In the mid-1960s, popular ideas about brainwashing shifted dramatically, reflecting Anglo-American developments in mind science and mass media. The 1965 film The Ipcress File exemplifies this shift: its brainwashing sequence uses flashing lights and electronic music synchronized to the rhythm of brainwaves. The article traces how the film's quest for cinematic spectacle drew on cybernetic science, multimedia design, and modernist architecture—developments that also influenced the psychedelic counterculture. Interposed between mind control, psychological science, and media was a vision of the human mind as a 'cybernetic spectator': a subject who scrutinizes how media and sensory demands affect consciousness and seeks to consciously participate in and guide this mental conditioning.
Jane Arden's 1973 film The Other Side of the Underneath adapts her radical feminist play A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches. The all-female cast re-enacted personal and archetypal situations using autobiographical material gathered from group therapy sessions led by the director, during which psychedelic drugs were consumed. The article situates Arden's performance approach within psychodrama, focusing on how psychedelics helped unleash performers' repressed feelings of trauma, rage, and desire, harnessed into a dynamic performance mode amplifying cathartic possibilities of women's speech. The author argues that Arden's pursuit of consciousness liberation through psychodrama and psychedelics aligned countercultural and radical feminist tactics for unraveling repressive social conditioning.