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Illustration by Michael Parkin for Wellcome Collection

Vance Packard’s ‘Hidden Persuaders’ was an exposé of the new techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers. These techniques are still at work today in the age of big data.

In John Carpenter’s 1988 film ‘They Live’, the protagonists use special sunglasses to reveal hidden messages in media and advertising. 

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'They Live'

In 2014, Facebook revealed details of an experiment they had carried out in collaboration with Cornell University. Researchers modified the type of content that appeared in some users’ newsfeeds. For one group, the Facebook algorithm was adjusted so that only posts with positive content appeared. For a second group they privileged downbeat content. The effect was to subtly change the emotional behaviour of each group. Users who saw only optimistic information were more likely to post cheerful content, and those exposed to negative posts adapted to the norms of the group by posting similarly dispiriting information.

Whether the researchers succeeded in affecting the actual emotions of their sample is uncertain. The experiment was nevertheless notable for both demonstrating the potential of platforms like Facebook to ‘nudge’ users towards certain decisions and behaviours, and for its sheer scale. Typically, experiments in the human sciences use small samples of under 100 participants. The Facebook/Cornell experiment was conducted on 689,003 users.

The 2018 scandal around Cambridge Analytica revealed that the British political consulting firm had collected data on around 87 million Facebook users. Data that they themselves claimed could be used to target individuals online and influence political and consumer behaviour. In his provocatively titled book ‘World Without Mind’, Franklin Foer suggests that the more we extend ourselves into the online, the more we leave ourselves vulnerable to manipulation. But such warnings also point to a longer history of behavioural research in the 20th century and echo equally powerful critiques about the ‘hidden persuaders’ at work on our minds.

In the early 1800s, the German phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall claimed that the precise measurement of the skull could reveal information about temperament based on 27 different ‘faculties’. Decades later, the Victorian polymath and eugenicist Francis Galton sought to identify the essential features of criminal types by conflating different images of felons in composite photographs. He collected anthropometric measurements to identify how talent and genius might run in families and to predict maladaptive or delinquent behaviour. By the early 20th century, statisticians had cast doubt on the idea that physical characteristics could indicate character, and psychologists began developing new introspective tests as a measure of personality.

The system of phrenology developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall suggested that different human faculties were physically located in different sections of the brain.

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Four perspectives of a human head

Early 20th-century tests such as Robert Woodworth’s 1917 Personal Data Sheet were engineered to identify neurotic tendencies through a series of yes/no questions such as “Do you ever get so angry that you see red?” and “Do you get tired of people easily?” Researchers in the interwar period also developed methods of projective testing, such as the Rorschach inkblot test and the Thematic Apperception Test, which invited the subject to respond as freely as possible to ambiguous visual data and thereby reveal unconscious information about the human mind.

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The Rorschach test

Personality tests were widely used for recruitment in various branches of industry, intelligence, the military and civil service. The most successful ‘multidimensional’ test was the Bernreuter Personality Inventory, which asked 125 questions and measured four dimensions of personality: neurotic tendency, self-sufficiency, introversion-extroversion, and dominance-submission. By 1946, 2 million people were reported to have taken the test and the BPI was applied to assess the personality profiles required for numerous jobs, from machine operators to Hollywood screenwriters.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), or picture interpretation technique, was developed by the American psychologist Henry Murray. Like the Rorschach test, subjects are asked to tell a story about ambiguous visual stimuli presented on picture cards. Narratives they construct around the images are said to reveal conscious or unconscious motives, aspirations, fears and associations. It was employed by War Office Selection Boards (WOSBs) during WWII to recruit potential officers to the British Army. 

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Thematic Apperception Test Card

Social critics in the postwar period argued that such tests were an invasion of privacy and a form of discrimination. In his 1956 book ‘The Organization Man’, William Whyte argued that personality tests were inherently manipulative, testing for a conformist mindset that privileged the values of the organisation over the individual. Whyte’s book included an appendix on ‘How to cheat on personality tests’, advising readers to give the most “conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian” answers possible and a series of ‘standard’ answers to bear in mind such as “I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more”, “I don’t care for books or music much” and “I love my wife and children.” Whyte urged his readers not to testify against themselves by giving up their psyche to the wills of the organisation.

Vance Packard’s 1957 classic ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ described the psychological techniques used by advertisers, aka “Depth Men”, who are “are systematically feeling out our hidden weaknesses and frailties in the hope that they can more efficiently influence our behavior.”

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‘The Hidden Persuaders’

While big business used personality tests to manage their workforce, public relations experts were exploring how they could be used to sell products. In 1957, Vance Packard published ‘The Hidden Persuaders’, an exposé of consumer capitalism’s methods of manipulation. His critique became a bestseller, stoking fears about brainwashing and mind control in postwar America. Packard uncovered how advertising and consumer products were targeted at specific personality profiles or ‘self-images’. He unnervingly recounted how psychologists working at tobacco companies could accurately identify an individual’s cigarette brand of choice based on the results of a Rorschach inkblot test.

Two psychologists are quoted in Packard’s book saying: “Now take the man who drives a Studebaker, smokes Old Golds, uses cream-based hair oil, an electric shaver, carries a Parker 51 fountain pen. Obviously he’s a salesman, an active man, aggressive in face-to-face situations and wants to make a good impression. Probably he was a quite a romantic type in his youth.” The other psychologist adds: “Also, you’ll find that he is wearing loud shorts.”

‘Psychographics’, the term now used to describe the practice of data mining and microtargeting, emerged as a product of postwar American consumer culture. This method of profiling and targeting consumers and voters, wrote public relations expert Emanuel Demby in 1989, “allows us to view a population as individuals with feelings and tendencies, addressed in compatible groups (segments) to make more efficient use both of mass media and those that are targeted to particular portions of the population.” This new technique allowed the increasingly powerful ‘ad men’ of Madison Avenue to precisely hone their messages to particular types of individual and give them a tailor-made nudge towards a purchase.

Twentieth-century psychographic research used the traditional tools of market research: surveys and focus groups. Today, marketing experts use personal data to make accurate personality assessments of individual consumers. In 2014, Cambridge researchers Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Wu Youyou demonstrated a method of generating personality profiles based on Facebook ‘likes’ alone. They claimed that 10 likes delivered a more accurate personality profile than could be given by an individual’s co-worker. One based on 70 likes was more reliable than a close friend or roommate, and 300 likes were more accurate than a partner.

Kosinski, Stillwell and Youyou’s research showed that a sufficiently large number of Facebook ‘likes’ could make a more accurate prediction of a user’s personality than a close friend or partner.

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Computer-based personality judgment accuracy

In subsequent investigations, Kosinski and his colleagues showed the effectiveness of targeted ads based on a consumer’s digital footprint. On the one hand, they wrote, “this form of psychological mass persuasion could be used to help people make better decisions and lead healthier and happier lives. On the other hand, it could be used to covertly exploit weaknesses in their character and persuade them to take action against their own best interest”. 

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have entered an era of ‘digital psychopolitics’, in which big data “facilitates intervention in the psyche, enabling influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level.” Han is one of many to imagine a world in which algorithms generated by big tech companies know us better than we know ourselves. Concerns about the role of mass media in shaping public opinion are nothing new, but where 20th-century visions of totalitarianism saw the psychological homogenisation of the electorate through cinema and radio, the age of big data opens up a new idea of manipulation by mass media, which not only preserves individualism, but also preys on it directly. We may be heading less for Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ than Huxley’s disturbing account of a ‘Brave New World’, experiencing our trapped condition as strangely enjoyable: drugged up and blissed out, luxuriating in the distraction of continual status updates.

Find out more about the Hidden Persuaders project examining ‘brainwashing’ in the Cold War at Birkbeck, University of London. The War of Nerves, an exhibition about the psychological landscape of the Cold War runs at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles until  January 2019.

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral researcher working with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London. His research explores Cold War culture through the lens of the human sciences with an emphasis on the psychological, emotional and economic relationships between humans and emerging 'psy' technologies. 

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Charlie Williams

Sarah Marks is a historian of twentieth century science and medicine, and Central and Eastern Europe. She is a postdoctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, and is co-editor of the book 'Psychiatry in Communist Europe'  (with Mat Savelli, Palgrave, 2015).

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Sarah Marks

@SarahVMarks

Daniel Pick is professor of history at Birkbeck, a psychoanalyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, and the senior investigator on the Wellcome-funded Hidden Persuaders project. His publications include 'Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction' (OUP 2015) and 'The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts' (OUP 2012) 

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Daniel Pick

@HPersuaders

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Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.

Read our six-part story centred on brainwashing and mind control, exploring how these ideas influenced and were shaped by the ‘psy’ professions.

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Does mass media pave the way to fascism?

Do good mothers make good democracy?

Can our sexual desires be transformed?

Can isolation lead to manipulation?

Can our minds be taken hostage?

How do advertisers get inside our heads?

The Hidden Persuaders

The War of Nerves

It’s not unusual for captives, like kidnapped student Patricia Hearst, to end up feeling strong bonds with their captors. But is it a matter of submission or survival?

In 1973, during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Jan Erik-Olsson took four bank employees hostage and held them for six days, tormenting them with the threat of dynamite and hanging. Yet when they were released, some refused to cooperate with the investigation or to testify against him in court. Not only that, some actively contributed to the financial cost of his defence and appeared to believe that their captor was in fact humane and protecting them from the police. Swedish psychiatrists described a new type of mental disorder: Stockholm Syndrome. The term has since become widely used, yet its meaning remains obscure and often debated. How can such bizarre, irrational behaviour be explained?

On August 26, 1973, Norwegian police lowered a camera through a hole drilled in the roof of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg Square, Stockholm. Here, three hostages are seen with their captor Jan-Erik Olsson (standing on the right).

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The Stockholm hostages

Situations where individuals identify with dominant and malevolent authority figures have long interested psychiatrists. In the early 1930s, the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi described paradoxical emotional attachments he observed in survivors of child abuse as ‘identification with the aggressor’. The overwhelming trauma and anxiety of abuse, argued Ferenczi, could leave children physically and morally helpless, subordinated ‘like automata’ to their abuser’s will.

During World War II, Austrian psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim used Ferenczi’s concept to explain the behaviour of prisoners held in Nazi concentration camps. Bettelheim himself had been imprisoned between 1938 and 1939 in Buchenwald and Dachau. In 1943 he described several cases in which prisoners appeared to identify with Gestapo guards through both their behaviour and attitudes. Some prisoners adopted the guards’ manner of speaking and even imitated their dress and leisure activities. Bettelheim described the camp as a laboratory that turned “free and upright citizens not only into grumbling slaves, but into serfs who in many respects accept their masters’ values.”

Six of the twenty-one American soldiers who chose voluntary non-repatriation after the Korean War pose for a photograph. 

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‘We Stay For Peace’

Prisoners cooperating with the enemy became an urgent political problem for the United States government during the Korean War, as reports emerged of American prisoners of war collaborating with their Chinese and North Korean captors. In 1953, Colonel Frank Schwable and 35 other US Air Force personnel falsely confessed in public to committing crimes of bacteriological warfare against North Korea. Other reports of collaboration included passing information to the enemy, cooperating with indoctrination and making anti-war broadcasts. When the war was over, one British and twenty-one American soldiers chose to relocate to Communist China rather than return home.

Virginia Pasley's ‘21 Stayed’ (US) and ‘22 Stayed’ (UK) investigated the lives and experiences of those British and American soldiers who chose to stay in China after the war.

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‘22 Stayed’

The US Army and Air Force established a panel of psychologists to investigate this psychological indoctrination, or ‘brainwashing’. I E Farber, Harry Harlow and Louis Jolyon West proposed a model based on learning theory and conditioning. They claimed that a combination of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, malnutrition and threats created a state of debility, dependency and dread (DDD). The careful manipulation of DDD could induce a state of consciousness so intolerable that captives would reorganise their values and behaviour to suit their captors’ demands. The key to successful brainwashing was to provide occasional relief by rewarding good behaviour. If applied correctly, it could lead to ‘complete compliance’.

The most junior of these three researchers, Louis Jolyon West, would gain a reputation as an expert on the science of brainwashing and altered states of consciousness. He was particularly outspoken in his support for Korean War POWs, who had been accused of being weak-willed traitors and unfit soldiers.

West was one of four expert witnesses in one of the most high-profile hostage cases of the 20th century. In 1974, 19-year-old Patricia Hearst, granddaughter of American media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by a radical left-wing urban guerrilla group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army and subjected to isolation, threats and sexual abuse. Hearst changed her name to Tania and became supportive of the group’s cause. After 19 months she was arrested and charged with participation in an armed robbery on a bank. She was photographed in handcuffs giving a clenched-fist salute and listed her occupation as ‘urban guerrilla’ on police forms.

Her 1976 trial was a public sensation. The transformation from media heir to gun-wielding revolutionary raised questions about the fragility of the self in 1970s America. Was she, as the prosecution suggested, “a rebel in search of a cause” or a victim of psychological manipulation?

Hearst’s legal team assembled a panel of psychiatrists with expertise in treating Korean War POWs as well as former members of cults. West’s expert testimony likened Hearst’s situation to that of the Korean War POWs he had interviewed in the 1950s. He reported that she experienced similar conditions of debility, dependency and dread, which made her “numb with terror”, such that she “complied with everything they told her to do”, and he observed dissociative symptoms, such as anxiety, memory loss and depersonalisation consistent with DDD, leading to a “diminished capacity for autonomous action”. His account was supported by the testimonies of Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer and Martin Orne, who also described her condition as a classic case of coercive persuasion.

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Patty Hearst

The ‘brainwashing’ defence had no legal precedence and was not accepted by the jury. Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison. Despite the similarities, ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ did not feature in public debates surrounding the trial, but it emerged in the American mass media following the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 at the American embassy in Tehran. In a 1982-edited volume called ‘Victims of Terrorism’, several scholars applied the term Stockholm Syndrome retroactively to Hearst’s story. By the time Hearst received a full pardon from US President Bill Clinton in 2001, Stockholm Syndrome, rather than brainwashing, dominated psychological discussions of her case.

By its nature, Stockholm Syndrome is difficult to study under controlled conditions. Remarkably, researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University attempted an experiment in the early 1980s, simulating a hostage situation in which volunteer airline staff were taken hostage by FBI agents posing as terrorists and detained for four days. Researchers found that hostages who perceived the terrorists as friendly rather than aggressive could better adjust to captivity, and that hostages seen as friendly by their captors reported a more positive experience. The experiment legitimised Stockholm Syndrome behaviour not only as a normal response to captivity, but also a practical one.

Former captives known as ‘Chibok girls’ entertain guests in Abuja, Nigeria.

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‘Chibok girls’ entertain guests

In 2017, over 80 Nigerian female students who had been kidnapped from the town of Chibok in 2014 were released by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram, and it was widely reported that one of the hostages had chosen to stay with her captors. Some former Boko Haram captives, not from Chibok, have spoken of the complex emotional and social ties they forged in captivity. Many married Boko Haram members and had formed complex emotional bonds. One former bride described feeling ostracised from their family and community and wanting to return to Boko Haram.

More than 40 years after Jan Erik-Olsson’s bank robbery, Stockholm Syndrome remains debated among psychologists. It is frequently described as an unconscious response to the trauma of captivity that can increase a victim’s chances of survival. Although the phenomenon remains rare, it has been applied to numerous cases of kidnapping and hostage situations around the globe. Former detainees have embraced the term to understand their own experiences, alongside brainwashing and post-traumatic stress disorder. In a recent documentary, David Hawkins, one of the 21 American POWs who chose to live in China in 1953, uses these labels to make sense of his own story.

Critics suggest that the term Stockholm Syndrome is still problematic. Like ‘brainwashing’, it remains ambiguous and fails to account for the unique circumstances encountered in each case. Nonetheless, the idea of Stockholm Syndrome remains resonant. It alerts us to the psychological impact of kidnapping and imprisonment and the mysteries of group dynamics. In captivity, isolated from our ordinary support systems, we may be vulnerable to feelings of culpability, rage, despair or even murderous destructiveness. Our identities may prove very precarious when our defences are down.

It’s not unusual for captives to end up feeling strong bonds with their captors. But is it a matter of submission or survival?

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When military-funded researchers set out to discover whether isolation techniques could facilitate brainwashing, neuroscientist John Lilly suggested instead that isolation might improve our own control over our minds.

In June 1951 a group of psychologists and doctors with ties to US, UK and Canadian military forces held a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal. Minutes from the meeting reveal that the discussion centred on the question of ‘brainwashing’, specifically those methods that could be used during interrogation to extract information, elicit false confession or manipulate behaviour.

The doctors considered various artificial conditions that could be used to create states of helplessness and extreme suggestibility. A proposal was put forward by the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb to build an experimental chamber in which a human subject would be deprived of perceptual stimuli, to make their mind “susceptible to the implantation of new or different ideas”.

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John Lilly

Following the meeting, Hebb was granted $30,000 over three years by the Canadian Defence Research Board for a series of experiments at McGill University into the isolated mind. Isolation and solitary confinement, which can have acute and lasting effects on mental health, has a long history as a form of punishment and as a mode of philosophical inquiry. Hebb’s studies in the early 1950s marked the beginning of a new wave of research dedicated to examining the effects of isolation in laboratory conditions.

By 1969 there were 17 experimental ‘centres’ in North America dedicated to sensory deprivation research, each employing their own elaborate modifications in design and technique. For almost a decade, sensory deprivation was seen as glamorous, sensational and ominous, associated with Cold War exploration and espionage. It featured in films such as ‘The Mind Benders’ in 1963, an episode of CBS’s television series ‘The Twilight Zone’ in 1959, and as a live TV experiment on the BBC’s flagship science programme ‘A Question of Science’ in 1957. Some saw it as a sinister intervention on the brain, others argued that it could enhance the mind in creative and liberating ways.

In Hebb’s original experiment at McGill, a group of doctoral students designed an experimental condition in which subjects – graduate students paid $20 a day – were placed in a severe state of perceptual monotony. Their arms and hands were enclosed in cardboard tubes to limit movement and tactile perception. They could hear only the sound of a white noise generator, and they wore opaque goggles so that their entire visual field was occupied by diffuse white light. They were fed, watered and ‘toileted’, but otherwise they were asked to stay in the situation for up to three days, or as long as they could.

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The McGill experiments

Some claimed to enjoy the experience for a time, but others reported distress, disordered thinking and visual hallucinations. As the experimenters noted, one subject chose to do manual labour for a third of the pay rather than complete the experiment.

One subject in an experiment at McGill described feeling as if his body occupied two overlapping locations.

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Subject's drawing of perceptual hallucination

The researchers also played the subjects what they called ‘propaganda’ records, containing audio recordings that made claims about the existence of paranormal phenomena. They thought that the captive subjects, suitably disoriented, deprived and hungry for stimulus, might accept the propaganda material less critically than if they were in a normal perceptual environment.

The results have been difficult to replicate, but experimenters claimed that the records had a significant influence on their subjects. “A number of the experimental subjects,” wrote Hebb, “unlike the controls, went to the library to borrow books on psychical (not psychological) research, mind-reading, and so forth; there were spontaneous reports of being afraid of ghosts, late at night.” In another account, one of his students wrote that “one man even reported that he was trying to use telepathy as an aid to playing poker.”

The method may have been crude, but the McGill experiments proposed that information could be transferred from a storage device, in this case a vinyl record, into the information processor of the human brain. In terms like these, borrowed from the emergent disciplines of cybernetics and information theory, neuroscientist John Lilly explained the technique in a paper delivered to a group of military and intelligence officials in the late 1950s. When a person is isolated for long enough, Lilly wrote, they tend to absorb signal data on demand. Under these conditions there can be an “injection of ‘outside data’ into the ‘inside generators’, with some re-programming developing”.  

A schematic diagram of John  Lilly and Jay Shurley's isolation experiment.

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Schematic of an isolation chamber

Lilly was Chief of the Section of Cortical Integration at the National Institute of Mental Health and was an early pioneer of brain mapping and electrostimulation of the brain. Inspired by Hebb’s research, he developed his own sensory isolation technique in which subjects were fully submerged in a tank of body-temperature water. The possibilities for such science being used to control human minds was not lost on Lilly, who had described his electrostimulation technique as having the potential to gain “push-button control over the totality of motivation and consciousness.” But he was also interested in how such techniques could be used by an individual to explore, analyse and modify their own mind, or even to seek a certain kind of psychic liberation.

The McGill experiments were conducted on volunteers, but Lilly and his colleague Jay Shurley used themselves as subjects in the water isolation tank. They were increasingly fascinated by the mind-bending subjective experiences they had inside the tank. Lilly left the National Institute of Mental Health in the late 1950s and developed a user-friendly version of the tank in which the subject floats horizontally on a saturated pool of Epsom salts.

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Jay Shurley and Jerrie Cobb

Floatation tanks are still used today as a wellbeing therapy and are currently undergoing clinical trials for treating anxiety, depression and PTSD. Lilly wrote extensively about how tanks could be used to explore consciousness but also to gain greater control over one’s own mind. Lilly saw the human brain as a ‘programmed biocomputer’ and argued that the isolation tank offered the user a mode of accessing, understanding and intervening in their own ‘internal programming’.

A contemporary flotation tank used in an experiment on symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression.

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Floatation-REST in an open circular float pool.

Over the last century, various methods of modifying the brain’s function have been invented, tested and imagined. Today, we often think of the brain not just as a thinking machine but also as a trainable, plastic organ. There are numerous products available on the market that promise users the ability to modify or ‘hack’ their own brains, including smart drugs, electromagnetic brain stimulants, sound and light machines and neurofeedback devices. These devices are sold on the promise that individuals can improve their social and psychological selves by actively intervening on their own brain function.

In the 1950s, sensory deprivation was conceived as a new method of modifying the internal processes of the brain, raising fears and concerns about brainwashing and mind control. But it also opened up the possibility of intervention as a means of self-improvement, escape, or artistic creativity, anticipating an era in which the self-management of our brains has become a burgeoning industry.

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Military-funded researchers wanted to know if isolation techniques could facilitate brainwashing. One neuroscientist suggested that it might improve our own control over our minds.

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In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. Czech psychiatrist Kurt Freund found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.

Until the 1960s, male homosexuality was illegal in most countries. Ironically, the first European nation to make the radical move towards its active decriminalisation was one of the most repressive regimes of the Eastern bloc at that time: Communist Czechoslovakia. This spectacular policy change in 1961 contradicted years of homophobic Stalinist proclamations prioritising marriage and the traditional nuclear family as the ideal breeding ground for a strong socialist population and the foundation for a thriving national economy.

Kurt Freund’s book ‘Homosexuality in Man’, published in German by Hirzel Verlag in 1963, and a year earlier in Czech by the Czechoslovak State Medical Publisher.

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Homosexuality in Man

The move towards decriminalisation followed the failure of a large-scale attempt to ‘cure’ male homosexuality once and for all. Czech psychiatrists used a tailored form of ‘aversion therapy’, applying electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs while showing gay men erotic images of male bodies. They hoped to force their patients to associate homosexuality with pain and disgust and recondition both their behaviour and their personal identity.

Aversion therapy had been developed by psychiatrists to treat alcoholism in America in the late 1930s. By the 1950s, clinicians in both the West and the Communist world began to apply it, experimentally, to a wide range of ‘deviant’ behaviours. This growing faith in behaviour modification was inspired in large part by the work of the Russian Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov. His experiments on ‘conditioned reflexes’ in animals showed the degree to which external stimuli could affect the body and behaviour. More than half a century earlier, in the 1890s, he had shown that his laboratory dogs could be made to associate the sound of a buzzer with the promise of food and eventually induced to salivate, whether or not there was actual food present.

Ivan Pavlov and his colleague Maria Petrova conducting conditioned reflex experiments on a laboratory dog.

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Pavlov and dog

A generation of psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1950s refined Pavlov’s theories in experiments on human beings.  Spectacular claims were made about curing people’s mental health problems through such conditioning. If a dog could learn to associate a sound with food, perhaps an arachnophobe could come to connect spiders with a sensation of relaxation instead of fear – an approach that became known as desensitisation therapy. And if such positive associations could be created, perhaps so too could negative ones.

Pavlov’s ideas were combined with the work of American behaviourist psychologists John Watson and B F Skinner, who argued that reward and punishment also played their part in conditioning. Experimental ‘behaviour therapy’ was used to cancel out a myriad of ‘unwanted’ feelings and actions, from same-sex attraction to fears of flying. Techniques designed to ‘rid’ people of homosexual desire – and even to fully transform them towards heterosexual norms – had become a mainstay of institutionalised psychiatry by the 1950s and 1960s. Some patients referred themselves, hoping to be able to conform to the social norms of the time, and others arrived through the criminal justice system. These techniques also began to replace cruder ‘cures’ for homosexuality, such as the chemical castration inflicted on the mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing.

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Kurt Freund

Czech psychiatrist and sexologist Kurt Freund experimented with these behavioural approaches on his homosexual patients, seeking to prove whether the ‘cure’ was effective. Freund was interested in quantifying and categorising the variety of human sexual life; in the 1950s he had invented a device to measure the extent of male arousal: the penile plethysmograph. Through measuring the air pressure within a sealed container enclosed around the subject’s penis, Freund claimed to be able to tell whether they were experiencing sexual arousal.

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The penile plethysmograph

The device was a response to a problem posed by Czechoslovak army commanders, concerned that men were attempting to evade military conscription by faking homosexuality. Freund used the plethysmograph as a means of screening: the men’s innermost desires were measured, quantified and recorded in response to a variety of erotic images of men and women. Those who remained unaroused by male bodies were sent off to ‘defend socialism’ in the Czechoslovak People’s Army.

Freund was curious whether his device might be able to tell him more about the enigmas of sexual desire. He began to use it experimentally with patients who had presented themselves because they were attracted to other men, selecting patients who were not under coercion from the authorities. Patients underwent aversion therapy over the course of five days, alternating with testosterone injections to condition positive associations when looking at images of semi-naked women. Could the plethysmograph show, finally, that conditioning could purge men of unwanted desires and replace homoerotic urges with heterosexual ones?

The answer was no. Freund found that the treatments consistently failed to eliminate gay attraction. The plethysmograph showed that no matter how much conditioning the men endured, they were still unequivocally stimulated by erotic pictures of other men. Although a few went on to have successful heterosexual marriages, none of the participants reported a diminution in their attraction to the same sex. Looking at these startling results, Freund abandoned the idea that sexual preference could be altered through psychological intervention. He also lobbied the Central Committee of the Communist Party to change the law. Homosexuality, he argued, could not be ‘cured’ and should not be punished. The law was changed in Czechoslovakia, and Hungary followed suit shortly after.

He wasn’t alone. In the 1960s, socialist countries in Eastern Europe were moving away from the dogmatic decrees of the Stalinist ideology that had dominated the 1950s. Scientific expertise was being given more credence; there was a new, utopian vision that findings from science and technology could revolutionise society and improve its governance, albeit still along Marxist lines. In her book, ‘Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style’, Kateřina Lišková tells us that while the family itself remained of central importance to the nation, sexual liberation was a feature of social transformations in Communist Europe as well as in the West.

Gay clubs thrived in semi-underground culture in socialist Czechoslovakia – including ‘T-Club’, captured here by photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková in the 1980s.

In the 1950s, many psychiatrists thought that homosexuality could be reformed. One found that it couldn’t – and his discoveries led to a change in the law.

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