Dark Persuasion by Joel E. Dimsdale

Author:Joel E. Dimsdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

There was no doubt that Patricia Hearst had participated in the Hibernia bank robbery. The question was why did she do so, or, more precisely, what was her “intent.” For this, both sides relied on extensive psychiatric testimony. Indeed, half of the trial was consumed with expert witnesses called by both the prosecution and the defense.

Whatever his other limitations, Bailey did his homework on brainwashing. He sought out four expert witnesses. At first, he considered engaging British psychiatrist William Sargant (who seems to pop up whenever brainwashing is considered—Pavlov, drugs, the Korean War, Frank Olson, and Ewen Cameron), but apparently decided Sargant would be less convincing to an American jury. Also, Sargant had been indiscreet, giving television interviews and writing newspaper articles about his interviews with Hearst even before the trial started. In the Times of London, he wrote: “There will never be any doubt in my mind that Patty Hearst was ‘brainwashed,’ . . . or whatever other expression one chooses to use for the same thing. . . . The last war showed that around 30 days . . . was the maximum period of tension and stress a normal person could endure before breakdown. Then increased states of suggestibility supervene. . . . One’s behavior and ideas become the opposite of those normally held, just as the exhausted rabbit finally turns and runs into the mouth of the stoat.”31

Sargant described his first meeting with Hearst. “I came away horrified. She’s pathetic now. She resembles a person during a war who has just come back from battle.” Hearkening back to Pavlov, he commented that a nervous system under constant pressure can exhibit paradoxical brain activity.32 Elsewhere, Sargant commented that had he testified at the trial he would have emphasized Hearst had been converted rather than brainwashed.33

Instead of Sargant, Bailey selected three American psychiatrists and one psychologist who had worked extensively with the U.S. military on questions of brainwashing. They were renowned scholars: UCLA chair of psychiatry Jolly West, whom we last met in his MKUltra and LSD days; Yale professor Robert Lifton, an eminent scholar of Chinese brainwashing techniques; University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Orne, who was noted for his work on hypnosis and dissembling (also supported by MKUltra); and Berkeley psychologist Margaret Singer, who specialized in psychological testing and speech characteristics.

Singer (1921–2003) pointed out that when Hearst was arrested, her psychological testing showed such profound impairment that her IQ had dropped by over twenty points. Singer also analyzed Hearst’s speaking and writing characteristics, and testified that many of the communiqués and tapes Hearst had released during her SLA days were not at all in her writing style. The prosecution picked away at this by suggesting Hearst had faked her psychological testing to make her look more impaired than she was. Furthermore, prosecutors argued that perhaps Hearst started emulating the writing style of her SLA captors, particularly since, at least in the early days of her captivity, Hearst was told what to say by the SLA.

The question of

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