Among the subjects was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski

Monday, November 28th, 2022

I remember first finding out about the Unabomber in 1995 and being shocked that I hadn’t heard about a real-life mad-scientist supervillain mysteriously blowing up professors and industrialists.

I recently watched Unabomber: In His Own Words — in which Ted Kaczynski sounds like a bitter nerd, not Doctor Doom — and learned that his origin story involves another character who could have come out of a pulp novel, one Henry Murray:

During World War II, he left Harvard and worked as lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). James Miller, in charge of the selection of secret agents at the OSS during World War II, said the situation test was used by British War Officer Selection Board and OSS to assess potential agents.

In 1943 Murray helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler, commissioned by OSS boss Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, and Bertram D. Lewin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelind Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke. The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of offender profiling and political psychology. In addition to predicting that Hitler would choose suicide if defeat for Germany was near, Murray’s collaborative report stated that Hitler was impotent as far as heterosexual relations were concerned and that there was a possibility that Hitler had participated in a homosexual relationship. The report stated: “The belief that Hitler is homosexual has probably developed (a) from the fact that he does show so many feminine characteristics, and (b) from the fact that there were so many homosexuals in the Party during the early days and many continue to occupy important positions. It is probably true that Hitler calls Albert Forster ‘Bubi’, which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing their partners.”

In 1947, he returned to Harvard as a chief researcher, lectured and established with others the Psychological Clinic Annex.

From late 1959 to early 1962, Murray was responsible for unethical experiments in which he used twenty-two Harvard undergraduates as research subjects. Among other goals, experiments sought to measure individuals’ responses to extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Specifically tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly.

Among the subjects was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician who went on to be known as the ‘Unabomber’, a domestic terrorist who targeted academics and technologists for 17 years. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later criminal career.

In 1960, Timothy Leary started research in psychedelic drugs at Harvard, which Murray is said to have supervised.

Some sources have suggested that Murray’s experiments were part of, or indemnified by, the US Government’s research into mind control known as the MKUltra project.

Comments

  1. Adar says:

    MK Ultra as originally conceived to be confined strictly to what was called the interrogation problem. That problem being: 1. How to get a person to talk when they didn’t want to talk. 2. How to know the person was telling the truth when they did talk.

    That single best solution to the “problem” was found to be prostitute coached.

  2. Bomag says:

    …“vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Specifically tailored assaults to their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs were used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then viewed recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse repeatedly.

    Now we get this every day on the internet.

  3. Rog says:

    Sounds like this shrink wanted to have sex with Hitler.

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