ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which psychiatry was used for political and military purposes during the Cold War in North America and the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s, the central intelligence agency (CIA) decided to start bankrolling Ewen Cameron's allegedly therapeutic but in fact experimental and highly dangerous methods of treatment. In the 1950s, there was a strong faith in the United States in the power of the behavioural sciences (psychology, psychobiology, social psychology) to reveal the hidden corners of the human mind and to provide the authorities with useful instruments for controlling and conditioning people. The chapter focuses on Russian political psychiatry in the 1960s and the 1970s, but it first briefly refers to the fact that even in Imperial Russia one could be labelled mad if one gave expression to politically dangerous ideas. Finally, the chapter ends with a short discussion of the civil rights activism of an exceptional ex-psychiatric patient in the United States.
