The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (1961)

This is a 2015 reprint of the 1961 edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with optical character recognition software.

In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. In The Rape of the Mind he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds.

He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized "rape of the mind." He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion.

The Rape of the Mind is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists.

Contents:

Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission
1. You Too Would Confess
2. Pavlov's Students as Circus Tamers
3. Medication into Submission
4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession

Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission
5. The Cold War against the Mind
6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship
7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking
8. Trial by Trial
9. Fear as a Tool of Terror

Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion
10. The Child is Father to the Man
11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion
12. Technology Invades Our Minds
13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind
14. The Turncoat in Each of Us

Part Four: In Search of Defenses
15. Training Against Mental Torture
16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale
17. From Old to New Courage
18. Freedom -- Our Mental Backbone