David Saunders started his PhD in the Centre for the History of the Emotions in October 2016. His research is funded by the Wellcome Trust and intersects with our Living with Feeling grant.
You feel friendly towards people. You like to feel intimate with others. You can get along with people by being yourself.
These words would not be out of place in your average self-help book. These kind of messages are contained in the countless paperback volumes that line the shelves of train station bookshops or lay forgotten in airport lounges.
You feel neat and tidy. If you see paper on the floor, you pick it up.
Yet for Louis Weinstein, a once prominent businessman from Montréal, these apparently harmless words harboured something far more sinister.
You feel friendly towards people. You like to feel intimate with others. You can get along with people by being yourself.
In 1956, following a string of panic attacks, Weinstein was referred to the Allan Memorial Institute. Here, he encountered a “revolutionary” new type of therapy.
You feel neat and tidy. If you see paper on the floor, you pick it up.
Confined to his room with a tape recorder, Weinstein was made to listen to endless loops of these positive messages.
You feel friendly towards people. You like to feel intimate with others. You can get along with people by being yourself.
The loops continued without interruption for fifty-four days.
You feel neat and tidy. If you see paper on the floor, you pick it up.
On the fifty-fourth day, staff found Weinstein hiding under a blanket, hallucinating.
You feel friendly towards people. You like to feel intimate with others. You can get along with people by being yourself.
Speaking to the Washington Post in 1985, Weinstein’s son Harvey spoke of how his father returned home with severe memory loss and paranoia. He could barely communicate with his family. “He lost everything.”
You feel neat and tidy. If you see paper on the floor, you pick it up.
This therapeutic revolution was known as “psychic driving.”
*****
Psychic driving was the brainchild of the Institute’s director, Donald Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed that talking therapies for psychiatric conditions were slow, ineffective, and costly, and thus experimented with dramatic and completely untested physical methods to treat depression and anxiety.
At the Allan Memorial Institute, the tape machine was to replace the psychiatrist. Using endless loops of taped positive messages, Cameron believed that he could destroy the abnormal memories, beliefs, and behaviours of his patients and reprogram them into sociable, courteous, well-adjusted members of society. These loops would continue for days, weeks, even months on end, overwhelming his patients’ senses. When patients resisted, headphones were taped to their heads; eventually, they were immobilised entirely using a cocktail of depressants and psychedelic substances.
How was this expensive programme of research being funded? As far as most patients and staff were aware, Cameron’s ambitious experiments were being paid for by a generous scientific organisation called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. But no such organisation existed: the Society was merely a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Since 1953, the CIA’s MK-ULTRA programme had been funding scientific research into brainwashing and mind control. In the hostile and competitive Cold War environment, Cameron’s research sounded extremely promising to intelligence agencies, offering a reliable method for wiping and reprogramming the minds of allies and enemies alike. As such, the CIA poured $75,000 into Cameron’s research, weaponizing his relentless quest to restore patients to “health”.
How does the history of “psychic driving” point to the unexpected and troubling ramifications of our search for “normality” and quick-fix therapy? What “normal” attributes and behaviours might we wish to promote in ourselves? What happens when these desires are taken to obsessive lengths, or exploited for unknown purposes? These are all questions that will be explored at The Museum of the Normal, in which visitors will be encouraged to record their own taped messages as part of an evolving sound installation created across the evening. The end product, which will be made available to all visitors after the event, will stand as a collaborative exploration of our assumptions, desires, and fears about what it means to be normal.
This post is part of our ‘Normativity November’ series which explores the concept of the normal as we prepare for our exciting Being Human events ‘Emotions and Cancer’ on 22 November and ‘The Museum of the Normal’ on 24 November.