What Do I Know? Mental Manipulation: The Concept, Its Origin and Why It Should Not Be in Law

What Do I Know? Mental Manipulation

By Éric Bouzou (September 2010)

The notion of “mental manipulation” is the spearhead of anti-cult rhetoric in France. We propose below our “what do I know?” on the subject.

1) Cults and mental manipulation

The simple notion of “manipulation” within the framework of relations between persons is not new; it evokes the material means, or those founded on relational exchanges, used to abuse a group of people or someone in particular.
The notion of “mental manipulation”, for its part, is more recent; it is linked to the anti-cult fight deployed in France from the 1970s onwards: “The cult as a totalitarian organisation, with a therapeutic, spiritual, philosophical or religious aim, and in which the followers are mentally manipulated, is a French and collective invention of the 1970s and 1980s” (Arnaud Esquerre, La manipulation mentale - Sociologie des sectes).
The association “cults/mental manipulation”, in anti-cult discourse, therefore implicitly asserts that these groups possess particular techniques for enslaving their followers.

2) The concept of brainwashing

The notion of “mental manipulation” used in France is derived from the notion of “brainwashing” (lavage de cerveau in French), elaborated in the United States in the political context of the fight against communism.
The American authorities thought, for a time, that prisoners of war had been converted to communism by “brainwashing”; wishing to possess such procedures for their own use, they therefore encouraged research on the subject (see an illustration of these theses in the film The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon).

3) Brainwashing, a notion scientifically invalidated in the United States

Two directions were taken for this scientific research against a background of the fight against communism (see “Brainwashing: Myth or Reality”, Dick Anthony and Massimo Introvigne):
The first, conducted by the CIA (the American intelligence services), based on “behaviourism”, which roughly associated the human brain with a computer hard disk that could be emptied and filled at will; if it was possible for the experimenters to transform human guinea pigs into “vegetables” (by means of electroshocks, sleep deprivation, powerful drugs), they were never able to “reprogram” their victims; after repeated failures, these negative results were officially published by the CIA, thus scientifically invalidating this thesis.
A second, conducted by researchers such as Schein and Lifton, based on a corpus of psychological and psychoanalytic knowledge, in order to understand the propensity of certain people to submission or to domination; observing that the American prisoners studied had reaffirmed their initial vision of the world as soon as they were released, they invalidated the notion of “brainwashing” and introduced in its place different concepts such as that of “thought reform”.
According to the psychologist Dick Anthony, the notion of “brainwashing” supposes, explicitly or implicitly, the loss of “free will”; if it is possible to consider, relying on the Law, that a person has suffered a harm, the fact of judging that, during this abuse, she was no longer “herself” (apart from exceptional cases of physical violence or forced administration of drugs or medicines) is another question, because that would presuppose an exhaustive perception (by introspection or by an external view) of that personality allowing one to assert that a behaviour has changed completely; and supposing that this precondition be respected, what then would this new person be who has replaced the original one? A majority of researchers consider this notion as non-scientific. Nevertheless a certain number of academics, such as Benjamin Zablocki, although judging the reference to free will beside the point, wish to rehabilitate the concept of “brainwashing” in a scientific manner; Benjamin Zablocki’s approach, which is not without ambiguity as the psychologist Dick Anthony shows (notably on the question of free will and on his wish to keep the term “brainwashing”; see Misunderstanding Cults, Benjamin Zablocki, Thomas Robbins), poses no problems as long as it is confined, as it stands, to research laboratories; it is problematic if it becomes the basis of an action by the public authorities.

4) The recuperation of the notion of brainwashing in the fight against the cults in the United States

After its use in a political context, the notion of brainwashing reappeared in the United States (in the 1970s) when an important legal dispute developed between spiritual minorities and apostates of those same groups; it was reintroduced in Courts of Justice notably through the intermediary of psychiatrists such as Margaret Singer, claiming to support her theses on recognised works such as those of Schein and Lifton (in the United States, contrary to France it seems, a scientific theory can be invoked in a Court of Justice only if it is the object of a consensus in the corresponding scientific community, which was the case for the theses of Schein and Lifton).
During a trial that set a precedent, the psychologist Dick Anthony demonstrated that, in fact, Margaret Singer’s theses relied on the CIA’s current of research and not on that of Schein and Lifton, thus invalidating the use of the notion of “brainwashing” in an American Court of Justice (see Brainwashing: Myth or Reality, Dick Anthony and Massimo Introvigne).

5) The arrival of the notion of brainwashing in France, then of the notion of mental manipulation

The notion of brainwashing was introduced in France at the beginning of the 1970s, when the anti-cult fight took off in France, notably in connection with the importation of the so-called technique of “deprogramming”, consisting in kidnapping members of “cults” supposed to have undergone a brainwashing, sequestering them and imposing on them sessions of anti-cult propaganda until they reject their group of belonging, indeed until they sue it with the support of anti-cult associations; for obvious reasons, the technique of deprogramming became illegal in the United States and was, shortly afterwards, discreetly abandoned in France, following notably complaints from “deprogrammed” persons.
The appellation “brainwashing” did not have a stable resonance in France, where the appellation “mental manipulation” and its synonyms were invented: “mental destabilisation”, “mental hold”, etc., used systematically in the discourse of the anti-cult associations and of the State bodies for the fight against the cults such as the MILS, then the MIVILUDES from 2002 (their principal objective being to introduce this notion into French Law in order to fight the “cults” more effectively). One of the first to use the expression “mental manipulation” in France is the writer Roger Ikor, founder of the CCMM (Arnaud Esquerre, ibid.).
For the psychologist Dick Anthony, the concept of mental manipulation and its French derivatives (notably the theses of Doctor Abgrall) are nothing but variations on the notion of “brainwashing” and its corollary: the loss of “free will”. The sociologist Arnaud Esquerre thinks on the contrary that differences exist between the two concepts, deserving to be analysed, notably the taking into account by the French anti-cult associations of a fact they could not long pass over in silence: the followers of a “cult” are in their very great majority consenting (“a follower keeps a large part of his personality and remains a human”, according to an issue of Bulles, the journal of the UNADFI, cited by Arnaud Esquerre, ibid.).
The concept of “mental manipulation” would therefore synthesise an observation (most followers of “cults” are consenting) and a gratuitous assertion: that this consent is not really one, that there would be a “defect of consent” in Maître Picotin’s expression (“We need an offence, indeed a crime, of mental manipulation, (…) so that mental manipulation may be a defect of consent”, Café crimes, 25/11/2009, Europe 1). Let us note that certain anti-cult actors are less cautious about the part of personality left to followers of “cults”: “Nobody is safe from the manoeuvres of mental manipulation that the cults use to deprive an individual of all free will” (Psychothérapie Vigilance); “The ‘victim’ lets herself be emptied of her self without opposing the slightest resistance” (taken from a novel by Sarah Chiche, L’emprise, Grasset).
In their work Petit traité de manipulation à l’attention des honnêtes gens, Robert-Vincent Joule and Jean-Léon Beauvois show how certain techniques of persuasion (example: the foot in the door) induce certain behaviours without our knowledge. “Without our knowledge” meaning that, informed of the technique used, our behaviour could be different. Was there, in that case, a momentary loss of our free will or a defect of consent? No, because at no moment do the researchers suppose the loss (even momentary) of our capacity to be conscious of what is going on. In anti-cult discourse, deliberately anxiety-inducing, this loss of capacity is asserted (the person is no longer “herself”).
See our commentaries on the notion of hold and of the “self”.
This picture having been drawn, three questions must be posed. Is there a corpus of scientific research commanding a consensus on the validity of the concept of mental manipulation and its corollary, the defect of consent (the answer on the question of free will having already been given)? Is there a corpus of scientific research commanding a consensus and demonstrating that the techniques of seduction/persuasion possibly used in the said “cults” would be different from those used in the rest of society? Is there a corpus of scientific research commanding a consensus and demonstrating that the techniques of seduction/persuasion possibly used in the “cults” would have a more prejudicial impact than the impact of those same techniques in the rest of society? To our knowledge the answer to these three questions is “no”. Let us wager that if the answer were “yes” to any one of them, the MIVILUDES would have made it known, which is not the case.
In these conditions it appears out of the question to propose a law on the basis of the concept of mental manipulation in order to fight the “cults”. That is nevertheless what the French State and parliamentarians have done.

6) The About-Picard law

The About-Picard law (12 June 2001) was explicitly elaborated within the framework of the anti-cult fight to punish an offence of mental manipulation allegedly practised within the “cults” (see the analysis by the sociologist Patrice Rolland);
Creating an offence of mental manipulation was judged too foreign to legal vocabulary; the legislator preferred to return to the offence of “abuse of weakness”, replacing the notion of “mental manipulation” with that of “psychological subjection”; an analysis of the respective texts shows however that the two types of offence were equivalent in the legislator’s mind, only the appellation was modified (see the analysis by Maître Pérollier).
The initial text of the law, which explicitly targeted the “cults”, was finally modified to target every legal person; however the title of the law, which is not applicable, refers to the cultic movements, in order to remind the magistrates of the true target of this law and to reassure the deputies who were worried about a generalisation of its application; the law’s rapporteur, Catherine Picard (current president of the UNADFI), specifying orally, during the debates, that this law would not be applied to political parties, to trade unions or to professional groupings (Patrice Rolland, ibid.).
This law is therefore discriminatory, since it hypocritically claims to target every legal person while recalling in its title that it is to be applied against the “cults”, and it relies on a notion that is undefined and without scientific basis: mental manipulation rebaptised “psychological subjection”. This law was severely criticised by the Council of Europe; it has no equivalent in the other Western democracies.
This law benefits from a single case law (the Néophare affair), because the vague notion of psychological subjection makes the legal decision rest on the expert’s opinion, which itself can rely on no consensual scientific basis; the magistrates therefore seem to have considered, for the moment, its use as hazardous; but the MIVILUDES, through its current president, Georges Fenech, is doing intense lobbying with the magistracy to encourage its use.
For the sociologist Arnaud Esquerre (ibid.): ”(…) A person in a state of psychological subjection is a person the causality of whose acts is considered as coming from another person. What is at the heart of article 223-15-2 of the Penal Code is the recognition or not of a certain type of causality recognised by the State. The introduction of psychological subjection poses the question of knowing what the liberty of a subject is: a “free” subject is one who has the right submissions, submissions recognised by the State, from the point of view of one for whom the State is legitimate. From another point of view, which considers that the State deprives of liberty, the free being is the one without a State”.

7) Exit counselling

The notion of “mental manipulation” has also been recuperated by the protagonists of “exit counselling”, a recent and allegedly legal resurgence of deprogramming (thus confirming that deprogramming was an illegal technique which was tolerated by the public authorities) and promoted in France by Maître Picotin (the lawyer in the Monflanquin affair).
The defenders of exit counselling, following the example of Margaret Singer in the United States, refer to notions such as “thought reform” (Schein and Lifton), in the hope of giving a consensual scientific basis to a notion that has none.
There is today in France no declared official body evaluating this practice of exit counselling in order to validate its lawfulness.

8) The cacophony of expert opinions and the legislative cacophony

The qualification of the causes leading to prejudicial abuses within the framework of interpersonal relations is not mastered by the experts; this absence of mastery is found again in the texts of laws which, if they are legitimate in their objective of sanctioning abuses, ought nevertheless to be drafted with more coherence.
Several studies have shown (Stuart Wright’s for example) that leaving a spiritual minority is experienced in a way similar to a break-up in a couple; the same feelings of having undergone emotional or sexual blackmail, economic blackmail, or relations of domination can be found there; one could in all likelihood arrive at a similar conclusion concerning the professional world.
Yet, according to the case, the law relies on different expressions to qualify abuses; one speaks of “moral harassment” in the professional framework, one speaks of “psychological violence” in a couple (parliament has just voted the law, France 2), one speaks of psychological subjection (mental manipulation) in a “cult” (About-Picard law); what justifies these different appellations? A man who abuses his wife in a couple may be charged with psychological violence; if, by chance, he is a member of a spiritual minority, will it be possible to say that he was mentally manipulating her? Let us examine the different notions:
“Moral harassment is manifested by repeated doings which have as their object or effect a degradation of working conditions liable to infringe the employee’s rights at work and his dignity, to alter his physical health or to compromise his professional future” (Service Public). The offence of psychological violence, for its part, will sanction “repeated doings having as their object or effect a degradation of her conditions of life liable to entail an alteration of her physical or mental health” (Les Nouvelles News). The legislator therefore drew inspiration from the notion of “moral harassment” to define the offence of “psychological violence”; why then invent a new expression? “Psychological subjection” is defined as follows: “Is punished by three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 2,500,000 F, the fraudulent abuse of the state of ignorance or of the situation of weakness either of a minor, or of a person…, or of a person in a state of psychological or physical subjection resulting from the exercise of grave or repeated pressures or of techniques apt to alter their judgement, in order to lead this minor or this person to an act or an abstention gravely prejudicial to them” (Maître Pérollier).
Only the definition of psychological subjection establishes a direct alteration of the victim’s psyche, whereas in the definitions of moral harassment and of psychological violence it is the resulting “conditions of life” that produce a prejudicial effect on the victim. There is therefore indeed in the About-Picard law a dangerous digression towards a pseudo-scientific concept. Unsurprisingly this drift has seduced certain magistrates who wish to see it applied to other types of offence. The lawyer Yael Mellul has for example proposed a definition of “psychological violence” that would entail “a deprivation of free will” (Le Monde), without specifying what “losing one’s free will” signifies. In the programme Revu et Corrigé on France 5 of 27 February 2010, the lawyer evoked this time “brainwashing”. In the same way, certain magistrates judge it necessary to use the anti-cult terminology to qualify facts as old as the world, as for example in a case dealt with by the Court of Justice of Corrèze (source). In that tragedy, the violence of an incestuous father against his daughter is said to be interpretable using the notion of “mental hold” (a synonym of “mental manipulation”) reserved for “cults”.
“Moral harassment”, “psychological violence”, “psychological subjection”: these different expressions translate not only the confusion of the experts, but they also have as their purpose to segment artificially similar social phenomena in order to assign them more or less gravity or social opprobrium; it is thus that a suicide in a “cult” would unfailingly permit the invocation of the mental manipulation practised in the group and in the “cults” in general, relaunching the anti-cult hysteria to which France is accustomed, whereas an unprecedented wave of suicides in a CAC 40 company (France Télécom, JDD) is considered, half-heartedly and very selectively, as a matter of cases of workplace accidents.

9) Double standards

The double standards in the treatment of abuses according to the context in which they occur are not observed only in the legal framework.
Certain domains escape entirely, compared with the “cults”, from fundamental questioning about the existence of abuses in the very functioning of those institutions: “There are numerous institutional domains in the social order where a high level of control, an encapsulation and a transformation of identity appear, without any appeal being made to the notion of brainwashing. These regulatory frameworks are considered as “adapted” to the social order and the evaluation of individuals’ participation is measured on a scale going from rehabilitation to honorific appreciations. In each case, there is a considerable corpus of research that discusses these organisational practices and their impact on the individual in neutral or favourable terms. Among other examples: military training (…), convents and monasteries (…), secular and religious communities (…), medical training (…), psychiatric hospitals (…) and prisons (…). Even when the results have perverted legitimate institutional objectives, as for example in the case of police methods that extort false confessions, coercive procedures have been tolerated until very recently without the designation of “brainwashing” being attributed to them (…)” (David Bromley in Misunderstanding Cults, ibid.).
Among the activities that benefit from an astonishing indulgence, one may also cite marketing (advertising); to understand the act of purchase in order to induce a frenetic and unconscious consumption in the citizen (the objective notably of neuromarketing) is considered entirely legitimate and profitable for the community.

10) What to retain about mental manipulation

The notion of “mental manipulation” applied to the “cults”, derived from the notion of “brainwashing”, whether it refers to the loss of free will or to a defect of consent, is the object of no consensus in the scientific community, any more than it makes sense within the spiritual minorities.
The techniques of seduction or of persuasion possibly used in spiritual minorities are identical to those used in other domains of society; they are not more frequent there and do not have more prejudicial consequences there than in other sectors of society; no rigorous scientific research has demonstrated the contrary.
In these conditions, the notion of mental manipulation ought not to be used in a legislative framework, and a discriminatory one at that, or in the anti-cult propaganda conducted by the MIVILUDES, the parliamentarians and the anti-cult associations and relayed by the media, nor camouflaged in allegedly legal forms of deprogramming such as exit counselling, an effectively legal regulation of which is urgently indispensable.
It would be desirable for our legislation to harmonise its references to scientific expertise and its legal formulations, in order to deal with abuses within the framework of interpersonal relations; the differentiation by sectors of occurrence of the abuses — company (moral harassment), family (psychological violence), “cults” (mental manipulation) — is arbitrary, a cause of confusion and of discrimination.
Consequently the About-Picard law, which punishes, in fact and despite the appearances of a respect for the ordinary law, an offence of mental manipulation committed within a “cult”, ought to be repealed.
Our society, by hypocritically training the spotlight on a pseudo “mental manipulation” allegedly practised within the cults, cheaply relieves itself of reflecting on the far vaster domains in which an intense psychological pressure, a cult of concurrence and competition, or aggressive marketing techniques are used on a large scale and approved (the world of the company and of work, the domain of consumption in general, prisons, the army, psychiatric hospitals, etc.) and whose damage to the social body is considerable.
It is possible that the term “mental manipulation” will enter everyday language and that its use will be difficult to avoid; the MIVILUDES, helped by the anti-cult associations, supported by the media, is frenetically applying itself to popularising its use and its anxiety-inducing character. It is important not to lose sight of its presupposition, even if it fluctuates according to the context and the interlocutor, namely the loss of free will or the defect of consent. These concepts are socially dangerous, since they make it possible to consider as irresponsible people whose behaviour is judged disturbing; it is enough to declare that they have been mentally manipulated and no longer possess their free will, or that their consent is null and void. Certain anti-cult activists, like Maître Picotin, have not been mistaken about this, since they advocate the putting in place of a second anti-cult law making it possible to judge a follower of a “cult” irresponsible (through “defect of consent”), and against his will (a clause that certain deputies had already tried to include in the About-Picard law, but which was finally rejected… for how long?). The sociologist Patrice Rolland (ibid.) opportunely recalls that “The principle, in relations of private law or in the law of liberties, is that the value of an adult’s consent can be set aside only for exceptional reasons”. Care must be taken that the public authorities, drawn into an opportunistic victim policy against a background of the anti-cult fight, do not transform the exception into the rule.
Within the framework of the Human Dimension Implementation days at the OSCE, in which the CICNS took part in 2009 (see our report), we asked the panel of experts in charge of writing the guidelines for the respect (in the various European national legislations) of freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion and of belief, to introduce a clause asking States to abstain from using pseudo-scientific concepts (such as mental manipulation) to discredit the spiritual minorities, in particular in discriminatory laws such as the About-Picard law (this request received a favourable welcome; we will follow its evolution).

What Do I Know? Mental Manipulation

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