Klein N

The introduction sketches the history of the last thirty years where economic shock doctrine has been applied throughout the world, from South America in the 1970s to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Klein introduces two of her main themes.

1. That practitioners of the shock doctrine tend to seek a blank slate on which to create their ideal free market economies, which inevitably requires a usually violent destruction of the existing economic order.
2. The similarities between economic shock doctrine and the original shock therapy – a psychiatric technique where electric shocks were applied to mentally ill patients.

Part 1 begins with a chapter on psychiatric shock therapy and the covert experiments conducted by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in collusion with theCentral Intelligence Agency: how it was partially successful in distorting and regressing patients' original personality, but ineffectual in developing a better personality to replace it. Parallels with economic shock therapy are made, including a digression on how government agencies harnessed some of the lessons learned to create more