Cold War fictions of behaviorism: Theories of psychological influence in American Cold War literature

This project describes the significance of behaviorism for American literature and culture during the long 1950s. During the Cold War, behaviorism was often demonized on the grounds that its denial of free will was inherently communist. While this is obviously far-fetched, the behaviorist insistence on external causality does bear many similarities to the Marxist model of historical materialism. The radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner, though, arises not from a political commitment to communism but from his investment in modernist visions of language and agency. His detractors tend to find themselves in a logical bind, attempting to argue simultaneously that behaviorism is factually incorrect---that people cannot be conditioned or controlled externally---and that behaviorism is a force of terrifying power, poised to destroy the American way of life.;This contradiction is evident in ex-communist autobiographies, which set up psychoanalysis as a means of political resistance to the communist ideology they see flowing from externalized agency. This synchronous model of the theoretical conflict gives way to the diachronic model found in Korean War accounts of brainwashing. In these accounts, psychoanalysis and behaviorism merge to form an account of generational conflict rooted both in the psychosexual unconscious and in behavioristic conditioning. This model of psychological influence is reimagined both as a generational rather than theoretical split and as a danger produced by American culture rather than by external threats. The desire to inoculate American citizens against nefarious behavioral control gives rise to the Comics Code to regulate the representations to which children are exposed. This internalizing move reintroduces both the utopian model of social science that relies Skinner's externalized model of agency and the model of psychoanalytically based critique that arises out of the Marxist commitments of the Frankfurt School, thus bringing the cultural uses of Cold War psychology full circle.