Is Pointsman based on Dr. William Sargant?

[Monte Davis]

Yes, *very* suggestive. For Pudding's shell-shocked generation, 25 years
farther back -- with Freudian psychodynamics but AFAIK without
barbiturates, except Veronal (introduced 1903) for sleep -- see Rivers, now
best known from Pat Barker's "Regeneration" novels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._R._Rivers#The_Great_War

And extending the scope, there's "From shell shock and war neurosis to
posttraumatic stress disorder
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/>," which includes "a
memorandum addressed by Winston Churchill to the Lord President of the
Council in December, 1942..."

'I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of
these gentlemen [psychologists and psychiatrists] ... it is very wrong to
disturb large numbers of healthy normal men and women by asking the kind of
odd questions in which the psychiatrists specialize.'




On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 3:05 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> I, for one, am convinced. In my opinion, this clinches it:
>
> "After the Dunkirk evacuation the Sutton Emergency Medical Service
> received large numbers of military psychiatric casualties and Sargant
> developed abreaction techniques – patients would relive traumatic
> experiences under the influence of barbiturates."
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant
>
> Presumably P had read one of Sargant's books:
>
> Battle for the Mind (1957, on brainwashing, written with the help of
> Robert Graves)
>
> The Unquiet Mind (1967, autobiography)
>
> A few years after WW II:
>
> "In 1948 [Sargant] was appointed director of the department of
> psychological medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and remained there
> until the 1980s. There he developed his procedures for 'brainwashing'. He
> created a 22 bed sleep ward on the top floor of the adjacent Royal Waterloo
> Hospital, in which he would keep his traumatised patients in a continuous
> state of heavy sedation for periods of up to three months and subject them
> to insulin coma therapy and frequent electroconvulsive treatment. This
> brainwashing, he claimed, re-patterned the brain, wiping it clean of the
> traumatic experience so that when they woke up they couldn’t remember what
> had happened."
>
>
> http://www.nickread.co.uk/articles/2010/03/visionary-or-disaster-a-perspective-on-william-sargant/
>
> As for the MK-Ultra link (not touched upon in GR, I think) Wiki writes:
>
> "In recent years writer Gordon Thomas has suggested that Sargant's
> experiments with deep sleep treatment were part of British involvement with
> the CIA MKULTRA programme into mind control. Donald Ewen Cameron was
> experimenting along similar lines in Canada, and it later emerged that his
> work was in part funded by the CIA. Cameron often sought Sargant's advice
> and on one occasion Sargant sent Cameron a note saying: 'Whatever you
> manage in this field, I thought of it first'. Books about Cameron's
> experiments have commented on links between the two psychiatrists. Although
> Sargant acted as a consultant for MI5, no evidence has emerged that his
> work with deep sleep treatment at St Thomas' hospital had any links with
> intelligence services."
>
> For Sargant, MK-Ultra and the Frank Olson saga, see also Hank P.
> Albarelli, "A Terrible Mistake", and the first long quote provided here:
>
> https://wikispooks.com/wiki/William_Sargant
>
>
> Am 29.05.2016 um 12:48 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
>
> Pointsman is also a great character and I've a strong inkling he is
>>>
>> based on Dr. William Sargant.
>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160529/f617d1cb/attachment.html>