WAS SHE BRAINWASHED?

Brainwashing has never been used successfully as a defense in a federal court, as far as Justice Department officials can determine. However, some highly respected psychiatrists feel that the coercive practices described in Patty Hearst's affidavit, if they actually occurred, could have changed her personality so completely that she would have willingly joined the S.L.A. and taken part in its violent crimes. Technically, Patty's main defense may be mental incapacity or coercion, but the plea would be closely akin to brainwashing.

Patty said that she felt totally controlled by her captors. She claimed that she was isolated for long periods of time, threatened with death, and made to feel that she had been abandoned by her family. These are all classic techniques of brainwashing, according to Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who closely analyzed the mind-bending methods used on American prisoners of war in Korea and by Chinese Communists on their countrymen.

Though Lifton refuses to comment specifically on Patty, he notes that people who are particularly susceptible to brainwashing very often exhibit "an enormous aspiration toward social change and toward human brotherhood, which might be connected, under pressure, with various forms of individual guilt over the way one had lived one's life."

Rona Fields, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied political prisoners, feels that Patty has been put through a form of psychological torture often inflicted on such prisoners, and believes that after her release Patty acted much like political prisoners who were suddenly freed. "There's an exuberant, empty grin," says Fields, "but you had a feeling that they weren't comprehending what they were doing." The euphoria may touch off giddy and impulsive behavior, such as Patty's repeated gesture, just after her capture, of raising a clenched fist. The former prisoners, says Fields, "are almost cartoons of themselves."

One of the four experts appointed by the court to determine if Patty is mentally competent to stand trial is Dr. Louis J. West, chairman of the department of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and a leading student of thought control. Three days before Patty's lawyers released her affidavit, he discussed her case with TIME Correspondent Patricia Delaney. "It would be a mistake for people to judge the case prior to a careful examination of Patricia Hearst and all the facts," he said. "The Hearst case may be an example of someone enmeshed by the forces within a small group which has a profound ability to affect behavior. Such a group suddenly becomes an individual's only relationship with the rest of the world. Patty Hearst began as a victim [of kidnaping]. Any subsequent behavior has to be related to that fact. Prisoners under stress have a strong tendency to identify with the aggressor. The victim is dependent upon him for protection, food, for life itself. Identifying with the abductors may seem to be his or her only mechanism for survival. A helpless captive ends up fusing with the ideas of a group and doing things he or she as an individual would never have done. Life on the run with the S.L.A. was one of constant stress, at war in a hostile country with a friendly underground." West thinks that Patty could make a healthy adjustment to normal life, "depending upon how carefully she is handled by family, friends, doctors, and presumably the courts."

After reading Patty's affidavit, other experts are skeptical about her account. Chalmers Johnson, a University of California political scientist who has studied brainwashing, doubts that Patty was ever as strongly influenced as she claims. "She may have been driven into hysteria and even into a catatonic state after her kidnaping," Johnson says, "but she was not brainwashed. No one can persuade me that Cinque [S.L.A. Chief Donald DeFreeze] was bright or skillful enough to brainwash anyone."

Albert Raven, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, feels that if Patty had been brainwashed she would not have snapped back as rapidly as described in her affidavit. Says Chicago Psychiatrist Marvin Ziporyn: "If people believe that this girl sat around for 18 months because she was brainwashed, then I'm going to start robbing banks tomorrow because they'll believe anything."

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