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Reference: History of Mind Control in America

On August 26, 1957, an unemployed recovering alcoholic named Charles (Chuck) Dederich showed up to the University of California at Los Angeles Psychiatric department to volunteer himself as a human guinea pig. Dr. Keith Ditman’s experimental LSD program was funded by the federal government and as such was considered a CIA MK Ultra spin-off. Ditman would later answer directly to the dean of the CIA MK Ultra doctors, Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West when the latter took over the UCLA neuropsychiatric department that was eventually named after him. 

While under West at UCLA, Ditman testified on behalf of Charle Manson’s co-conspirators in the famous 1969 Tate-LaBianca murder trial (see Manson, Manson II).  According to the Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Ditman testified “that a person using LSD is more susceptible to the influence of a second party, and that Leslie’s (a Manson co-conspirator) use of the drug, plus Manson’s influence over her, could have been significant factors in causing her to participate in a homicide.” (Helter Skelter) This of course was consistent with Ditman’s boss West’s claims that he had personally created the aims of the CIA MK Ultra program, essentially circumventing the will of another person. (see Jolly West Part I, and Jolly West Part II). That included wiping out any memory of the person being programmed to kill or do otherwise in the first place.

It is significant that Ditman supervised the administration of LSD to Chuck Dederich because the only record of the latter’s experience is the later spoken words of Dederich himself. He said, “through a crazy bunch of circumstances, I got a jolt of LSD over at UCLA. I took this under an experimental program…On that date, I became a different person, really and truly.”  And that is the totality of Dederich’s explanation for his alleged invention of a drug rehabilitation technique that became extraordinarily famous and controversial.  It was called Synanon. Dederich said, “Everything that has happened to me since, Synanon, everything, dates from that point (UCLA LSD trip of August 26, 1957).” (see, Charles Dederich Oral History, UCLA Library) 

The fundamental technique that Dederich called Synanon was a group attack/encounter session called “The Game.”  Dederich asserted, “The Game began with an idea I had of getting people together in a room to pursue a conversation with a ‘line of no line.’ … Boy I felt great, and everyone else loved it too. The next week they all came back. That was the birth of the Synanon Game, which basically hasn’t changed at all since 1958.” (Synanon papers, UCLA Special Collections).

The Game

The game is a confrontational session where an individual is torn down mentally by his group. The person facing the others would be taken down a notch, or several, psychologically. With no rules or precautions in place, the individual was fair game for hazing of the most personal and degrading nature. It was intended to break down the individual’s ego and reduce his or her sense of self. In the end, a new personality was formed – fundamentally altered by the group that tore down the personality in the first place.

Similar, less extreme techniques are used in any highly disciplined group such as the Marine Corps, competitive sports teams, even businesses where cooperation and teamwork are highly valued. But generally, they stop at the first sign that selfish, entitled behavior is apparently eschewed by the “offending” group member. The Game was different. It was uncontrolled and savage. It resulted in damaged people unquestioningly carrying out the demands of Dederich. It resulted in people severing all worldly contact and withdrawing into a cult. In fact, within a few years, Synanon was no longer in the drug rehab business, but instead became an isolated tribe of its own. Its fundamental methodology, the Game, was almost a perfect replication of what the CIA MK Ultra psychiatrists were a) claiming the Chinese/Korean Communists were utilizing on US POWs to control their minds, and b) attempting to replicate and improve for their own mind control programs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CIA’s Time/Life adjunct Henry Luce heavily embraced Dederich with cult-like devotion, honoring him with multi page promotional pieces. This 13-page spread made Synanon runner up only to the celebration of John Glenn’s first human orbit of earth, see LIFE magazine.

Dederich’s celebrity would ultimately wane as “The Game” became positioned with brainwashing. Synanon would spiral from drug rehab marvel to primitive, tribal, and violent cult. Nonetheless, the psychiatric profession continued to promote Synanon’s ways. Offshoots were studied and practiced on prison populations funded by the government. This framework overlapped with Dr. Edgar Schein’s mind control work. Schein was a paid MK Ultra colleague of Jolly West, Robert Lifton, Martin Orne, and Margaret Singer (whom he co-authored a book with) who experimented with mind control under the aegis of “studying Communist methods.” (see Edgar Schein LSD MK Ultra). Schein was credited with redefining “brainwashing” with the more academic term “coercive persuasion.” It was an apt term for CIA MK research. Naomi Klien established in her book The Shock Doctrine that in spite of all the yammering about “interrogation research” the CIA experiments and practice were always in fact geared toward torture techniques to change (control) the minds of subjects.

In 1968, Dr. Martin Groder established a federally funded mind control experimental program utilizing the Game model and Schein’s work at the Federal Correctional Institute at Marion, Illinois. The prison was built in 1963 as a maximum-security replacement for Alcatraz. Groder coined yet another term, Asklepieion (the Greek temple of healing), to carry on the coercive persuasion by ego/personality destruction and replacement.

So effective were the new Game techniques in controlling and changing minds, the prison system transferred scores of ideological ‘troublemakers’ from around the country to have their brains washed of unorthodox ideas. For example, the editor of Black Pride news Ed Johnson (aka Akinsiju Ola), the president of radical group New Africa Imari Obadele, Chicano militant Alberto Mares, prison lawyer Lanier “Red” Ramer, and Black Panther Eddie Sanchez. According to then-Associate Warden Fred Frey “We are a dumping ground. There’s no denying that. We get all the adjustment problems in the federal prison system.” (Southeast Missourian, April 25, 1974). Coercive persuasion was used to secure participation of those minds the MK Ultra doctors were assigned to control and redirect. While some with long sentences were promised routes to earlier release, others were threatened with or subjected to solitary confinement (the acknowledged worst form of human torture) until they acquiesced to play the Game.  

The goal was to break down the “convict identity” and antisocial/character-disordered patterns, then rebuild a more “prosocial” self. Sessions used confrontation to “unfreeze” old beliefs and self-concepts, induce change, and “refreeze” new ones. All of this work was a natural offshoot of the 1950’s primary CIA MK Ultra work. A comparison to MK Ultra’s least regulated and more extreme early techniques illustrates. Dr. Ewen Cameron of Canada’s McGill University (a World Psychiatric Association president, see The Deep State and Scientology) executed this “research” with what he termed “psychic driving.”  He subjected victims to months of electric shocks and coma inducing drugs. At first, it was accompanied with prerecorded continuous playback loops commanding the victims to forget their past. Then having wiped out the memory, ego/personality, to nothing, Cameron sought to reconstruct the individual mind with months of prerecorded new messages to the comatose patient. Needless to say, the experiments wound up with deeply damaged people, both physically and psychologically. Lawsuits abounded and nearly sunk the MK Ultra program altogether. Undaunted, the MK program marched forward using less controversial methods to bring about the same coercive results. The Game was modelled on the same psychic-driving principle.

The later Schein/Groder Game techniques applied the same principles as Cameron’s psychic driving in an aggressive group confrontation context. A 2024 Cambridge University Press paper explained how the MK Ultra doctors who originally studied Korean/Chinese Communist “brainwashing” turned around and applied the same processes to Americans they wanted to perform thought reform on: “In April 1961, Edgar Schein presented his CIA-funded “brainwashing research” at a conference for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). At the event, titled The Power to Change Behavior, Schein hoped to promote coercive reformation as something genuinely therapeutic. He tried to disabuse his audience from popular fictions surrounding the brainwashing concept. Whether in Maoist China or the United States, he explained, coercive reform programs in both nations applied systematic social pressures, nudging deviants to unlearn antisocial personality traits through a process of mimicking and eventually internalizing prosocial behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. When communists used these methods Americans called it “brainwashing,” but to Schein and other social scientists the electric hype around that label caused a serious problem.” (see, Cambridge Press paper by Mark M. Chatfield) Ironically, this publication overall seems to regret that confrontational Game programs were taken out by an epidemic of civil rights violations complaints. Still, the paper is chock-full of pertinent facts supporting our narrative.

The later prison “treatments” at Marion and other facilities, were described by Black Panther (and former Marion inmate) Eddie Griffin: ““In ‘game sessions’ members of the group accuse a person of playing games, not being truthful with the group, lying, and so forth, or the person is accused of some misdeed or shortcoming. Before he is allowed a chance to explain (which is considered only as more lying), he is relentlessly barraged by dirty name calling until he confesses or ‘owns up’ to his shortcomings. He is then accused of making the group go through a lot of trouble in having to pry the truth out of him. So, for this crime, he is forced to apologize. ‘Marathons’ are all night versions of literally the same, except that they include local community people who come into the prison to be ‘trained’ in the techniques. After so many hours of being verbally attacked and denied sleep, a person ‘owns up’ to anything and accepts everything he is told. After being humiliated, he is encouraged to cry. The group then shows its compassion by hugging him and telling him that they love him. These techniques exploit the basic weaknesses in human (aggregative) nature, especially those weaknesses produced by an alienating society, i.e. the need to be loved, accepted by other people, and the need to be free.”

The programs ultimately were implemented in ten different state prison projects across the country.

 Unsurprisingly, the Schein/Groder experiments were heavily criticized as coercive thought control, targeting political “troublemakers” (including Black Muslims and other activists), and was discontinued amid lawsuits and congressional scrutiny around the mid-seventies. The CIA had to look for other venues with which to continue the coercive persuasion experimentation and practice. During the late seventies and through the eighties The Game was applied to juvenile delinquents. It was hailed and officially supported in the states of Florida and Utah for years until lawsuits alleging violations of constitutional rights and mind damaging practices broke the activity. Some have pointed to the timing of Jim Jones’ transfer of People’s Temple to the Guyana jungle was another form of mind control experiment venue change. After all, The Game was the central control practice of Jones’ People’s Temple, under the heading “Catharsis.” 

How all this ties to our narrative was touched on in the Cambridge Press study where all of the groups we have covered thus far are listed together as related:

“The brainwashing scare retained its communist associations, but the meaning of the term shifted with concerns about scientific advancements in behavior modification, government interest in mind control technologies, and concerns about “brainwashing” in violent cults. In the Vietnam era, concerns grew around the American military’s use of psychological torture in counterintelligence interrogations, and antipsychiatry activists slandered Skinnerian methods of behaviorism as sinister. Shocking events such as the Manson family murders, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and conversion to the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Jim Jones’s orchestrated mass suicides and murders at the People’s Temple compound in Guyana also heightened popular concerns about “brainwashing.” The nature of the threat increasingly symbolized the consequences of pathological individuals and government groups that abused their power by infringing [on] human or constitutional rights. Since the 1970s, instead of something that communists might do to Americans, brainwashing symbolized something that deranged Americans did to unsuspecting victims or enemies.”  Still, the study and public at large seemed to overlook the facts we have presented to date: to wit, the consistent Military Industrial Intelligence Complex connections to each of these groups.

Jolly West’s UCLA continued to support Synanon in myriad ways throughout the sixties and into the seventies. At least two professors repeatedly advocated on Synanon’s behalf before state agencies running into conflicts with the group. It also supported Dederich’s expansion into the US prison system. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of those prisons was the Federal Correctional Institute at Terminal Island (Los Angeles) at the time Charles Manson was doing imprisoned there.

As of the mid-seventies Jolly West himself (then head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Department) was receiving and organizing literature from colleagues he respected and worked with in the “anti-cult” profession that singled out Synanon and the Game as positive societal forces. Those files include a treatise by West’s (and his partner Margaret Singer of Berkley) mind control and anti-cult colleague, Berkley Sociologist Richard Ofshe. He authored Chapter Six Synanon: The People Business in the 1976 University of California press volume The New Religious Consciousness. Ofshe claimed to have spent an entire year as a “participant-observer at Synanon.”  He gave this glowing testimonial:

“The philosophical principles on which Synanon’s value system is based rest on traditional American notions of individual responsibility for action, the idea of finding within oneself the strength to control one’s life, and the faith that one can, in some mystical way, look within oneself and know what is right…

“It seems to me that the core of Synanon’s therapeutic system is precisely the fact that absolute demands are made on the individual. In considering Synanon’s authoritarianism we must not lose sight of the substance of what is demanded. The demands are, in the main, for adherence to the highest principles of honesty, rejection of behavior regarded as undesirable by those undergoing change and by the society in general, and pursuit of perfection…

“Insofar as the system is successful, it results in persons who modify their observable behavior in socially acceptable ways and come to believe that they are in control of their actions and able to govern themselves.” (Ofshe chapter of the New Religious Consciousness, source: Jolly West Special Collections, UCLA libary)

Notwithstanding the unusual support and encouragement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, UCLA, and the most influential American mainstream media, Dederich and Synanon leadership regressed into alcoholism, created a secretive and physically abusive cult, and by the late seventies had for all intents and purposes folded. It did not go out in spectacular fashion like its CIA cult brethren the Manson Family, the Symbionese Liberation Army and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. Instead, it disintegrated like the other intelligence cult that used its coercive persuasion Game methods to control its members, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon.  The Manson families practiced the Game under the rubric “Charlie’s Rap.”  Same ego/personality destruction-reconstruction method as the Game, different name. The Moon Group’s version was called Public Confession. Same technique, different name.  Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple called their version of the Game, “Catharsis.” Identical method, different name. The Symbionese Liberation Army was perhaps most honest, calling their version of the Game “Maoist self-criticism and re-education.”

All of the CIA related cults examined in this series used the group confrontation personality destruction and reconstruction methodology that CIA MK Ultra doctors originally ascribed to Communist Chinese and Korean “brainwashing.” They then repackaged the techniques, rebranded them under some ‘transactional analysis’ label and used them to destroy and create new personalities in victims of its experiments. Ironically, the authors of this coercive persuasion program would spend the rest of their careers attacking what they called cults – largely excluding the groups they had a hand in creating. In a devious twist, those very doctors, led by Jolly West, would subsequently use their experiments to accuse other groups they wanted to eliminate of applying their own “coercive persuasion” techniques. More importantly, the Military Industrial Intelligence complex would use the methodologies and principles learned to implement mass mind control mechanisms that effect our everyday lives today.