Interview with Massimo Introvigne: Full Transcript

Massimo Introvigne is the founder and director of CESNUR (the Centre for Studies on New Religions). With Dick Antony, a psychologist, he has published a book synthesising the research carried out on the notions of “brainwashing” or “mental manipulation” that underpin the anti-cult campaign. The book in French (Lavage de cerveau : mythe ou réalité) is published by l’Harmattan. Here Massimo Introvigne gives us an overview of that work, which helps in understanding the current French context of the campaign against dérives sectaires.

A CICNS interview, November 2006.

Massimo Introvigne: “Whenever society does not understand a movement that seems very strange, the quickest explanation is to say: people do not join it voluntarily — it is bewitchment, it is hypnosis, it is mental manipulation. Historically, it is true that the notion of mental manipulation — born to explain Nazism first of all, then communism — was applied by certain atheist psychiatrists to religion in general. But at a certain point it was realised that attacking religion in general led nowhere, and so this distinction was made with the ‘high-intensity religions’ (note). The definition exists, but it is somewhat circular: a cult is a religious or pseudo-religious movement, they will tell you, which one joins through brainwashing; and a religion is a religious movement which one joins freely. Explaining exactly where the difference lies in any given case is then very difficult. What they really think is that a cult is a religious — or, as we prefer to say, pseudo-religious — movement that holds ideas we consider unacceptable in the France of 2006. So, since those ideas are unacceptable, we do not believe there are people mad enough to join it freely: they can therefore only be joining for reasons that come down to mental manipulation.

In the book, we begin by quoting the works of classical authors, such as Pliny, who indeed does not believe there are people strange enough to adhere to a doctrine as odd as Christianity. So what is the explanation? They are victims of bewitchment. Speaking of bewitchment after the Enlightenment risks sounding a little dated, so one speaks instead of hypnosis or mesmerism. In the United States, people could not understand how individuals — once again, apparently perfectly normal — became Mormons, members of a cult that, on top of everything, practised polygamy. So a legend arose that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, kept in his cellar a German — hence foreign — mesmerist. There is always the fear of the foreigner, obviously.

The term ‘mental manipulation’ was born in Germany to explain the inexplicable — that is, Nazism — not after but before: when the Nazi movement began to assert itself. In those years, at the University of Frankfurt, there were psychiatrists, who were all Freudians, and sociologists, who were all Marxists, and they faced a very serious problem of Marxist orthodoxy. The problem, in good Marxist orthodoxy, was this: Nazism — fine, that is normal; there is a strong socialist movement, so there is a reaction to stop it. Only, in good Marxist orthodoxy, who ought the Nazis to have been? The bourgeois. And who are the Nazis who come to smash the windows of our university? They are the workers — and the party is called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That is where the Frankfurt School is born; it is born of this collaboration of psychiatrists and sociologists — Adorno and Durkheim on one side; Federn, Erickson, Reich and others on the other — who try to provide an explanation. The explanation, in the end, is mental manipulation: the Nazis have found the secret of mental manipulation; and since they are Freudians, they say the Nazis exploit the fact that the workers are vulnerable — and they are vulnerable because they were subjected to sexual repression in their childhood. Having been subjected to sexual repression, they are weakened, and so they are easy victims for mental manipulation.

What happens is that after a few years there is no Frankfurt School any more, and all its members have become American citizens, for they are all Jewish and all socialists. At the end of the Second World War, the money of the United States government is no longer spent on explaining how one becomes a Nazi — that is a problem of the past; the question they will now be asked is: ‘Explain to us how one becomes a communist.’ The Boston project consists of centres led by veterans of the Frankfurt School transferred to the United States, where the Liftons and the Scheins are trained — that is, the people who invented the modern theory of mental conditioning. On one side there is a scientific theory — controversial, no longer followed by several psychiatrists, but serious: one can debate with Lifton, and I have done so several times at international conferences — and on the other side there is the propaganda version of the American secret services, who invented the expression ‘brainwashing’. A CIA official explained it in two words at a hearing of the American Congress, saying: ‘The brain is like a gramophone, and the communists are the people who have the technique of changing the record.’ But after twenty or thirty years of clinical experimentation, they concluded that it did not work.

Their final report is that brainwashing can be divided into two phases — what they call the negative phase and the positive phase. Now, all that these psychiatrists — who were abroad, because in the United States these experiments would have been against the law, so they had them carried out mostly in Canada — were capable of was reducing a person to a vegetative state; but the reprogramming, putting new ideas in, did not work. There were lawsuits, because some patients — let us call them ‘patients’ — died. Others had not given the consent required under Canadian law to submit to this type of experimentation. So there were trials, of which records exist; we therefore know the protocol, and we know that they ended in failure. The MK-ULTRA project was closed not for moral reasons but because it did not work. MK-ULTRA was a very sad page, for there were deaths and enormous damage; but at least we have a clinical protocol — immoral by the standard of any morality whatsoever. Lifton himself has written a great deal against the immorality of the psychiatrists who took part in these experiments; but at least there is a clinical protocol establishing, after thirty years of experimentation, that it does not work.

It must be said that Lifton and Schein are still alive, and that they do not willingly use the expression ‘brainwashing’ — in a public debate whose proceedings, as it happens, have just been published in Sweden. Lifton always told me that the title of his most famous book, Le lavage de cerveau dans la Chine communiste, is the publisher’s title. Indeed, it is odd that in a book with ‘brainwashing’ in its title you find, at a given page, that one must above all not use the expression ‘brainwashing’, which is a sensational expression but not a scientific one. The affair of the Korean prisoners of war is a less important affair than is sometimes put about. The real affair was the conversion of certain missionaries, for example, to communism. There, there is a whole theory — but this theory of thought reform had nothing magical about it, for Lifton himself insisted on saying two things: the first was that fewer than half the people on whom the Chinese had tried thought reform had converted to communism, and on the others it did not work; and that preconditions were needed — always sexual repression in childhood, exposure to doctrines such as Catholicism for missionaries who see the world a little in black and white, us and the others, and the influence of a certain popular culture.

It is true that Lifton, who is an anarchist, does not like a globalising vision of the world and has lent his personal support to certain anti-cult campaigns — but always with reservations when it comes to making laws, for example.

The extension to religion comes late. It arrives with William Sargant in England in 1960 — a psychiatrist, who does not speak of cults. Two great examples in his book Battle for the Mind are the Jesuits and the Methodists. He says that what the Jesuits and the Methodists do is not very different from what the Chinese communists do, and so one could apply the same theory of mental manipulation to the Jesuits and the Methodists.

When this English idea, which has no practical consequence, travels to the United States, it is taken up by a clinical psychologist, Margaret Singer — who died two years ago, and who was a student of Schein — and she says: ‘If we attack all religions, we shall not last long.’ So a distinction is invented between the religion that does not employ brainwashing and the cult that does employ brainwashing.

The whole battle that was fought — notably in the American courts, where Dick Antony played a very important role as an expert in several trials — is that Margaret Singer always said: ‘I follow the thesis of Lifton and Schein; indeed, I studied with Schein’ — even though she wrote only a single scientific article and two popular books. In reality, Dick Antony’s objection is to say: ‘What we are applying to cults is not a controversial but serious scientific theory — it is the CIA version of changing the record in the gramophone.’

I would say that in the United States the courts came to regard deprogramming as a criminal activity. For those who do not know these cases: deprogramming consists of abducting people — in genuine kidnappings — in the street, putting them in a van and taking them to a place where they undergo a counter-brainwashing; that is, they are spoken to very harshly, either about religion in general or about their religious experience, until they declare themselves convinced and converted. The whole problem with deprogramming is that deprogramming was almost never conducted by psychologists or psychiatrists, but by former members of movements themselves, who had made of it a very lucrative profession — there have been deprogrammings at 40,000, 50,000, even 100,000 dollars in the United States — and also by people who came from private police services and from circles that were at times rather shady. Among the deprogrammers, the best known in the United States, Rick Ross, had begun his career as a jewel thief before moving into private policing. These characters did not exactly gain their first experience at university. There have been rapes and violence, and in several countries it is clear that deprogramming is an illegal activity. It persists in Japan, curiously, where there is a deprogramming industry — aimed notably at members of the Unification Church — which continues; and it exists in China, where it is carried out by the state.

I took part in a Singer trial in Switzerland — so I crossed her path once in my life; she was an expert in the same trial. It was a defamation suit concerning the Unification Church — which, as it happens, won, before the Geneva court. In the end, the question put to Singer was: ‘How do you know that a missionary of Reverend Moon’s Unification Church uses mental manipulation, while a Baptist or Catholic missionary does not use it?’ She did not quite know what to answer. But in the end, one piece of testimony haunted her through all the last years of her life, in a trial concerning the Krishna devotees, for she said: ‘The Krishna devotees have absurd ideas, whereas Catholics have reasonable ideas.’ At that point the judges said to her: ‘So you are putting ideas on trial.’

If we want to do comparative law, there are two laws against mental manipulation in Europe: an article of the Spanish Penal Code and the French law of 2001. A bill risks passing in Belgium, while in the other countries — in Italy and in other legislatures — there have been schedulings. In Germany and in Sweden, the commissions that were set up advised against introducing a special law on mental manipulation. As for the countries outside Europe with a law on mental manipulation: a commission in Chile had proposed a law, but it is not yet in place. Otherwise there is only China — which is very curious, because in China the word manipulation, brainwashing, was born of anti-Chinese propaganda; yet China itself adopted it when it had the problem of the Falun Gong group, in order to put in place a law against criminal cults modelled, once again, on the French model, and following visits to Beijing by French figures, including Alain Vivien.

We conclude not by calling for a crusade against those who have ideas different from ours, but by observing that a dialogue is beginning, in countries such as the United States or Italy. It seemed impossible in the French-speaking countries, but certain small steps, perhaps, promise us — who knows, in a changed political situation — possibilities of dialogue with those who hold different ideas, even in France.”

Note (‘high-intensity religion’): According to Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion, a ‘high-intensity’ religion is created by reforms, attempts to restore religious belief and practice within existing organisations to a more demanding level. When the attempts fail, the reformers are pushed out of the existing structures and create ‘high-intensity religious alternatives’.