Intervista – “Cosa c’è davvero dietro l’abuso di termini quali “follia”, “pazzia”, “fobia” legati alla politica?
Ce ne parla il dottor Federico Soldani, epidemiologo psichiatra che lavora nel Regno Unito e studia la storia della psichiatria, in particolare rispetto alla dimensione politica”.
Author Archives: Federico Soldani
Biden: “A phenomenal negative psychological impact that CoViD has had on the public psyche” (2022)
“As Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, points out, I think one of the significant things we are going to find ten years from now is a phenomenal negative psychological impact that CoViD has had on the public psyche.
And so you have an awful lot of people who are, notwithstanding the fact that things have gotten so much better for them economically, that they are thinking, but how do you get up in the morning feeling happy – happy that everything is alright?
Even though your job is better, even though you have more income.”
Putin, Pirandello e i cento anni di ‘Enrico IV’ (2022)
Secondo il Financial Times “ci sono analisti che temono che il leader russo si stia trasformando in Vlad il Matto. Pensano che Putin sia al potere da troppo tempo e stia diventando sempre più insensibile e paranoico. Il suo isolamento durante la pandemia ha peggiorato le cose”.
Scrisse Murray – capo psicologo dell’OSS durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale e poi professore ad Harvard – nel 1937 su Hitler: “È un uomo insignificante, che mi sembra comportarsi al di là delle sue capacità. È sotto la costante cura di uno psichiatra di Monaco della vecchia scuola.
Sintomi: grave depressione e incubi (insonnia) – probabilmente di persecuzione. Pensare che la pace dell’Europa dipende dal sistema elettrochimico in quel cranio!”
“Fuori di testa”, Peyote & Co. (2022)
“La musica e la psichedelia sono la mia cura” – Mace
‘Mario Draghi study group’, 2001. Venti anni dopo, sarà un finanziere a scortarci attraverso la pandemia nella matrix digitale e allucinogena? (2022)
Verso una Terza Repubblica cyber-psichedelica?
Società “malate”? ‘Contro la paura’ di Pino Arlacchi (2022)
“Tutte le societa’ sono malate, ma alcune sono piu’ malate delle altre” – Robert Edgerton
If political psychology becomes epidemiology (2020)
As the great doctor Rudolf Virchow used to say “politics is medicine on a large scale”.
‘Structures of Capital’: Centre d’étude des problèmes humains, CEPH (2022)
“Coutrot was probably the first French businessman to perceive the possible use of psychology and sociology in business.”
“This was the spirit in which he created the Centre d’Etude des Problèmes Humains, CEPH, in association with the writer Aldous Huxley, the archeologist Robert Francillon, and the economist Georges Guillaume. Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Jean Ullmo, Alfred Sauvy (who coined the expression ‘Third World’), Teilhard de Chardin (a close friend of Coutrot’s), Tchakotine, and others participated in the CEPH meetings, which included eight commissions: economic humanism, applied psychology, rational and humane limitation of inequality, propaganda, industrial decentralization, psychobiology, history and analysis of Marxism.”
“Open to psychology, even psychiatry and sociology, the new managers wanted to take into account the human factor and analyse the motivations buried deep inside managers, at the very heart of the spirit of capitalism.”
“Social psychology techniques, and industrial psychology imported from the U.S. Thus, a mixed discourse can be seen to be forming in which the words and expressions borrowed from the spiritualist and personalist vocabulary (community, person, man, liberty, dialogue) are blended with terms used for technical efficiency and psychoanalysis. The switch to human relations and the social sciences by the heirs of Social Catholicism.”
“A new generation of psychosociologists followed the importing of group techniques… Most received, after their university studies, a complementary education in the United States from the “masters” of American social psychology, in particular Carl Rogers.”
Moruzzi: fisiologia della vita vegetativa vs. di relazione (2022)
Con la pandemia 2020 e i cambiamenti seguiti a questa si e’ verificata una generalizzata riduzione della vita di relazione e un’attenzione molto piu’ accentuata per tutto cio’ che riguarda gli aspetti della vita vegetativa, per esempio anche rispetto alle funzioni del nervo vago.
Huxley’s introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (2022)
“Man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul.”
“The evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and provent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.”
“The invention of the steam engine produced a revolution, not merely in industrial techniques, but also and much more significantly in philosophy. … External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end.”
“The solution… must be be sought in the domain, not of philosophy, but of psychology.”
“The Gita, where the psychological facts are linked up with general cosmology.”
“It is only to a mind purified from egotism that intuition of the Divine Ground can come.”
“There will never be enduring peace unless and until human beings come to accept a philosophy of life more adequate to the cosmic and psychological facts than the insane idolatries of nationalism and the advertising man’s apocalyptic-faith in Progress towards a mechanized New Jerusalem.”
Charles Reade, the Medico-Psychological Association, and “conspiracy theory” (2021)
“The theory of Dr. Sankey – the President concluded – as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible that the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade, and the precautionary measure suggested by Dr. Sankey of using a padded waistcoat in recent cases of mania with general paralysis – in which mental condition nearly all these cases under discussion were – seemed to him of practical value.”
“The only wonder is that in public asylums – Dr. Tuke added – considering the savage nature of some of the half-educated victims of mental disease, and the liberty which the non-restraint system allows them, accidents do not more frequently happen; that within the last few years several superintendents, and many attendants, have been seriously hurt, would show there are two sides to this question. The fact is that in the refractory wards of our public asylums the attendants, too few in number, carry their lives in their hands. The remedy is to increase their number, and add to the surveillance over them.”
Eugen Bleuler and the influence of the Enlightenment (2021)
“A liberal revival movement, under the influence of the French Revolution, began in Switzerland too.”
“The Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined several terms such as ‘schizophrenia’, ‘schizoid’, ‘autism’, depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler’s happily chosen term ‘ambivalence’.”
“He had little interest in the Church and religion. Both Eugen and Hedwig Bleuler didn’t usually go to Church, and there were no prayers said in the family. Both lived under the influence of the Enlightenment: one should live in this world, seek beauty and help others. Eugen Bleuler was critical of the time when theologians rather dogmatically imparted religious education, and children had to learn off the catechism by rote and without any understanding of it.”
Lady Ida Darwin and the ‘Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded’ (2021)
“In 1912 the Association, jointly with Cambridge University Eugenics Society, held a meeting in the Guildhall, where Ellen Pinsent read a paper on ‘Mental Defect and its Social Dangers’.”
“Since its formation in 1914 the Central Association for Mental Welfare has on numerous occasion drawn public attention to the social problem presented by mental deficiency and to the grave consequences and serious cost entailed by the presence of mental defectives in the community.”
“My first audience.” Freud and the genesis of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (2021)
“An audience that had greeted, debated, and discussed Freud’s theoretical construction of psychoanalytic psychology, often before he published the results.”
‘Lenin è stato un fallimento? Un dibattito’. ‘Lenin, il distruttore’, Sorokin 1924 (2021)
“Non basta avere il desiderio di curare una malattia o immaginare una macchina meravigliosa per essere un buon medico o un abile ingegnere. Lo stesso si può dire per gli statisti. Anche un pazzo può avere un profondo desiderio di essere il Salvatore dell’umanità“.
“Lenin dal momento del suo ritorno in Russia nel 1917 era all’ultimo stadio della paralisi progressiva [neuro-sifilide, ndr]”.
“La psicologia e il comportamento di Lenin sono abbastanza comprensibili su basi patologiche. Mezzo matto e malato”.
“Qualsiasi psicologo, psichiatra o comportamentista serio lo sa molto bene. Solo un popolo ignorante e ingenuo da un lato, e individui di tipo pazzo, antisociale e inferiore (che sono molto numerosi tra gli estremisti di destra e di sinistra, i radicali e i “super idealisti”) dall’altro, vengono ingannati da queste “bellissime reazioni al discorso”; per loro solo Lenin è “il salvatore dell’umanità”, “il liberatore dell’umanità”, “il grande riformatore”, “il nuovo Gesù Cristo”, e così via”.
“Non ho alcun desiderio di convincerli perché hanno bisogno meno di essere convinti che curati”.