the sleeper effect: hypnotism, mind control, terrorism

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John Frankenheimer, dir. The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.Raymond’s mother manipulatesand controls newspaper and television images that affect thewhole nation.

Grey Room 45, Fall 2011, pp. 88–105. © 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 89

The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control,TerrorismSTEFAN ANDRIOPOULOS

Anxieties about clandestine terror cells have been prevalent in popular culture andpolitical discourse since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Television shows suchas Sleeper Cell: American Terror and 24 center on the frightening figure of the“sleeper”—a terrorist who lies dormant in our midst, living an ostensibly normallife while secretly plotting acts of destruction and mayhem. Corresponding to andpossibly inspired by these fictional scenarios was the real-life but failed attempt toexplode a bomb-packed car in New York’s Times Square by Faisal Shahzad, a natu-ralized U.S. citizen who lived in a small town in Connecticut. But the fear-provokingfigure of the sleeper has a long prehistory—in Cold War culture and at the end of thenineteenth century. The Manchurian candidate Raymond Shaw seems to be a patrioticAmerican, a war hero who earned the Medal of Honor fighting Communist NorthKorea. But as readers of Richard Condon’s best-selling novel know, he is in realityunder “remote control,” waiting to be activated by his “operator” who will compelhim to commit murder and to participate in an elaborate plot that is meant to destroyAmerican democracy.1 This fictional Cold War scenario of a brainwashed clandes-tine assassin coincided with contemporaneous warnings against the hypnoticpower of advertising and theories of propaganda that described the delayed andclandestine workings of unreliable information as the so-called sleeper effect. Buteven earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, medical researchers, legal theo-rists, and literary authors raised similar concerns, anticipating fantasies of absolutemind control by invoking the ostensibly unlimited power of hypnotic suggestion.

During the 1880s French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot legitimized hypnosisas a subject of serious medical study. Charcot’s interest lay in a detailed clinicaldescription of the “grand hysterical attack,” and he asserted a constitutive linkbetween hysteria and hypnotism. According to Charcot, only hysterics could behypnotized. But this assumption of a constitutive link between hypnosis and a

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pathological state of our nervous system was vehemently contradicted by othermedical researchers. In diametrical contrast to Charcot, the doctors of the “NancySchool” defined hypnosis not as a disease of the nervous system but as a state akinto sleep. This conception was first formulated in Ambroise Liébeault’s study OfSleep and States Analogous to It (1866) and was then adapted in Hippolyte Bernheim’sworks, which found enormous resonance in the 1880s.2

In the preface to his On Suggestion and Its Therapeutic Applications (1886),Bernheim directly opposed Charcot, insisting that the hypnotic state was “not a neurosis analogous to hysteria.”3 Bernheim asserted that the “induced sleep” didnot differ from a “natural” one.4 The affinity of hypnosis to natural sleep alsoexplained why “the overwhelming majority of persons” were “suggestible” eventhough they did not suffer from hysterical symptoms. But to account for the role of suggestion, Bernheim expanded Liébeault’s notion of hypnosis. In a circularequation of hypnosis and suggestion, Bernheim wrote, “To define hypnosis as aninduced sleep, is to give a too narrow meaning to this word. . . . I define hypnotismas inducing a specific psychic condition of increased suggestibility. . . . It is sugges-tion that generates hypnosis.”5

Whereas Charcot and his disciples characterized hypnosis as a physical con ditionof “heightened neuro-muscular excitability” (l’hyperexcitibalité neuro-musculaire),Bernheim conceived of hypnosis as a mental or “psychic condition,” marked by anincreased suggestibility.6 The emerging rapport between hypnotist and hypnotizedsubject was alleged to constitute a relationship of unlimited power on the hypno-tist’s part. Even Charcot asserted, in his description of the somnambulist phase of“grand hypnotism,” “Our power does not encounter any limits in this domain; forwe can extend our influence almost toward the infinite.”7 Bernheim in turn repre-sented the hypnotized subject as an “automaton controlled by a foreign will.”8

As Bernheim and numerous other physicians affirmed, the hypnotized subject func-tioned as a sort of medium who could even be compelled to commit crimes, againsthis or her own will. Anticipating Cold War anxieties of absolute mind control, the medical theories of the école de Nancy thereby raised the “terrifying specter ofhypnotic crime.”9

Because no unequivocally verified cases of crimes committed under hypnosiswere known, many medical researchers staged simulated hypnotic crimes in orderto prove their possibility. Auguste Forel, who taught in Switzerland, described onesuch experiment:

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To an older man of good suggestibility, whom I had just hypnotized, I gave arevolver that Mr. Höfelt himself had previously loaded with blanks only.Pointing to H., I explained to the hypnotized that the latter was a thoroughlyevil person and that he should shoot him dead. With utter determination hetook the revolver and fired a shot directly at Mr. H. Mr. H., simulating aninjured person, fell to the floor. Then I explained to the hypnotized man thatthe fellow was not quite dead yet and that he should shoot him again, whichhe did without hesitation.10

In addition to Forel, the physicians Bernheim, Edgar Bérillon, Henri-Étienne Beaunis,Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and the young Arthur Schnitzler staged similar “performances” (Vorstellungen)—all for the ostensibly scientific purpose of prov-ing to their largely judicial audiences that hypnotic crimes were feasible.11

But the notion of sleep was central not only to Liébeault’s definition of hypnosis,which was extended by Bernheim to include phenomena of waking suggestion. A different, less conspicuous deployment of the term can also be observed inBernheim’s description of so-called posthypnotic suggestions. In addition to hisexperiments on the therapeutic and criminal use of hypnosis, Bernheim explored“suggesting to a somnambulist actions . . . which were to be carried out not duringhypnosis but after awakening.”12 Bernheim conceived of such a suggestion assecretly hatching in the subject in whom it had been implanted under hypnosis.When the time arrived for its execution—which could be months later—the embed-ded suggestion took control of the body and was promptly carried out. Transferringthe notion of sleep from the somnambulist or sleeper to the hypnotic commanditself, Bernheim writes in his 1886 treatise De la suggestion,

A suggestion can thus be sleeping unconsciously in the brain into which it hasbeen implanted during sleep and will not emerge before the day assigned inadvance for its emergence. Further research is necessary in order to elucidatethis curious fact of psychology and to establish how long a hypnotic suggestioncan thus, according to hypnotic order, remain latent before its realization.13

Bernheim’s description of this “curious fact of psychology” highlights the latencyof the implanted hypnotic suggestion that is dissociated from our waking con-sciousness and that does not manifest itself before the time for its execution hasarrived. The hypnotized subject therefore has no way of detecting hidden sugges-tions that might be lurking in his or her brain. In 1915, Sigmund Freud describedthese posthypnotic suggestions as an early experimental demonstration of the

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boundary that separates our unconscious from our ego: “Incidentally, even beforethe time of psychoanalysis, hypnotic experiments, and especially posthypnotic suggestion, had tangibly demonstrated the existence and agency of the mentalunconscious.”14

But in the late nineteenth century, many physicians were less interested in thetheoretical implications of successful posthypnotic suggestions, focusing insteadon fictional scenarios of criminal suggestion, which they presented as real. TheSwiss researcher Forel came to see a particular danger in the employment ofposthypnotic suggestions in which, in addition to a crime and the time set for itsexecution, the idea of “free volition” was implanted, causing the hypnotized personcommitting the crime to believe in his or her own free will. As Forel wrote,

One of the most insidious ruses of suggestion, however, lies in the use of timingalong with implanting amnesia and the idea of free volition in order to prompta person . . . to perform a criminal act. That person then finds himself in a situation that is bound to create in him every illusion of spontaneity while inreality he is only following the command of someone else.15

The belief in perfectly camouflaged suggestions produced the powerful paranoiathat an unlimited number of hypnotic crimes could be committed without beingrecognized as such. In later editions of his textbook Forel shifted from asserting thereality of such hypnotic crimes to indicating their mere possibility. In 1907 he wrote,“One of the most insidious ruses of suggestion, however, would be the not impossi-ble use of timing along with implanting amnesia and the idea of free volition inorder to prompt a person . . . to perform a criminal act.”16 But Forel never renouncedthe plausibility of this scenario, which emerged from a reciprocal exchange betweenmedicine, law, and literary fiction. Medical researchers invoked the terrifyingspecter of an unknown number of actual hypnotic crimes that could not be recog-nized as such. But empirical evidence for this anxiety was restricted to theatricalsimulations and literary tales, which were equated with reality.17

One especially powerful narrative that enacted the scenario of being controlledby a foreign will was Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” (1887). The diary of theunnamed narrator minutely documents how the narrator gradually submits to the control of an invisible being that eventually drives him to suicide. Within thediegetic universe of the literary text, the representation of being possessed by anexternal force is lent scientific credence by the figure of Dr. Parent. As the narratornotes in his diary after returning from a dinner party given by his cousin,


I found myself seated next to two young women, one of whom was the wife ofa physician, Doctor Parent, who has a considerable interest in nervous disordersand the unusual phenomena which are currently being generated by experimentsin hypnosis and suggestion. He told us at some length about the startling resultsobtained by English researchers and the doctors of the Nancy School.18

Parent tries in vain to refute the objections of his skeptical listeners. Finally, hehypnotizes the narrator’s cousin and orders her to obtain, under false pretenses, fivethousand francs on the next day, after being awakened from hypnosis:

She [Sablé] sat in an armchair, and he [Parent] began starring hypnotically intoher eyes. . . . I saw Mrs. Sablé’s eyes grow heavy, her mouth tense up and herchest begin to heave. Ten minutes later she was asleep. . . . The doctor com-manded, “You will get up tomorrow at eight o’clock. Then you will pay a visitto your cousin in his hotel and implore him to give you five thousand francsthat your husband wants from you and that he needs before his next trip.”Then he woke her up.19

Sablé promptly carries out the order received under hypnosis and persists in thebelief that she is acting on behalf of her husband, even after the narrator tells her thatshe is only executing Parent’s posthypnotic command:

I went on: “Do you have any recollection of what happened yesterday at yourhouse?”

“Of course.”“Do you remember Doctor Parent hypnotizing you?”“Yes.”“Well, he ordered you to come here this morning and borrow five thousand

francs from me, and you are now merely obeying that suggestion.”She thought for a few moments and then answered: “But you must under-

stand it is my husband who is demanding the money.”For a whole hour I tried persuading her, but I failed utterly.20

Maupassant’s narrative highlights the secrecy of Doctor Parent’s posthypnoticcontrol. The hypnotic implantation of amnesia is so powerful that it cannot be over-come. Even though Sablé is “dominated by the irresistible order she has received,”she continues to believe that she is acting of her own volition.21

Instead of calling the reality of hypnotic crimes into question, the absence ofclearly verified cases could thus be read as testifying to the unlimited power of

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posthypnotic suggestion. Hellmut Ivers wrote in his treatise on Hypnosis in GermanCriminal Law, “Cases of this nature have . . . certainly come to trial in the past. Butthe court is unable to recognize the real cause of the criminal act . . . when free volitionor amnesia have been suggested.”22 According to Ivers, the hypnotic crime cannotbe detected, and the court will “find the acting person guilty.”23 Legal, medical, andliterary representations of posthypnotic suggestion were accordingly marked by aparanoid phobia about the power of clandestine hypnotic commands controlling theactions of the hypnotized subject for an indefinite period. These anxieties extendedalmost unchanged into the 1910s and 1920s, when “crime and suggestion” advancedto the “most popular subject” of cinema.24 Films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinetof Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) enacted theostensibly unlimited power of the hypnotist on the cinematic screen, subjecting theviewer, via close-ups and point-of-view shots, to the hypnotic power of the cine-matic apparatus. At the same time, numerous physicians employed suggestion inorder to produce visual filmlike hallucinations in their hypnotized patients, andearly theories of film described the new medium as exerting an irresistible hypnoticinfluence over its spellbound audiences. Some even raised the prospect that cine-matic suggestions could compel susceptible viewers to commit crimes after leavingthe movie theater, an anxiety that replicated Forel’s warning against crimes com-mitted under the influence of posthypnotic suggestion.25

A similarly paranoid scenario of clandestine control emerged in the 1950s whenCold War anxieties about brainwashed sleeper agents coincided with ominouswarnings against the insidious power of advertising and the delayed “sleeper effect”of propaganda. Like Maupassant’s citation of contemporaneous scientific research,Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate refers to a number of scientific texts in order to lend credibility to its representation of conditioning orbrainwashing. The text blends theories of hypnotism with behaviorist notions ofconditioning, describing this Cold War method of mind control as a “radical tech-nology for descent into the unconscious mind.”26 Toward the beginning of the novel,the figure of Yen Lo gives a lecture on the topic of brainwashing, telling his audi-ence of Soviet and Chinese Communist functionaries,

I am sure that all of you have heard that old wives’ tale . . . that no hypnotizedsubject may be forced to do that which is repellant to his moral nature. . . . Thatis nonsense of course. . . . The conception of people acting against their ownbest interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleepwalking andin politics every day.27


Before invoking sleepwalking and politics as empirical proof of his assertion, YenLo quotes a number of scientific articles and books that support his claim that thehypnotized subject can be compelled to commit crimes. These texts includeMargaret Brenman’s “Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Antisocial andSelf-Injurious Behavior,” published in the journal Psychiatry in 1942, and Wesley R.Wells’s “Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Crime,” which was printed in1941 in The Journal of Psychology.28 Yen Lo also cites Andrew Salter’s ConditionedReflex Therapy (1949) and Fredrick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), abook about the pernicious influence of cartoons on children.29

The scientific texts quoted in The Manchurian Candidate date from the 1940s andearly 1950s. But Condon’s 1959 novel itself constitutes one of the most compellingarticulations of a cultural fantasy that pervaded both literary fiction and contempo-raneous medical research. Condon’s representation of Raymond Shaw as a docileautomaton who kills his platoon members, his father-in-law, and even his own wifebecame the shorthand for a widespread anxiety that justified, or even engendered,further scientific experiments that set out to implement similar scenarios. In 1958and 1959, while Condon wrote and published his novel, the U.S. CentralIntelligence Agency funded clandestine research programs that explored the limitsof brainwashing under the code name MK-ULTRA. As Rebecca Lemov and othershave shown, the Scottish-American psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron experimentedwith drugs, hypnosis, and extreme stress as means of “depatterning” and mind con-trol. Without referring to contemporaneous narrative fiction, Lemov has describedthese experiments as emerging from “a commonly held fantasy perceived as animpending reality of exerting absolute control over someone.”30 But the role of literature was not restricted to Cameron reading “science fiction each night beforegoing to bed.”31 Literary texts such as The Manchurian Candidate played a constitu-tive role in the emergence of this scientific fantasy. As in the late nineteenth century,literary tales did not just unilaterally adapt established scientific knowledge.Instead, Condon’s novel and comparable fictional scenarios served as a catalyst forfurther research into the ostensibly unlimited possibilities of mind control and psy-chological warfare. William Sargant’s Battle for the Mind (1957) thus quotes literarytexts by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as if these novels constituted scientificaccounts of real-life experiments.32

In Condon’s novel, the figure of Yen Lo blends the fantasy of absolute mind con-trol with contemporaneous anxieties about Communist sleeper agents. Claimingthat he is able to “prolong posthypnotic amnesia into eternity,” Yen Lo develops a

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scenario of clandestine assassinations that are marked by absolute “secrecy and control.”33 As Yen Lo asserts, “If a normally conditioned Anglo-Saxon could betaught to kill and kill, then to have no memory of having killed, . . . he would remainan outwardly normal, productive, sober and respectful member of his commu-nity.”34 Without explicitly introducing the term, Condon’s novel thereby alludes tocontemporaneous anxieties about the invisibility or latency of the “sleeper agent,”a phrase that emerged concurrent with the introduction of the term brainwashingin order to describe long-term clandestine Communist agents who lie dormantwithin the United States. The first use of the term remains elusive, but it was wellestablished by 1955 when Holly Roth published The Sleeper, a novel that revolvesaround a covert Communist agent who succeeds in infiltrating the cryptographicsection of the U.S. Army. As a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in thenovel says, “Hollister, we realize now . . . was a sleeper—a member of the CommunistParty whose life was dedicated to the one big moment.”35

The novel does not describe how Hollister has been recruited by the enemies ofthe United States. But brainwashing and mind control are mentioned toward theend of the text. Its closing pages describe a clandestine U.S. operation that seeks toinfiltrate Communist China with Asian-American sleeper agents who have beentrained in camouflage and psychological warfare. A military general justifies thisrecourse to methods that are “quite worthy of the Chinese” by describing them as an“antidote” to the poison of Communist “brainwashing.”36 The novel furthermoreintroduces a different mode of persuasive communication. The one female protago-nist of the text is not only under suspicion of being an accomplice to the Communistsleeper; she also works as a copywriter for an advertising agency on Madison Avenue.37

A similar contiguity of brainwashing and advertising can be observed in TheManchurian Candidate where Senator Iselin finally puts the number of allegedmembers of the Communist Party who work in the Department of Defense at fifty-seven. According to Raymond’s mother, that is a number that everybody can remem-ber “as it could be linked so easily with the fifty-seven varieties of canned food thathad been advertised so well and so steadily for so many years.”38 In addition to thisreference to advertising, the novel also presents television as a medium of condi-tioning and manipulation. For years, the Soviet Union and Raymond’s mother havebeen plotting an elaborate plan to assassinate a presidential candidate during histelevised party convention. A blood-splattered Senator Iselin is then supposed to“really hit that microphone and those cameras . . . rallying a nation of televisionviewers into hysteria . . . which will sweep them right into the White House under

John Frankenheimer, dir. The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.


powers which will make martial law seem like anarchism.”39

In John Frankenheimer’s cinematic adaptation of the novel, the new massmedium of television moves even more clearly into the center of attention. At thebeginning of the film, the return of the decorated war hero Raymond Shaw turnsinto an arranged photo op as Raymond’s mother makes a press photographer take apicture of Raymond, who finds himself flanked by his stepfather, Senator Iselin,under a banner that reads “Johnny Iselin’s boy.” The contrast between the wideframe of cinema and a tightly and deceptively framed news image that has beenarranged by Raymond’s mother is emphasized even more strongly in a latersequence, which shows Senator Iselin attending a press conference held by the sec-retary of defense. The film image shows in a medium shot Raymond’s mother in theleft part of the frame, seated next to a control television screen that shows the sec-retary of defense. Unnoticed by anybody but the viewer of the film, Raymond’smother gives a signal to her husband. Iselin gets up to announce a serious questionthat concerns “the safety of the whole nation,” shouting that he has proof that 207members of the Communist Party work in the Department of Defense. The deepstaging of the right part of the frame allows the viewer of the film to compare theclose-up of the television screen in the lower part of the image with a wider view ofthe mise-en-scène than is captured on the tiny screen. The director or enunciator of this staged television image, Raymond’s mother, remains visible in the left part ofthe frame as she approvingly observes the image of her husband on the televisionscreen. A cut to the right renders visible the television camera that captures theimage of Iselin, again contrasting his agitated body with the close-up of his face onthe control screen. The film cuts back to the left, showing Raymond’s mother hov-ering over the television set, thereby revealing the puppeteer who is in charge of thetelevision image.

The widescreen film highlights the material apparatus of television cameras andcontrol screens, revealing the lack of background information that the narrow frameof the television set imposes on its viewer. The close-up of television allows forSenator Iselin’s campaign of misinformation. The wider shot of cinema, by contrast,reveals Raymond’s mother as the person who is truly in control of what can be seenby a nation of television viewers. In Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922),extended point-of-view shots force the viewers of the film to adopt the perspectiveof Mabuse’s hypnotized victims, thereby establishing the hypnotist as an embodimentof the cinematic apparatus. But in this sequence of The Manchurian Candidate, thenewer medium of television is presented as a dangerous source of mass manipula-

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tion, whereas cinema functions as a medium of insight and knowledge.Nonetheless, contemporaneous discursive representations of Cinerama and

CinemaScope ascribed a “frightening” immersive power to these new wide-screentechnologies, one that went so far as to allow for the “condition[ing]” of cinematicaudiences.40 Within Frankenheimer’s film, this implication of cinema in a widermediatic network of mind control becomes visible in a sequence that visualizesBennett Marco’s recurring nightmares about Yen Lo’s terminal experiments. Thedream sequence opens with a long circular pan, possibly alluding to the curvedscreen of Cinerama, which needed to be scanned by the viewer because its entiretycould not be apprehended in a single glance. The image alternates between show-ing the Communist functionaries to whom Yen Lo presents his lecture on the unlim-ited power of brainwashing and a meeting of the Ladies Garden Club in a NewJersey hotel lobby, where Bennett Marco and the other members of Raymond Shaw’splatoon believe themselves to be. By partially aligning the cinematic audience withYen Lo’s brainwashed test subjects, the scene comments on the conflict betweenviewers’ awareness of sitting in a movie theater and their “conditioned” immersioninto the film’s diegetic universe.

In Cold War culture, television, advertising, and new technologies of wide-screencinema were thus placed in proximity to Communist techniques of brainwashingand propaganda. Timothy Melley has highlighted the structural affinity that con-nects texts from opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as Edward Hunter’sBrain-Washing in Red China (1951), J. Edgar Hoover’s Masters of Deceit (1958), andVance Packards’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957).41 Hunter’s focus is on Communistpropaganda, whereas Packard reveals how the clandestine mechanisms of advertis-ing control the American consumer in the shopping mall. But both texts present thesame scenario of a docile subject who has been brainwashed into following exter-nal commands. Quoting a study by the “motivational analyst” James Vicary, whoinstalled hidden cameras in supermarket aisles to record the eye-blink rate of femaleshoppers, Packard describes advertising as exerting a hypnotic influence:

The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance, a light kind oftrance that . . . is the first stage of hypnosis. . . . [M]any of these women werein such a trance that they passed by neighbors and old friends without noticingor greeting them. Some had a sort of glassy stare. They were so entranced asthey wandered about the store plucking things off shelves at random that theywould bump into boxes without seeing them.42

John Frankenheimer, dir. The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.


Packard’s description of the sleepwalking female shopper is sensationalist andsexist. But the resurgence of notions of hypnotic trance within Cold War theories ofadvertising speaks to a pervasive anxiety about invisible sources of deception andexternal control. The title of Packard’s book on “hidden persuaders” emphasizesthis concern about being controlled without being aware of the external coercion.In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media reiterated this Cold Warview of advertising when describing ads as “not meant for conscious consumption.They are intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise ahypnotic spell.”43 McLuhan thereby repeats a conceptualization of advertising thathe first put forward a decade earlier. In The Mechanical Bride (1951) he asserted,“the ad agencies flood the daytime world of conscious purpose and control witherotic imagery from the night world in order to drown, by suggestion, all sales resis-tance.”44

Like Packard, McLuhan explains the power of advertising by drawing on thenotion of hypnotic suggestion, simultaneously highlighting the loss of autonomyand free volition that characterized the “other-directed” consumer.45 Accordingly,McLuhan’s chapter on “Freedom—American Style” exposes the uniformity of AmericanCold War consumer culture, implicitly comparing Communist and consumeriststandardization. In McLuhan’s words, “Does ‘freedom’ mean the right to be and todo exactly as everybody else? How much does this kind of uniformity depend onobeying the ‘orders’ of commercial suggestion?”46

Two years prior to the publication of McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride, the clan-destine agency of “persuasive communications” was emphasized in Carl Hovland,Arthur Lumsdaine, and Fred Sheffield’s Experiments on Mass Communication(1949), a volume that describes experiments on the efficacy of propaganda.47 Oneexperiment conducted in 1943 compared the immediate and long-term effects ofFrank Capra’s “Information Film,” The Battle of Britain, which embellished Britishsuccesses in the war against Nazi Germany and was presented to three companiesof U.S. soldiers as a source whose credibility was questionable. The experimentalresults showed that viewers’ positive evaluations of British accomplishments increasedwith the passage of time after seeing the film—a phenomenon that Hovland and his coauthors called the “Sleeper Effect.” The surprising findings could not beexplained by a lack of education in test subjects. As Hovland wrote, “it is apparentthat the ‘sleeper’ effects were confined neither to uninformed opinions nor to theless well educated.”48

Hovland at first surmised that the “forgetting of an initially discounted source”

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might be the cause of the phenomenon.49 But during the following years furtherexperiments showed that—upon explicit questioning—viewers did remember thattheir source of information was questionable or biased. Yet, at the same time,researchers reconfirmed that “communications ostensibly written by untrustworthysources produced a greater net-opinion change after one month than immediatelyafter.”50 Consequently, Hovland and Weiss rejected their initial explanation andinvoked dissociation of information and its source rather than forgetting as the causeof the sleeper effect. In a 1953 volume entitled Communication and Persuasion,Hovland asserted, “there is a decreased tendency over time to reject the material pre-sented by an untrustworthy source.” He continued, “while the subjects were able torecall the source when questioned about it directly, they may not have thought of itwhen they were merely asked their opinion concerning the issue.”51

This explanation remained hypothetical, but the delayed effect of biased or unre-liable information was firmly established as a scientific fact in the 1950s, and thespeed with which the notion of the “sleeper effect” of propaganda or advertisingbecame an established technical term within the psychology of opinion change isremarkable. In current psychological research, the sleeper effect is still a widelyused concept, especially within accounts of the efficacy of negative advertising inpolitical campaigns.52 Scientific articles in the Journal of Consumer Research andin the Journal of Advertising thus talk about a sleeper effect without framing theterm with quotation marks that would highlight the underlying metaphor.53

The first descriptions of the phenomenon, by contrast, marked their rhetoricityby introducing the term with quotation marks. In the 1949 volume Experiments onMass Communication, Hovland described the delayed effect of propaganda in thefollowing terms: “some of the effects of the film may be ‘sleepers’ that do not occurimmediately but require a lapse of time.”54 Weighing possible explanations, he sim-ilarly wrote, “it is apparent that the ‘sleeper’ effects were confined neither to unin-formed opinions nor to the less well educated.”55

In describing the delayed effect of propaganda, Cold War psychological theoriesthus resemble Bernheim’s late-nineteenth-century account of posthypnotic sugges-tions that “are sleeping unconsciously in the brain” of the hypnotized subject.Bernheim employed this metaphor to emphasize the latency of posthypnotic sug-gestion and the time lag between the act of implanting a suggestion and the time setfor its execution. In both respects, Cold War psychology comes surprisingly close tothese earlier theories of hypnotism and posthypnotic suggestion. But the invocationof “the ‘sleeper’ effects”56 of propaganda in 1949 resonated, above all, with contem-


poraneous anxieties about Communist sleeper agents who lie dormant in the fabricof U.S. society—until the moment for the sleeper’s activation arrives. As the FBIagent in Roth’s The Sleeper says, “Hollister, we realize now . . . was a sleeper—amember of the Communist Party whose life was dedicated to the one big moment.”57

Psychological theories of propaganda and Cold War scenarios of clandestinesleeper agents draw on the same tropes of latency. Both versions of the metaphordescribe an invisible enemy who acts from within, an alien body that lies dormantinside our mind or inside our social fabric before it gets activated. Two distinct butrelated notions of the sleeper thus emerged simultaneously around 1950: the brain-washed Manchurian candidate and the insidious long-term effects of propagandaand advertising that affect our opinions even if we initially discount them as unre-liable and biased.

The term sleeper is seeing a contemporary resurgence within political and pop-ular representations of terrorism. The paranoid invocation of an invisible enemy, asleeper who lurks within, has unfortunately become an all-too-common strategy injustifying the so-called war on terror. Brainwashing is still cited as an explanationof why and how young men and women become suicide bombers or tools of terror-ist organizations. But in our time the “sleeper” or “sleeper agent” has morphed intothe “sleeper cell,” a figure that is not only linked to fantasies of brainwashing andmind control but also resonates with a notion of cellular networks. However, thiscurrent anxiety about clandestine sleeper cells revolves around a potential or fic-tional scenario, one that is summoned in television shows and fear-mongering polit-ical statements that highlight the difficulty of identifying the enemy before he or sheexecutes a terrorist master plan. In contrast to these exaggerated invocations ofpotential and fictional scenarios of terrorism, the “sleeper effect” of negative adver-tising is very real, and it produces tangible effects. In a way, one could say that theelectoral success of George W. Bush in 2004 was due to the sleeper effect—in bothmeanings of the term: the perfectly timed “Swift Boat” campaign against John Kerryin August 2004, three months before the election, and the fear-mongering invoca-tion of terrorist sleeper cells and their impending attack on the homeland.58 Todaywe are still witness to the sleeper effect of negative advertising and the unsettlingacceptance and success of disinformation campaigns—against socialist government,death panels, and softness in the war on terror—campaigns that seem worthy ofSenators Iselin and McCarthy.

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Notes1. Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (1959; New York: Avalon, 2003), 32, 49, 147.2. Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, Du sommeil et des états analogues considérés surtout au point de

vue de l’action du moral sur le physique (Paris: Masson, 1866). According to Maria Tatar, just fivecopies of Liébeault’s book were sold between 1866 and 1871. However, it was reissued in two volumesin 1889 and 1891: Ambroise A. Liébeault, Le sommeil provoqué et les états analogues (Paris: O. Doin,1889); and Ambroise A. Liébeault, Thérapeutique suggestive: Son mécanisme: Propriétés diverses dusommeil provoqué et des états analogues (Paris: O. Doin, 1891). See Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound:Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 33; and AlanGauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 320.

3. Hippolyte Bernheim, De la suggestion et ses applications à la thérapeutique [1886], deuxièmeédition corrigée et augmentée (Paris: O. Doin, 1888), iii; Hippolyte Bernheim, Hypnosis and Suggestion,trans. Christian A. Herter (New York: University Books, 1964), 418.

4. Bernheim, De la suggestion, ii/417. Throughout this essay, page references that are divided by a slash (/) indicate first the page number in the original version of the quoted text and then the corresponding number in the published English translation. An asterisk (*) after the second numberindicates that I have modified the translation.

5. Bernheim, De la suggestion, 22/15*.6. Georges Gilles de La Tourette, L’hypnotisme et les états analogues au point de vue médico-légale

(Paris: E. Plon, 1887), 82; and Bernheim, De la suggestion, 22/15*.7. Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux, faites à la Salpêtrière [1886]:

Recueillies et publiées par MM. Babinski, Bernard, Féré, Guinon, Marie et Gilles de la Tourette, vol. 3of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1890), 340; and Jean-Martin Charcot,Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered at the Infirmary of La Salpêtrière:Third Volume, trans. Thomas Savill (London: Sydenham Society, 1889), 293*.

8. “Automate dirigé par une volonté étrangère.” Bernheim, De la suggestion (1886), 84/60*.9. Albert v. Schrenck-Notzing, “Die gerichtlich-medizinische Bedeutung der Suggestion,” Archiv

für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik 5 (1900): 12.10. Auguste Forel, Der Hypnotismus, seine psycho-physiologische, medicinische, strafrechtliche

Bedeutung und seine Handhabung, Dritte verbesserte Auflage mit Adnotationen von Dr. O. Vogt(Stuttgart: Enke, 1895), 198–199.

11. Arthur Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien: Eine Autobiographie (1920), ed. Therese Nickl and HeinrichSchnitzler (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 313.

12. Bernheim, De la suggestion, 45/31*.13. “Ainsi, une suggestion peut dormir inconsciente dans le cerveau où elle a été déposée pendant

le sommeil et n’éclore que le jour assigné d’avance pour son éclosion. De recherches ultérieures sontnécessaires pour bien élucider ce curieux fait de psychologie, pour établir combien de temps une suggestion hypnotique peut ainsi, par ordre, rester latente avant d être réalisée.” Bernheim, De la sug-gestion, 54/38*.

14. Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbewußte,” in Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1946), 10:267; and


Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Worksof Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), 14:168–169*.

15. Auguste Forel, “Der Hypnotismus und seine strafrechtliche Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für diegesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft 9 (1889): 184. Schrenck-Notzing wrote in nearly identical terms, “Oneof the most insidious ruses of posthypnosis is the suggestion of free volition in committing the deed.”Schrenck-Notzing, “Die gerichtlich-medizinische Bedeutung der Suggestion,” 9. See also Albert Moll,Der Hypnotismus (Berlin: Fischers medizinische Buchhandlung, 1889), 119; and Albert Moll, DerHypnotismus: Mit Einschluß der Psychotherapie und der Hauptpunkte des Okkultismus, Fünfteumgearbeitete und verstärkte Auflage (Berlin: Fischers medizinische Buchhandlung, 1924), 523.

16. Auguste Forel, Der Hypnotismus oder Die Suggestion und Psychotherapie: Seine psychologische,psychophysiologische und therapeutische Bedeutung, Fünfte umgearbeitete Auflage (Stuttgart: Enke,1907), 258.

17. For a more comprehensive version of this argument, see Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed:Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema (Chicago: Chicago University Press,2008), 30–41, 66–73.

18. Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla” [second version, 1887], in Contes et nouvelles II, Texte établi etannoté par Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 922; and Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla,” in A Dayin the Country and Other Stories, trans. David Coward (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990),284–285.

19. Maupassant, “Le Horla,” 923/286.20. Maupassant, “Le Horla,” 925/288.21. Maupassant, “Le Horla,” 925/288.22. Hellmut Ivers, Die Hypnose im deutschen Strafrecht (Leipzig: Wiegandt, 1927), 68.23. Ivers, 23. See also Adolphe Belot’s novel Alphonsine (1887) in which the innocent medium is

convicted, because the court does not realize that Berthe Mauclair acted under a foreign will when following the irresistible hypnotic command to murder. Adolphe Belot, Alphonsine (Paris: E. Dentu,1887).

24. Victor Klemperer, Leben sammeln, nicht fragen wozu und warum: Tagebücher 1918–1924, ed.W. Nowojski (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1996), 432.

25. See Andriopoulos, 91–127.26. Condon, 30. On the persistent invocation of Pavlov in Cold War representations of brainwashing,

see Killen, in this issue of Grey Room.27. Condon, 40–41.28. Margaret Brenman, “Experiments in the Hypnotic Production of Antisocial and Self-Injurious

Behavior,” Psychiatry 5 (1942): 49–61; and Wesley Raymond Wells, “Experiments in the HypnoticProduction of Crime,” The Journal of Psychology 11 (1941): 63–102.

29. Andrew Salter, Conditioned Reflex Therapy (New York: Creative Age Press, 1949); and FredrickWertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart, 1954).

30. Rebecca Lemov, The World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York:Hill and Wang, 2005), 212.

104 Grey Room 45

31. See Rebecca Lemov, in this issue of Grey Room.32. See Timothy Melley, in this issue of Grey Room. William Sargant, Battle for the Mind:

A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 157.33. Condon, 45.34. Condon, 45.35. Holly Roth, The Sleeper (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 57. Later Hollister is described

as “nothing but a tool—a tool of unknown, unestimated usefulness” (58–59).36. Roth, 169–170. While Roth’s novel suggests that these covert American agents will themselves

employ practices of mind control, the neurologist Harold Wolff attempted to condition Americanagents who were recruited from the exiled Chinese community, “preconditioning” them againstCommunist brainwashing before sending them back into Communist China. See John Marks, TheSearch for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times Books, 1979),150–151.

37. Roth, 45.38. Condon, 132.39. Condon, 306.40. See Philip T. Hartung, “The Screen: Better with a Dramamine,” Commonweal 57, no. 7 (21

November 1952): 165. “Cinerama may be a novelty now, but it certainly presents unlimited possibili-ties for the motion picture industry, once they start making fictional and biographical films in this newmedium. The idea is almost frightening; and the observation of Robert E. Sherwood gives one food forthought: ‘You’ve put into the hands of a playwright a tool by which we can submit the audience to anyexperience we want to give them, and what is more, condition them for that experience.’” I owe thisreference to Ariel Rogers, “Moving Machines: The Experience of New Technologies from Widescreento Digital Cinema” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2010), 52.

41. Edward Hunter, Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (NewYork: Vanguard Press, 1951); J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in Americaand How to Fight It (New York: Holton, 1958); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York:David McKay, 1957); and Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in PostwarAmerica (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 2–6.

42. Packard, 106–107.43. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge: MIT Press,

1994), 228.44. Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard

Press, 1951), 97 (emphasis added).45. David O. Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) defines the “other-directed” personality as “sen-

sitized to the expectations and experiences of others,” but I use the term here in its more sinister senseas denoting a state of being controlled by external forces. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Studyof the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 8.

46. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride, 117. Further invocations of hypnosis and trance in McLuhan’saccount of advertising are to be found on pages 10, 42, 101, and 123.


47. Carl I. Hovland, Arthur Lumsdaine, and Fred D. Sheffield, Experiments on Mass Communication,vol. 3 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).

48. Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 192.49. Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 197.50. Walter Weiss, “A ‘Sleeper’ Effect in Opinion Change,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social

Psychology 48, no. 2 (1953): 178.51. Carl I. Hovland, Irving L. Jenis, and Harold H. Kelley, Communication and Persuasion:

Psychological Studies of Opinion Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 256.52. See, for instance, R.A.W. Lariscy and S.F. Tinkham, “The Sleeper Effect and Negative Political

Advertising,” Journal of Advertising 28, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 13–30.53. See Lariscy and Tinkham, 13–30; and D.B. Hannah and B. Sternthal, “Detecting and Explaining

the Sleeper Effect,” The Journal of Consumer Research 11, no. 2 (September 1984): 632–642.54. Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 182.55. Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 192.56. Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield, 192.57. Roth, The Sleeper, 57.58. For a description of the Swift Boat campaign in terms of the “sleeper effect,” see Drew Weston,

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: Public Affairs,2007), 344.

the sleeper effect: hypnotism, mind control, terrorism

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