A Look at Sensory Deprivation by Wade Pickren, PhD
Ryerson University; President-Elect Division 26
The following is a retro review of:
Sensory Deprivation: An Investigation of Phenomena Suggesting a Revised Concept of the Individual’s Response to His Environment.
P. Solomon, P. E. Kubzansky, P. H. Leiderman, J. H. Mendelson, R. Trumbull, & D. Wexler (Eds.). Harvard University Press, 1961.
This is a volume of edited contributions to a symposium held at Harvard Medical School in June 1958. In addition to the papers actually given at the conference, a few invited discussion pieces were added for publication. The chapters in the volume are most interesting in themselves, but they also hold added interest for us in light of the recent and current controversy over the involvement of psychologists in torture and “national security interrogations.” Before exploring that aspect of the volume’s interest, I will reprise the main points of the book and the symposium on which it was based.
psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Psychologists included Donald Hebb and his collaborators, W. Heron, W. H. Bexton, T. H. Scott, B. K. Doane, as well as Austin Riesen, Donald Lindsley, Jack Vernon, Robert Holt, and Jerome Bruner, as well as others. The growing influence of cybernetics research and theorizing, itself a product of military needs and demands in World War II, was represented at the conference by Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch. And without a doubt the then current concern of the military and intelligence services about brainwashing and other psychological manipulations was an understated but very present impetus for the reported research and a primary reason for the conference.
The symposiasts and discussants were an all-star cast drawn from neurophysiology, experimental