Programming the Brain: Vernacular Cybernetics and the Neuro-therapeutic Imaginary

abstract: This essay argues that the vernacularization of cybernetics by writers of self-help and science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s contributed to a "neuro-therapeutic imaginary" that linked brains to processes of personal transformation and the management of mental illness. In works by Maxwell Maltz, John C. Lilly, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, and Samuel R. Delany, the trope of "programming the brain" served as the basis for imagining new neuro-computational therapeutic processes, showing how readers of cybernetics negotiated the sociocultural and political meaning of neurologically grounded models of identity and debated the status of preexisting therapeutic paradigms such as psychoanalysis.