his book Battle for the Mind (and also an opportunity for giving up his 30-year heavy smoking habit). He spent his convalescence in Majorca, and Robert Graves helped him edit the book. Battle for the Mind, published in 1957, was one of the first books on the psychology of brainwashing. While this book is often referred to as a work on 'brainwashing', and indeed it is subtitled a physiology of conversion and brainwashing, Sargant emphasises that his aim is to elucidate the processes involved rather than advocate uses. In the book he refers extensively to religious phenomena and in particular Christian Methodism, emphasising the apparent need for those who would change people's minds to first excite them, as did the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Sargant connected Pavlov's findings to the ways people learned and internalised belief systems. Conditioned behaviour patterns could be changed by stimulated stresses beyond a dog's capacity for response, in essence causing a breakdown. This could also be caused by intense signals, longer than normal waiting periods, rotating positive and negative signals and changing a dog's physical condition, as through illness. Depending on the dog's initial personality, this could possibly cause a new belief system to be held tenaciously. Sargant also connected Pavlov's findings to the mechanisms of brain-washing in religion and politics. Some of Sargant's former colleagues remember him with admiration. David Owen worked under Sargant at St Thomas' in the 1960s, before embarking on his political career, and recalled him as "a dominating personality with the therapeutic courage of a lion" and as "the sort of person of whom legends are made". But others, who preferred to remain anonymous, described him as "autocratic, a danger, a disaster" and spoke about "the damage he did". Patients, too, recall their treatment at the hands of Sargant in very different terms. One man who consulted Sargant at his Harley Street private practice for depression in the 1960s later recalled "Will" with affection and respect. Visiting Sargant for a brief consultation every six months, he was given large doses of drugs and had a course of electroconvulsive therapy; he remembered his relief at being told that his depression was caused by chemical and hereditary factors and could not be resisted by an effort of personal will. But a woman who had been admitted to St Thomas' in 1970 with post-natal depression, and was left with memory loss after