Thought reform theories:
Thought reform is the alteration of a person's basic attitudes and beliefs
by outside manipulation. The term usually relates closely to brainwashing
and mind control.
Steven Hassan, a controversial anti-cultist, has suggested that the influence of sincere but misled people can provide a significant factor in the process of thought reform. However, many scholars in the field of new religious movements do not accept Hassan's Bite model for understanding cults.
One of the first published uses of the term thought reform occurred in the title of the book by Robert Jay Lifton (a professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York): Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China (1961). (Lifton also testified at the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst.)
Colloquial use:
Popular speech continues to use the word brainwashed informally and pejoratively
to describe persons subjected to intensive influence resulting in the
rejection of old beliefs and in the acceptance of new ones; or to account
for someone who holds strong ideas considered to be implausible and that
seem resistant to evidence, common sense, experience, and logic. Such
popular usage often implies a belief that the ideas of the allegedly brainwashed
person developed under some external influence such as books, television
programs, television commercials (as producing brainwashed consumers),
video games, religious groups, political groups, or other people. Mind
control expresses a conception only mildly less dramatic than brainwashing,
with thought control slightly milder again. With thought reform and coercion
we start to move into acceptably neutral academic jargon and into the
areas of propaganda, influence and persuasion.
Dramatization:
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The alarmist concept of brainwashing functioned as a central theme in
the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate in which Communist brainwashers
turned a soldier into an assassin through something akin to hypnosis.
The idea that one person could be so enslaved to another as to do their
bidding even when (no longer) under duress, has fascinated dramatists
and movie viewers throughout the ages.
The Charles Bronson movie Telefon had a similar plot to The Manchurian Candidate but featured water supply tampering as the brainwashing technique instead of hypnotic suggestion.
It also plays a central role in The Ipcress File, where Michael Caine tries to resist his re-programming. The idea has also appeared in comedies such as The Naked Gun trilogy, where Reggie Jackson becomes a tool in an effort to kill Queen Elizabeth II, and in Zoolander, which depicts male model Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) becoming brainwashed/hypnotized into trying to kill a fictional Prime Minister of Malaysia.