Voices Off

In this talk, “Voices off: Stanley Milgram’s cyranoids in historical context,” Daniel Pick reflects on a largely forgotten set of experiments by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, inspired by the play, “Cyrano De Bergerac.” He considers this case in the context of a larger five-year collaborative research project he has run at Birkbeck, University of London on the history of “brainwashing,” “hidden persuasion,” and “obedience” studies in Cold War times.

Daniel Pick is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck and the Senior Investigator in the Hidden Persuaders project. He is also a psychoanalyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. His publications include Psychoanalysis: A Very Short Introduction (2015), The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (2012), Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (2005), as editor (with Lyndal Roper), Dreams and History: The Interpretation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis (2004), and Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (1989).