Psychoanalysis and American Intelligence Since 1940:
Unexpected Liaisons

By Knuth Müller (Germany)

In Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick (Eds.), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism, London, UK: Routledge, 2016.

This book seeks to alter the way psychoanalysis is positioned in the political landscape of the twentieth century by locating it in “totalitarian” times. It argues that the rise of fascism, the trauma of the Second World War, and the transformation of that struggle during the Cold War, shifted the center of gravity within the profession as well as the social understanding of its role. Collectively the decades from the 1920s through the 1960s—a period of large-scale growth, development, and repositioning of the psychological sciences as a whole—were permeated by anxieties about the threat of totalitarian societies and the nature of the totalitarian “mind,” as well as deliberation about the psychological basis for freedom in society. The authors in this edited volume investigate how particular visions of the mind, therapy, and polities interacted during the age of Total War and Cold War, and ask how the history of psychoanalysis might be rewritten in this light.

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism is a result of a conference held at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London, in 2012. It not only contains papers presented at the conference, but also adds and expands research efforts concerning the impact of the Second World War and totalitarianism on psychoanalysis, as well as the impact of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the war and totalitarian systems.

In Chapter 11 of this edited volume, “Psychoanalysis and American Intelligence Since 1940: Unexpected Liaisons,” Knuth Müller outlines the history of US-American psychoanalysis and its collaboration with US centralized intelligence services including the COI, OSS, CIA, and other military-intelligence networks before and during the Cold War years. Originally bound to defend the free world from totalitarianism in a time of utter crisis and existential threat by German and Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism, the ethical and moral decisions of the psychoanalytic community slowly began to erode, not only during but also after WWII. In receiving continued financial aid from the intelligence community for Cold War-related research on topics including sensory deprivation, stress induction, sleep deprivation and psychoactive drugs, aspects of their work—sometimes undertaken in utter disrespect for the Hippocratic Oath and the Nuremberg Code of 1947—contributed to the development of psychological torture techniques (relabeled “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” by the Bush-Administration), thus in some ways supporting the totalitarian structures that they were originally committed to counteracting.