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‘Brainwashing’ from the Cold War to the Present

February 15
5:00PM-6:30PM
Rifkind Room, NAC 6/316

Join historians Daniel Pick and Andreas Killen as they discuss how political tensions from the Cold War era to the present contributed to the enduring fantasy of brainwashing and, in so doing, also shaped our understanding of the brain, mind, and the human condition.

Daniel Pick is the author of Faces of Degeneration, the edited volume Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, and, most recently, Brainwashed (2022). From 2014-2021, he was the senior investigator of a research project at Birkbeck on the history of ideas about mind control during and since the Cold War.


 

Andreas Killen is Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published widely on the history of psychiatry and the human sciences, including, most recently, Nervous Systems: Brain Science in the Early Cold War (2023).