Treating

In 2010, Barbara Ehrenreich published Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. The author traces the history of positive thinking and how it came to be the dominant mode in the U.S.A. The “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” ideology she describes as so dominant right now seems to be the outcome of the one variant of mind control described in this treating field: The therapeutic gospel became so self-understood and omnipresent it prevents any way of critically engaging social and political  power relations.

Barbara Ehrenreich - On Optimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Still, the promise of healing through mind control lives on, and new technologies make it even more powerful. In this book review from The New York Review of Books (2011), reviewer Sue Halpern, discusses new approaches to build mind-computer interfaces to stop human suffering.