But what is necessary to survival in wartime may not be so helpful to a peacetime civilian population, especially children.

Tax-exempt, foundation-subsidized bigwigs like G. Stanley Hall, Abraham Flexner, John Gardiner, Theodore Sizer, Ronald Havelock, John Goodlad, Benjamin Bloom, and Ralph Tyler — viewing life's dilemmas through the prism of the World Federation of Mental Health — saw it differently. For openers, they worked to ensure that school curriculum and testing ditched the traditional focus on excellence and academics to concentrate on a subjective socialization (i.e., socialist) agenda that targeted the child's “belief system.”

To illustrate the radical nature of this step, one need only quote from the “father of modern education,” John Dewey. In his acclaimed book School and Society he wrote: “There is no obvious social motive for the acquiring of learning [and] … no clear social gain at success thereat.” Fast-forward to 1981 and to the “father of outcome-based education,” Benjamin Bloom. In All Our Children Learning, Bloom averred that “the purpose of education is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students … by [challenging] the student's fixed beliefs.”

You get the picture. By indoctrinating postwar Boomers early on, perception management morphed into a psychological force of such magnitude that best-selling author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, etc.), was moved to comment before his recent death: “The greatest challenge facing mankind is … distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.... In the information age (or … the disinformation age) … we must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real.”

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