Category Archives: English

Huxley on Proust and psychology (2020)

“The invention and development of the modern science of psychology has made us regard as important and interesting a multitude of small odds and ends of thought, emotion and sensation which seemed to our ancestors almost negligible. They did not insist on the phenomena because they were interested primarily in what they regarded as the reality behind them.”

Trump, mass hallucinogens, and the cyber-psychedelic transformation of capitalism (2020)

“It was not exactly the emancipation demanded by Karl Marx, who, moreover, did not have the fancy to imagine that the result following industrial capitalism were the states altered by LSD” – Geminello Alvi, ‘Capitalism. Towards the Chinese ideal’ (2011)

“Simply a symbol of national solidarity, the first step towards wearing a uniform.” Orwell on civilians and gas masks (2020)

“As soon as war started, the carrying or not carrying of a gas mask assumed social and political implications…. The extent to which masks are carried will probably be a pretty good index of the impression the war news is making on the public.”

“The peace of Europe hangs on the electro-chemical system in that cranium!” (2020)

Harvard psychologist Murray about Hitler

Trump, spectacle and psyspeak (2020)

“Zimbardo sees reality TV as a logical format for teaching psychology. “The reason reality TV is so popular is because to observe human behavior is fascinating,” he observed. “I spend my whole life doing this.”

Psychiatry, constitutional law, and political power in a 60s TV debate (2020)

“Would you let such an individual, just because he has the advantage of the Constitution, free in society to infect women, to invoke this delusional system on other people?”

Joker: welcome to the era of global political psychiatry (2019)

Joker sanctions in global popular culture the citizen who becomes patient.

Cocaine and Morgan: the lesson of Freud (2010)

Morgan, an Italian pop musician, in an interview with Max magazine in 2010 revealed using cocaine and in particular crack as an antidepressant, claiming that Sigmund Freud also prescribed it for such purpose.

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power? (2019)

The current public psychiatrization of “the most powerful man in the world,” as the media often describe the President of the United States of America, could be seen as a new paradigm shift in contemporary power.

In addition to the increasing use of a psychologized lexicon in everyday speech, a role might be played by such spectacle communicating symbolically, and contributing to, a global cultural shift towards a subjectivist worldview and a progressive de-politicization of citizenship.

The political career of Mao, Yale and the “reorientation of thought” (2020)

“Between 1919 and 1920, future Chairman Mao Zedong had several encounters with the school: he edited its student magazine, re-focusing it on “thought reorientation,” and operated a bookshop out of its medical college”.

Viktor Frankl: drugs, LSD and subjective vs. objective meaning (2020)

“One of Frankl’s main topics in the 1960s. When teaching at Harvard University in 1961, he was among few who opposed the experimental use of LSD proposed by Dr. Timothy Leary, stating that “freedom is only one side of a phenomenon whose other side is responsibility.”

In Pisa, professor Vaccà diagnosed Shelley’s drug habit (2020)

“At Eton, after an illness, the doctor who attended him took a liking of him, and Shelley borrowed his medical books and was deeply interested in chemistry from that time, and, unlike doctors, he experimented with some of the drugs on himself.”