‘Amica psilo’. Fachinelli, 1989 (2023)

“Differenza rispetto ad altre ‘droghe’ – che gettano in un infinito galoppante, turbolento. Qui un addentramento lento, per piccoli spostamenti – oppure, ed è lo stesso, occhi che via via si aggiungono, altre visioni convergenti.

Non si tratta di ‘tagliare’ col mondo, con la realtà, violentemente. Per me, basta spostare dei fili, dei legami, come si spostano i rami di un albero per vedere il mare, una radura.

Lo spicco, lo splendore di ogni cosa nasce dalla sospensione dei suoi collegamenti – nel tempo, nello spazio, nell’ordine causale. Un rumore mi sorprende e mi fa sobbalzare, imprevisto, solitario: eppure è quello, familiare, di una porta che sbatte.”

“(Più tardi). I temuti flashback degli allucinogeni: ritorni di ciò che si è provato sotto il loro effetto qualche tempo dopo, in piena “sobrietà”. Come una via ormai tracciata – ritrovata.”

Totalitarian “medicine”. George F. Will in the Washington Post, 1987 (2022)

“The Soviet regime applies ‘scientific socialism’, within which psychiatry has a special place.”

“Historian Paul Johnson notes that in 1919 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced an anticommunist leader to treatment in a sanatorium.”

“Glasnost has not involved the release of any dissident from a psychiatric ‘hospital’.”

“Neal Ascherson, in the New York Review of Books, says German doctors were dazzled to discover that, under Hitler, medicine was ‘the central intellectual resource of the New Order’.”

“Since Freud postulated that the self is a fractious committee — the ego, id and libido — there has been ‘scientific’ doubt about the importance of reason in the individual’s life.”

“As Khrushchev said in Pravda in 1959 about people ‘who might start calling for opposition’ to communism: ‘Clearly the mental state of such people is not normal’.”

“Psychiatry, with its expanding arsenal of drugs, can be abused as a brutal instrument of social control. And the official Soviet premise, that only the psychologically disabled could fail to love socialism, enlists psychiatry as a rationalization for the regime.”

“Un singolare filo rosso”. ‘Storia della Psicologia’, Mecacci 2019 (2022)

“Non sembra che ci sia altra scienza, se non la psicologia, per la cui comprensione occorra richiamarsi così direttamente alla vita, spesso drammatica, dei suoi protagonisti“.

“La sfida della psicologia del terzo millennio non è circoscrivibile al superamento delle sue crisi interne, teoriche e metodologiche, ma si configura come un confronto urgente con la societa’ contemporanea che non è piu’ inquadrabile – come schema generale di riferimento – nella polis entro cui nacque la disciplina nella sua versione occidentale. In effetti, si sta formando da alcuni anni un orientamento che, abbandonando le indagini settoriali, intende rispondere all’esigenza di rivedere la posizione della psicologia sui grandi valori che hanno caratterizzato la societa’ occidentale (la morale, la democrazia, la parita’ dei diritti, e in generale il rispetto della persona), e che oggi sono sotto l’attacco della globalizzazione”.

“Questa prospettiva politica, nel senso nobile della parola, che le deriva dal modello della democrazia ateniese, ci sembra la piu’ promettente”.

Carlo Angela, allievo di Babiński e politico (2022)

La Rai, radiotelevisione italiana, ha realizzato nel 2017 un documentario intitolato “Carlo Angela, un medico stratega”.

Angela fu anche Maestro Venerabile della loggia “Propaganda” di Torino e, come il collega neuropsichiatra Ugo Cerletti sviluppatore dell’elettroshock o terapia elettroconvulsivante, membro del Supremo Consiglio dei 33.

Roots of Polish psychiatry (2022)

“The roots of Freemasonry, one of the most important cultural and social phenomena of modern times, are clearly European, but the origins of this fraternal organization are as obscure as they are legendary.”

“There has been very little or no research so far into the impact of the Masonic ideas of tolerance, freedom, equality and brotherhood on the development of psychiatry. The degree of this influence was certainly different from one country to another.”

“Polish Freemasonry was reborn in 1920, with an important role played by three psychiatrists: Rafał Radziwiłłowicz, Witold Łuniewski and Jan Mazurkiewicz, who were Grand Masters of the Grand National Lodge of Poland.”

“Freemason psychiatrists headed the Polish Psychiatric Association throughout the entire inter-war period: Chodźko in 1920–23 and 1928–30, and Mazurkiewicz in 1923–28 and 1930–47.  Radziwiłłowicz was the General Secretary of the Association between 1920 and 1928, and he was also the founder of Rocznik Psychiatryczny (Psychiatric Annual), the journal published by the Association.”

‘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

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.”

“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.”

‘Russian Psychiatry – Its Historical and Ideological Background’, Zilboorg 1942 (2021)

“Alcoholism in Tsarist Russia was as typical and chronic a disease as was Tsardom itself.”

“Since the Soviet Revolution, psychiatry has become a branch of public health when it is not a field of laboratory research. What is known here as “mental hygiene” has become the chief field of Russian psychiatric endeavor.”

“The whole working population is brought into the orbit of psychological supervision and educational efforts.”

“A system for ‘the protection of neuropsychic health.’ Sanatoria for borderline cases and for neuroses have been organized.”

“Social hygiene and prophylaxis are the guiding principles.”

“What benefit does Russia derive from this Institute?” Tsar Nicholas II on the Psycho-Neurological Institute (2021)

The last Emperor of Russia and Vladimir Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute revolutionaries.

Un anno di PsyPolitics (2021)

Un rovesciamento del mito della caverna di Platone: anziche’ essere liberati dalla prigionia dei sensi e delle percezioni veicolate attraverso la cultura, la societa’, la storia, ovvero attraverso l’ego psicoanalitico, i cittadini trasformati in pazienti vengono sempre piu’ isolati tra loro, distanziati, fatti operare attraverso il digitale ovvero a distanza, e vengono cosi’ infilati in una caverna di isolamento digitale, virtuale e tra non molto allucinogena.

Sia ‘cibernetica’ che ‘psichedelico’ sono espressioni con una chiara origine politica.

Fino a che punto un capitalismo che si cinesizza puo’ vedere la convergenza teorica di ‘comunismo acido’ e ‘completamente automatizzato’ da una parte e di ‘cypsy capitalism’ o ‘capitalismo cyber-psichedelico’ dall’altra?

E’ possibile capire la caotica politica contemporanea attraverso lo studio della storia della psichiatria e delle psicodiscipline?

PsyPolitics intende continuare nell’analisi dei prepotenti fenomeni politici oggi in corso.

Origins of the cyber-psychedelic subculture (2021)

In this article, two covers are presented from conferences proceedings sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, about Cybernetics – 1953 Macy Conferences – and Neuropharmacology – 1955 Neuropharmacological Conferences, in which U.S. neurophysiologist and behavioural scientist Ralph Waldo Gerard proposed the term ‘psychotomimetic’.

‘Pneumadelic’? Osmond, 1957: “my own preference being ‘psychelytic’, or ‘psychedelic’ ” /3 (2021)

“There is one golden rule that should be applied in working with model psychoses. One should start with oneself.”

“Our psychotomimetics resemble the hypothetical endotoxin that Carl Jung called toxin-X and that we have called M (mescalinelike) substance.”

Osmond views raise an interesting paradox of experience over logos: if in order to discuss rationally about such substances one has to use them and if using them disorganizes the psyche, would it ever be in fact possible to discuss rationally about them? Or the move to use them implies – a priori – an abandonment of human rationality?

‘Freud of the Rings’ (2021)

“In her book The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of Psychoanalysis, Phyllis Grosskurth explains that around 1912, Freud’s primary disciple and intellectual heir, Carl Jung, split with his mentor and began outlining his own theories which deviated from Freud’s work.

Freud, hoping to keep a grip on the emerging field of study, brought together six prominent students and created a “Secret Committee” to propagate and defend his work against Jungian psychoanalysis. To seal the deal, Freud gifted each committee member a signet ring with a Greek or Roman god from antiquity taken from his collection.

He later gifted other rings to friends and students, in total handing out about 20 of the signets during his life.”