Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo si specializzò nelle tecniche di controllo del pensiero impiegate dai regimi totalitari. Il suo lavoro letterario approfondisce i profondi meccanismi psicologici che plasmano il comportamento umano, in particolare nel contesto dell'oppressione e della propaganda. Meerloo esplorò i modi in cui individui e intere società vengono manipolati, offrendo spunti sulla psicologia del potere e della sottomissione. Le sue analisi forniscono prospettive senza tempo sulla vulnerabilità della mente umana alle influenze esterne e sull'importanza del pensiero critico.
Meerloo's asserts that totalitarian methods can turn anyone into a "traitor." He goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describe how culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds.
2021 Reprint of the 1949 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Meerloo's best-known book is Rape of the Mind, published in 1956. The book received wide attention in part because it dealt with totalitarian applications of brainwashing techniques during the Korean War. Rape of the Mind explains how scientific brainwashing is done and argues that "hardly anyone can resist such." "Fear, and continual pressure are known to create a menticidal hypnosis. The conscious part of the personality no longer takes part in the automatic confessions. The brainwashee lives in a trance, repeating the record grooved into him by somebody else." In Delusion and Mass Delusion, Meerloo attempts to explain the mechanisms within the mind that allow for such manipulation. He attempts an explanation of the several mechanisms undergirding thought, many of which are not obviously available to individuals. An interesting early study on brainwashing by an early student of the practice.
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.