Joost Meerloo

Biography

Born as Abraham Maurits Meerloo in The Hague, Netherlands, Meerloo came to United States in 1946, was naturalized in 1950, and resumed Dutch citizenship in 1972. Dr. Meerloo was a practicing psychiatrist for over forty years. He did staff psychiatric work in the Netherlands and worked as a general practitioner until 1942 under Nazi occupation, when he assumed the name Joost (instead of the more Jewish-sounding Abraham) to fool the occupying forces and in 1942 fled to Belgium. From there he escaped to England (after barely eluding death at the hands of the Germans). He became a colonel and was chief of the Psychological Department of the Dutch Army-in-Exile in England.

After the war he served as High Commissioner for Welfare in the Netherlands, and was an adviser to UNRRA and SHAEF. An American citizen since 1950, Dr. Meerloo was a member of the faculty at Columbia University and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the New York School of Psychiatry. He was the author of many books, including Rape of the Mind, a classic work on brainwashing, Conversation and Communication, and Hidden Communion.

He was the son of Bernard and Anna Frederika (Benjamins) Meerloo. He was the youngest of six children and the only one of the six to escape his occupied country and to survive the holocaust.

He married Elisabeth Johanna Kalf Den Haag, May 16, 1928. The couple divorced on February 19, 1946. He married Louisa Betty "Loekie" Duits (a physical therapist) in New York City on May 7, 1948.

Meerloo specialized in the area of thought control techniques used by totalitarian and other regimes.

Rape of the Mind

Meerloo's best-known book is Rape of the Mind, published in 1956. The book received wide attention because it dealt with totalitarian applications of brainwashing techniques during the Korean War.

The book explains how scientific brainwashing is done, and argues that "hardly anyone can resist such." "Fear, and continual pressure are known to create a menticidal hypnosis. The conscious part of the personality no longer takes part in the automatic confessions. The brainwashee lives in a trance, repeating the record grooved into him by somebody else."

Like their totalitarian counterparts, democratic societies are subject to the insidious influences of mind control. Such influences surround the citizens of free societies, "both on a political and a nonpolitical level and they become as dangerous to the free way of life as are the aggressive totalitarian governments themselves." People must guard against the creeping intrusion into their minds by technology, bureaucracy, prejudice, and mass delusion.

Freedom and democracy depend in part on education for mental freedom—helping children and adults to think for themselves and see the essentials of a problem—helping them to understand concepts, not merely to memorize facts.

The book is still widely cited by observers of the contemporary scene. Writing in 2015, for instance, Stella Morabito quotes Meerloo's phrase, "the transformation of the free human mind to an automatically responding machine” and argues that this captures the ongoing loss of liberties in countries like the United States.

Education

Dr. Meerloo received an M.D. degree at the University of Leiden in 1927. He then did postgraduate work in

psychiatry and psychoanalysis, receiving a Ph.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1932. He later continued psychiatric studies in Paris.