TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION: FROM PROPAGANDA TO BRAINWASHING - J. A. C. Brown

Paperback book.
Very good condition.
Book on psychology and advertising.
TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION: FROM PROPAGANDA TO BRAINWASHING
Author: J. A. C. Brown
Publisher: PELICAN
Publication Year: 1963
Publication Place: GREAT BRITAIN
Pages: 336
Dimensions: 18x11
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SYNOPSIS: Attempts to change the opinions of others are as old as human speech, but in recent years we have come to fear that our thoughts and feelings are open to manipulation by new methods and hidden techniques. To the pressures of the ‘admen’ are added a whole battery of hsi nao (literally ‘wash brain’) techniques.
Here is a timely and much-needed survey of the whole area of persuasion. Dr Brown, the author of Freud and the Post-Freudians, ranges from political propaganda, religious conversion, and commercial advertising, through a detailed appraisal of the intentions and effects of the mass media, to a cool look at case histories of indoctrination and confession.
But Techniques of Persuasion is more than a review of the phenomena of persuasion: it also contains a lucid analysis of the concept of personality itself. Only if we understand first the development of the central personality can we understand the importance of attempts to change it.
 
James Alexander Campbell Brown (1911–1965) was a psychiatrist who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He took a degree in medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He later traveled to mainland Europe where he studied in many countries. During the Second World War, he was a specialist in psychiatry in the Middle East. As well as practicing in the army, he also gained experience in mental hospitals, prisons and selection boards. Later he became interested in the normal individual's adjustment to society. He joined a large industrial concern after the war, where he worked for seven years.
Even though he learned in a school of thought which considered mental illness mainly as an individual and biological problem, he later regarded it basically as a social one. He took the view that the mental conflicts of the neurotic are in large part induced by the sick society in which he or she lives. Thus, he felt that the efficiency of industry cannot be weighed solely in terms of the amount goods it produces or its financial profits, but also considering at what cost of human health and happiness the goods were produced. He expressed this view in his work The Social Psychology of Industry (1954).