Robert J. Lifton was a physician who
helped to care for the liberated US servicemen who were brainwashed
while in Chinese prison camps during the Korean War. He determined
that eight primary techniques were used against those prisoners, a
fully-orbed process of thought reform with each technique
representing a particular blend of logical fallacy that attacked a
person's sense of self. The nature of the manipulation was
surreptitious, and as the prisoners lost touch with their prior
identities and the perspective of life outside the camps. As a
consequence of the isolation and these pressures, they adopted new
beliefs and false memories as a matter of survival.
In his landmark book, Thought
Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Lifton presents
details concerning several individuals in a more informal case study
format in order to help the reader understand the process that he saw
emerge, over and over, in the soldiers and some other Westerners who
were also captured and held at the camps. One of those individuals
was a Catholic priest named Father Luca, someone Lifton uses to
illustrate how delusions (reinterpreted belief about events and his
own personal history) developed because of the intense psychological
pressure and physical factors employed at the camp during the
brainwashing process. (Today, we call this process thought reform,
mind control, or spiritual abuse, and some prefer to call it undue
influence because of its covert and surreptitious nature. In many
respects, the terms are largely interchangable and speak to the same
process, but some of the terms carry obviously more disturbing
connotations.)
Please consider that lack of nutrition,
heavy labor, physical beatings, corporal punishment in general,
shaming messages, degrading conditions, and other types of abuse
produce the environment which facilitates and enhances this process.
Consider also the possible responses of the girls at Hephzibah
House who were starved, beaten, verbally abused, mentally and
physically tortured, and treated like human trash that was unworthy
of any kind of consideration of human dignity because of their
allegedly sinful status and “strange
woman” identity. Consider that they were trapped and isolated
from the outside world and were denied free communication with their
families in a lockdown prison that exceeding conditions in many US
government correctional facilities for convicted adult criminals.
The following excerpts from Lifton's
book describe Father Luca's case (emphasis mine).
Chapter 4: Father Luca's False
Confession, pp 45-6:
Father Luca's false visualizations (or illusions) varied in duration from a fleeting moment to a period of a few weeks or months, merging into a dream-like state in which
"I was mixed up between real and imaginary things and persons. I was no longer able to distinguish what was real and what was imaginary. . . .
I had the notion that many things were imaginary, but I was not sure. I could not say, “This is real,” or “This is not real.”
This inability to distinguish the real from the unreal extended beyond his immediate confession material. Once, just after he had fainted,
"I had the idea that I was no longer in prison. I had been put in a small house outside the cathedral. People were going about outside – chiefly Christians. I heard voices and recognized some of them."
But this delusion was by no means completely removed from the confession, because in it he “came out into the garden” and saw two men, remembering the name of one of them but not of the other. . . The next day he questioned whether all of this had really happened, ans it had become to him “half-dream, half-real.” He had two additional delusions which also contained fantasies of rescue, but were more elaborate and more lasting. . .
So convinced was he that this episode really occurred that one year later, during a special movement for the exposure of all “bad behavior,” he “confessed” to having coughed on this occasion to attract the attention of his fellow priest. It was only when he arrived in Hong Kong after his release, and was told that this other priest had never been arrested, that he gave up his belief in the incident. And the same was true of another rather similar episode. . .
The chapter goes on to explain more
details about the specific experiences of Father Luca who
demonstrated a typical manifestation of the Doctrine Over Person
technique, that which systematically caused him to confabulate and
believe in events that never took place. Both the physical
conditions at the camp, the isolation from his life and self prior to
imprisonment, and the intense program of thought reform at the camp
(an attempt to change him into a supporter of the Communist effort in
Korea) created the conditions which forced the prisoners into
adapting as a means of survival. They changed their understanding
and even their memories through dissociation, their way of coping
with the abuse in order to survive.
Consider how similar this effect
compares to the experiences of the Ingram Family, described in this previous post. And consider how the minimum required 15 months or
more of incarceration at Hephzibah House might affect a young woman
between the ages of 12 and 18, especially those girls who entered the
home to escape abuse.
For a child born into the foster system and
shuffled from abusive home to abusive home while being sexually
abused, consider that such a child would have few internal resources
or sense of personal strength and self to resist psychological and
spiritual manipulation while subjected to beatings, insufficient
nutrition, and degrading psychological treatment reported by so many
former residents and staff members at Hephzibah House.
We who are
raised with excellent or even adequate parenting take for granted
that a child raised in an environment of abuse finds abuse to be the
norm and accepts it without question. People also take for granted
that severely abused children think the way that they do about
things, when in fact, the abuse has deprived them of much ability and
development. Think about this in terms of a child like Lucinda Pennington.
Read more about what Lifton had to say
specifically about the technique of Doctrine Over Person in the next
post.
