Psychiatry, "Brainwashing," and the American Character

Never have the presumably typical per-sonality characteristics of the American citizen appeared to be the subject of so much attention, at home and abroad, as they are today. It need not surprise us that hostile voices in certain other lands describe Americans as “warmongers ” or “selfish ex-ploiters. ” Even the murmurs of ambiva-lent foreign friends, calling us “thought-less, ” “brash, ” or “spoiled ” are not too dif-ficult to understand. But today American concern with American character arrests our attention since it, too, is so predomi-nantly critical. Domestic outcries against flaws in the national character have reached a most remarkable pitch in the last decade. Many of these alarms have been couched in quasi-psychological terms, and psychi-atry has been invoked to explain the characterological deterioration and moral shortcomings of the American in the mod-ern world. One of the most extraordinary examples of this phenomenon (of pseudo-psychiatric national self-abnegation) has been what I have termed elsewhere “the great ‘brain-washing ’ hoax” ( 45). Arising from a loose original definition ( 13), and from mislead-ing statements by a few individuals (in-cluding psychiatrists) about the behavior of American prisoners of war in Korea (19), a public image of the young American in uniform as weak, passive, cowardly, un-patriotic, materialistic, and hopelessly lack-ing in conscience and moral character has been engendered during the past decade. This “hollow American ” is depicted as a pushover for communist indoctrination, and psychiatric explanations are given (and accepted) to show how our national institutions have failed to produce men on a par with the tough, red-blooded, patri-otic citizen-soldiers of our own armies of 1 Read at the 119th annual meeting of The