According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online “Bhagavadgita, (Sanskrit: “Song of God”) an episode recorded in the great Sanskrit poem of the Hindus, the Mahabharata. It occupies chapters 23 to 40 of Book VI of the Mahabharata and is composed in the form of a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, an avatar (incarnation) of the god Vishnu. Composed perhaps in the 1st or 2nd century CE, it is commonly known as the Gita.
On the brink of a great battle between warring branches of the same family, Arjuna is suddenly overwhelmed with misgivings about the justice of killing so many people, some of whom are his friends and relatives, and expresses his qualms to Krishna, his charioteer a combination bodyguard and court historian. Krishna’s reply expresses the central themes of the Gita. He persuades Arjuna to do his duty as a man born into the class of warriors, which is to fight, and the battle takes place.
Krishna’s argument incorporates many of the basic teachings of the Upanishads, speculative texts compiled between 1000 and 600 BCE, as well as of the philosophy of Samkhya Yoga, which stresses a dualism between soul and matter (seemind-body dualism) [n.b. reality or “human experience as being constituted by two independent ultimate principles, puruṣa (‘consciousness‘ or spirit); and prakṛti, (cognition, mind and emotions)” ed. Wikipedia].
He argues that one can kill only the body; the soul is immortal and transmigrates into another body at death or, for those who have understood the true teachings, achieves release (moksha) or extinction (nirvana), freedom from the wheel of rebirth. Krishna also resolves the tension between the Vedic injunction to sacrifice and to amass a record of good actions (karma) and the late Upanishadic injunction to meditate and amass knowledge (jnana). The solution he provides is the path of devotion (bhakti). With right understanding, one need not renounce actions but merely the desire (kama) for the fruits of actions, acting without desire (nishkama karma). […]
The Gita has always been cherished by many Hindus for its spiritual guidance, but it achieved new prominence in the 19th century, when the British in India lauded it as the Hindu equivalent of the New Testament and when American philosophers — particularly the New England TranscendentalistsRalph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau considered it to be the pivotal Hindu text. It was also an important text for Mohandas K. [‘Mahatma’, ed.] Gandhi, who wrote a commentary on it.”
This is considered possibly the text that influenced Gandhi the most.
“Closeup of Vishnu, seated in the lotus position on a lotus. From depiction of the poet Jayadeva bowing to Vishnu, Gouache on paper Pahari, The very picture of devotion, bare-bodied, head bowed, legs crossed and hands folded, Jayadeva stands at left, with the implements of worship placed before the lotus-seat of Vishnu who sits there, blessing the poet.” Bhagavad Gita – Wikipedia
“This folio samples a part of verse 20, and the beginning of verse 21 from the opening chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, which is on the topic of Arjuna’s distress. प्रवृत्ते शस्त्रसम्पाते धनुरुद्यम्य पाण्डवः ॥ २० ॥ Then, beholding the sons of Dhritarâshtra standing arrayed, and flight of missiles about to begin, … the son of Pându, took up his bow, हृषीकेशं तदा वाक्यमिदमाह महीपते । अर्जुन उवाच । … ॥ २१ ॥ And spoke this word to Hrishîkesha, O Lord of Earth. Arjuna said:” Bhagavad Gita – Wikipedia
Below the full text of Huxley’s 1944 introduction (with emphasis and links added) to the Bhagavad-Gita.
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‘Bhagavad-Gita – the Song of God’. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. With an Introduction by Aldous Huxley. Hollywood: The Marcel Rodd Co., 1944. Copyright The Vedanta Society of Southern California.
More than twenty-five centuries have passed since that which has been called the Perennial Philosophy was first committed to writing; and in the course of those centuries it has found expression, now partial, now complete, now in this form, now in that, again and again. In Vedanta and Hebrew prophecy, in the Tao Teh King and the Platonic dialogues, in the Gospel according to St John and Mahayana theology, in Plotinus and the Areopagite, among the Persian Sufis and the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – the Perennial Philosophy has spoken almost all the languages of Asia and Europe and has made use of terminology and traditions of every one of the higher religions. But under all this confusion of tongues and myths, of local histories and particular doctrines, there remains a Highest Common Factor, which is the Perennial Philosophy in what may be called its chemically pure state. This final purity can never, of course, be expressed by any verbal statement of the philosophy, however undogmatic that statement may be, however deliberately syncretistic. The very fact that it is set down at a certain time by a certain writer, using this or that language, automatically imposes a certain sociological and personal bias on the doctrines so formulated. It is only in the act of contemplation, when words and even personality are transcended, that the pure state of the Perennial Philosophy can actually be known. The records left by those who have known it in this way make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist, Christian or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact.
The original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic. Theology, which generally takes the form of a reasoned commentary on the parables and aphorisms of the scriptures, tends to make its appearance at a later stage of religious history. The Bhagavad-Gita occupies an intermediate position between scripture and theology; for it combines the poetical qualities of the first with the clearcut methodicalness of the second. The book may be described, writes Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in his admirable Hinduism and Buddhism, ‘as a compendium of the whole Vedic doctrine to be found in the earlier Vedas, Brahmanas and Upanishads, and being therefore the basis of all the later developments, it can be regarded as the focus of all Indian religion.’ But this ‘focus of Indian religion’ is also one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the Perennial Philosophy ever to have been made. Hence its enduring value, not only for Indians, but for all mankind.
At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness – the world of things and animals and men and even gods – is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: 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. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
In Hinduism the first of these four doctrines is stated in the most categorical terms. The Divine Ground is Brahman, whose creative, sustaining and transforming aspects are manifested in the Hindu trinity. A hierarchy of manifestations connects inanimate matter with man, gods, High Gods and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond.
In Mahayana Buddhism the Divine Ground is called Mind or the Pure Light of the Void, the place of the High Gods is taken by the Dhyani-Buddhas.
Similar conceptions are perfectly compatible with Christianity and have in fact been entertained, explicitly or implicitly, by many Catholic and Protestant mystics, when formulating a philosophy to fit facts observed by super-rational intuition. Thus, for Eckhart and Ruysbroeck, there is an Abyss of Godhead underlying the Trinity, just as Brahman underlies Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either lead the life of the outer man, the life of separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, ‘nothing burns in hell but the self’). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.
Within the Mohammedan tradition such a rationalization of the immediate mystical experience would have been dangerously unorthodox. Nevertheless, one has the impression, while reading certain Sufi texts, that their authors did in fact conceive of al haqq, the Real, as being the Divine Ground or Unity of Allah, underlying the active and personal aspects of the Godhead.
The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy – that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning – is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality – theoretically and by hearsay – is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men’s cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu and Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytical reasoning. In the words of the Anglican Prayer Book, our eternal life, now and hereafter, ‘stands in the knowledge of God’; and this knowledge is not discursive but ‘of the heart,’ a super-rational intuition, direct, synthetic and timeless.
The third doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy, that which affirms the double nature of man, is fundamental in all the higher religions. The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away 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. But the spark within is akin to the Divine Ground. By identifying ourselves with the first we can come to unitive knowledge of the second. These empirical facts of the spiritual life have been variously rationalized in terms of the theologies of the various religions. The Hindus categorically affirm that thou art That – that the indwelling Atman is the same as Brahman. For orthodox Christianity there is not an identity between the spark and God. Union of the human spirit with God takes place – union so complete that the word ‘deification’ is applied to it; but it is not the union of identical substances. According to Christian theology, the saint is ‘deified,’ not because Atman is Brahman, but because God has assimilated the purified human spirit into the divine substance by an act of grace. Islamic theology seems to make a similar distinction. The Sufi, Mansur, was executed for giving to the words ‘union’ and ‘deification’ the literal meaning which they bear in the Hindu tradition. For our present purposes, however, the significant fact is that these words are actually used by Christians and Mohammedans to describe the empirical facts of metaphysical realization by means of direct, super-rational intuition.
In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means. In India, in China, in ancient Greece, in Christian Europe, this was regarded as the most obvious and axiomatic piece of orthodoxy. The invention of the steam engine produced a revolution, not merely in industrial techniques, but also and much more significantly in philosophy. Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement. Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future. 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. These false and, historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life. And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else’s religion.
These four doctrines constitute the Perennial Philosophy in its minimal and basic form. A man who can practise what the Indians call Jnana yoga (the metaphysical discipline of discrimination between the Real and the apparent) asks for nothing more. This simple working hypothesis is enough for its purposes. But such discrimination is exceedingly difficult and can hardly be practised, at any rate in the preliminary stages of the spiritual life, except by persons endowed with a particular kind of mental constitution. That is why most statements of the Perennial Philosophy have included another doctrine, affirming the existence of one or more human Incarnations of the Divine Ground, by whose mediation and grace the worshipper is helped to achieve his goal – that unitive knowledge of the Godhead, which is man’s eternal life and beatitude. The Bhagavad-Gita is one such statement. Here, Krishna is an Incarnation of the Divine Ground in human form. Similarly, in Christian and Buddhist theology, Jesus and Gotama are Incarnations of divinity. But whereas in Hinduism and Buddhism more than one Incarnation of the Godhead is possible (and is regarded as having in fact taken place), for Christians there has been and can be only one.
An Incarnation of the Godhead and, to a lesser degree, any theocentric saint, sage or prophet is a human being who knows Who he is and can therefore effectively remind other human beings of what they have allowed themselves to forget: namely, that if they choose to become what potentially they already are, they too can be eternally united with the Divine Ground.
Worship of the Incarnation and contemplation of his attributes are for most men and women the best preparation for unitive knowledge of the Godhead. But whether the actual knowledge itself can be achieved by this means is another question. Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thoughts of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties. Here, for example, is what Abbot John Chapman writes in on of his admirable Spiritual Letters: “The problem of reconciling (not merely uniting) mysticism with Christianity is more difficult. The Abbot (Abbot Marmion) says that St John of the Cross is like a sponge full of Christianity. You can squeeze it all out, and the full mystical theory remains. Consequently, for fifteen years or so, I hated St John of the Cross and called him a Buddhist. I love St Teresa, and read her over and over again. She is first a Christian, only secondarily a mystic. Then I found that I had wasted fifteen years, so far as prayer was concerned.” And yet, he concludes, in spite of its ‘Buddhistic’ character, the practice of mysticism (or, to put it in other terms, the realization of the Perennial Philosophy) makes good Christians. He might have added that it also makes good Hindus, good Buddhists, good Taoists, good Moslems and good Jews.
The solution to Abbot Chapman’s problem must be sought in the domain, not of philosophy, but of psychology. Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual may be useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development. All this is clearly set forth in the Gita, where the psychological facts are linked up with general cosmology by means of the postulate of the gunas. Krishna, who is here the mouthpiece of Hinduism in all it manifestations, finds it perfectly natural that different men should have different methods and even apparently different objects of worship. All roads lead to Rome – provided, of course, that it is Rome and not some other city which the traveller really wishes to reach. A similar attitude of charitable inclusiveness, somewhat surprising in a Moslem, is beautifully expressed in the parable of Moses and the Shepherd, gold by Jalaluddin Rumi in the second book of the Masnavi. And within the more exclusive Christian tradition these problems of temperament and degree of development have been searchingly discussed in their relation to the way of Mary and the way of Martha in general, and in particular to the vocation and private devotion of individuals.
We now have to consider the ethical corollaries of the Perennial Philosophy. “Truth,” says St Thomas Aquinas, “is the last end for the entire universe, and the contemplation of truth is the chief occupation of wisdom.” The moral virtues, he says in another place, belong to contemplation, not indeed essentially, but as a necessary predisposition. Virtue, in other words, is not the end, but the indispensable means to the knowledge of divine reality. Shankara, the greatest of the Indian commentators on the Gita, holds the same doctrine. Right action is the way to knowledge; for it purifies the mind, and it is only to a mind purified from egotism that intuition of the Divine Ground can come.
Self-abnegation, according to the Gita, can be achieved by the practice of two all-inclusive virtues – love and non-attachment. The latter is the same thing as that ‘holy indifference,’ on which Saint François de Sales is never tired of insisting. ‘He who refers every action to God, ‘ writes Camus, summarizing his master’s teaching, ‘and has not aims save His Glory, will find rest everywhere, even amidst the most violent commotions.’ So long as we practise this holy indifference to the fruits of action, ‘no lawful occupation will separate us from God; on the contrary, it can be made a means of closer union.’ Here the word ‘lawful’ supplies a necessary qualification to a teaching which, without it, is incomplete and even potentially dangerous. Some actions are intrinsically evil or inexpedient; and no good intentions, no conscious offering of them to God, no renunciation of the fruits can alter their essential character. Holy indifference requires to be taught in conjunction not merely with a s set of commandments prohibiting crimes, but also with a clear conception of what in Buddha’s Eightfold Path is called ‘right livelihood.’ Thus, for the Buddhist, right livelihood was incompatible with the making of deadly weapons and of intoxicants; for the mediaeval Christian, with the taking of interest and with various monopolistic practices which have since come to be regarded as legitimate good business. John Woolman, the American Quaker, provides a most enlightening example of the way in which a man may life in the world, while practicing perfect non-attachment and remaining acutely sensitive to the claims of right livelihood. Thus, while it would have been profitable and perfectly lawful for him to sell West Indian sugar and rum to the customers who came to his shop, Woolman refrained from doing so, because these things were the products of slave labour. Similarly when he was in England, it would have been both lawful and convenient for him to travel by stage coach. Nevertheless, he preferred to make his journeys on foot. Why? Because the comforts of rapid travel could only be brought at the expense of great cruelty to the horses and the most atrocious working conditions for the post-boys. In Woolman’s eyes, such as system of transportation was intrinsically undesirable, and no amount of personal non-attachment could make it anything but undesirable. So he shouldered his knapsack and walked.
In the preceding pages I have tried to show that the Perennial Philosophy and its ethical corollaries constituted a Highest Common Factor, present in all the major religions of the world. To affirm this truth has never been more imperatively necessary than at the present time. 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. All the elements of this philosophy are present, as we have seen, in the traditional religions. But in existing circumstances there is not the slightest chance that any of the traditional religions will obtain universal acceptance. Europeans and Americans will see no reason for being converted to Hinduism, say, or Buddhism. And the people of Asia can hardly be expected to renounce their own traditions for the Christianity professed, often sincerely, but the imperialists who, for four hundred years and more, have been systematically attacking, exploiting and oppressing, and are now trying to finish off the work of destruction by ‘educating’ them. But happily there is the Highest Common Factor of all religions, the Perennial Philosophy which has always and everywhere been the metaphysical system of the prophets, saints and sages. It is perfectly possible for people to remain good Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Moslems and yet to be united in full agreement on the basic doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy.
The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of escape from the self-imposed necessity of the self-destruction. For this reasons we should be grateful to Swami Prabhavananda and Mr Isherwood for having given us this new version of the book – a version which can be read, not merely without that dull aesthetic pain inflicted by all too many English translations from the Sanskrit, but positively with enjoyment.
“It was at least more plausible that the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade”
by Federico Soldani – 31st Dec 2021
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Charles Reade, (born June 8, 1814, near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, Eng.—died April 11, 1884, London), English author whose novels attack, with passionate indignation and laborious research, the social injustices of his times.” A fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, he “embarked on a long career as a dramatist, theatre manager, and novelist.”
Wikipedia, accessed 31st December 2021 reports that “Reade fell out of fashion by the turn of the century — “it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him,” wrote George Orwell in an essay on Reade” (emphasis and links added in subsequent quotes as well) […]
The author George Orwell summed up Reade’s attraction as “the same charm as one finds in R. Austin Freeman‘s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould‘s collections of curiosities — the charm of useless knowledge,” going on to say that:
“Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the Exchange and Mart, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you can hardly help enjoying Reade.”
“In the 1870s several British asylums came under close scrutiny in the popular and medical press. A number of patient deaths were reported that had a disturbing feature in common: broken ribs. The most alarming was the case of Rees Price, an elderly blind patient admitted to Carmarthen Asylum who had died shortly after admission. A postmortem found eight broken ribs and it was alleged that Price had received no proper medical examination upon admission, nor any special attention when he began to exhibit breathing difficulties. One of the responses to these revelations was a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette from novelist Charles Reade. Reade’s 1863 novel Hard Cash included a character who found himself committed to a private asylum where he was placed at the mercy of sadistic asylum attendants. Reade claimed that the research he had undertaken when writing this book cast light on the circumstances surrounding cases of rib fracture:
“The ex-keepers were all agreed in this that the keepers know how to break a patient’s bones without bruising the skin; and that the doctors have been duped again and again by them. To put it in my own words, the bent knees, big bluntish bones, and clothed, can be applied with terrible force, yet not leave their mark upon the skin of the victim. The refractory patient is thrown down and the keeper walks up and down him on his knees, and even jumps on his body, knees downwards, until he is completely cowed. Should a bone or two be broken in this process, it does not much matter to the keeper; a lunatic complaining of internal injury is not listened to. He is a being so full of illusions that nobody believes in any unseen injury he prates about.”
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Cover of a 1871 issue of The Journal of Mental Science, edited by Henry Maudsley of London and John Sibbald of Edinburgh, Vol. XVI. With a quote from Francis Bacon in Latin: “ Nos vero intellectum longius a rebus non abstrahimus quam ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu fit) coire possint. ”
These issues were discussed during the meeting of “THE MEDICO-PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION. The Report of a Quarterly Meeting of the Medico- Psychological Association, held in London, at the Royal Medico-chirurgical Society, by permission of the President and Council, on the 27th January, 1870.” A paper and a debate were published under “PSYCHOLOGICAL NEWS.”
“The Fifth Quarterly Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association was held, by the kind permission of the President and Fellows of the Medico-Chirurgical Society, at their house in Berners Street, on Thursday, January 27th, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, M.D. Cantab., one of the Lord Chancellor’s Visitors in Lunacy, Ex-President of the Society, in the chair [in the 1881 photo below, ed.].
Dr. SANKEY then read the following paper on “Ribs Fractured in Asylums”: “Doubtless there is at present no subject of greater importance to us and to the public, in relation to insanity, than that of the frequency with which fracture of the ribs has been found in patients dying in asylums. Its importance has relation to the causes of these injuries, to the obscurity which exists in connexion with their origin, and to the manner by which they are to be prevented.
In entering upon an inquiry into the causes of these fractures, I must separate all other cases of ill treatment and injury which have lately been collected together in articles that have appeared in the newspapers, and confine my remarks solely to the cases of fracture of the ribs.”
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After the reading of Dr. Sankey’s paper “The PRESIDENT said that the Association were much indebted to Dr. Sankey for the opportune manner in which he had brought this question before them that evening. The question, as Dr. Sankey said, had of late been debated with much of sensational effect in the daily papers, particularly in the Pall Mall Gazette. He (the President) believed that the writer in the Pall Mall was agitating the question and making capital out of the recent unfortunate cases — which he as much as any one deplored — in order to disparage the practice of non-restraint in our public asylums, and to cover the failures in that respect at the criminal asylum at Broadmoor, regarding which the Commissioners in Lunacy had so strongly commented. Broadmoor for some, to him unknown, reason enjoyed in a singular measure the powerful patronage and advocacy of the Pall Mall Gazette. Nevertheless he (the President) must still express his most unqualified and undiminished faith in the treatment of the insane without mechanical restraint, and he would go so far as to say that he would rather have such a complication and misadventure as broken ribs to occur in the rare individual instances in which it did, than consent to a recurrence – however modified in guise it might be -to the abominations of the restraint system. The safety beds, the polkas and mazourkas of the Scotch asylums he equally condemned.”
The President concluded:
“The theory of Dr. Sankey 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.”
In discussing Sankey’s paper, it was added by “Dr. TUKE – I regret that Dr. Sankey, in his paper on the subject, seems to imply that there may be truth in the assertion of some of the sensational writers in the public press, that such lamentable accidents as those now under discussion are common , or are of ordinary routine. I deny this in toto; such accidents are rare, and that being so, it is useless to argue that they are in their nature unlikely, or occur only in general paralysis. The only wonder is that in public asylums, 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.”
“I didn’t know my grandfather, [Paul]Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), personally. He died a number of years before I was born. Everything I know about him was told to me by my father, Manfred Bleuler, Eugen’s eldest son” [a psychiatrist himself, ed.] (emphasis and links added in subsequent quotes as well).
In an article entitled ‘Being a Member of the Bleuler Family’ (full text available on PubMed of the U.S. National Library of Medicine) published in the journals History of Psychiatry and Schizophrenia Bulletin in 2011, a granddaughter of Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler briefly reconstructed what she knew about her grandfather and his family and professional environment.
A similar article aboutCarl Gustav Jung by a grandson was previously discussed in PsyPolitics.
According to Wikipedia, accessed 29th December 2021, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler studied medicine in Zürich. He trained for his psychiatric residency at Waldau Hospital under Gottileb Burckhardt, a Swiss psychiatrist, from 1881-1884. He left his job in 1884 and spent one year on medical study trips with Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist in Paris, Bernhard von Gudden, a German psychiatrist in Munich, and to London. After these trips, he returned to Zürich to briefly work as assistant to Auguste Forel while completing his psychiatric residency at the Burghölzli, a university hospital” where he later became professor of psychiatry and director.
Some of Eugen Bleuler’s students included psychiatrists such as “Abraham, Binswanger, Jung, Brill, Minkowski,” as a preface comment by Berrios in History of Psychiatry highlighted.
According to a 2008 brief piece in the American Journal of Psychiatry, “The term ‘schizophrenia’ was coined 100 years ago, on April 24, 1908, when Paul Eugen Bleuler gave a lecture at a meeting of the German Psychiatric Association in Berlin:
“For the sake of further discussion I wish to emphasize that in [Emil] Kraepelin’s dementia praecox it is neither a question of an essential dementia nor of a necessary precociousness.
For this reason, and because from the expression dementia praecox one cannot form further adjectives nor substantives, I am taking the liberty of employing the word schizophrenia for revising the Kraepelinian concept.
In my opinion the breaking up or splitting of psychic functioning is an excellent symptom of the whole group.”
Bleuler and colleagues in Zurich reportedly used the term since 1907. The concept and term were revised in the seminal ‘Dementia Praecox, oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien’ (‘Dementia Praecox, or Group of Schizophrenias’) in 1911.
~~~
As Eugen Bleuler’s granddaughter pointed out in her article, “At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, the simple people living on the lakeshore too took an increasing interest in the developing sciences, and this was also the case for the Bleuler family. His parents lived most frugally so as to enable their children to have a good education. Furthermore, both families of Eugen Bleuler’s parents were actively involved in public life and regularly took on administrative positions in the Zollikon community.” “[After 1830] a liberal revival movement, under the influence of the French Revolution, began in Switzerland too.”
“It was […] to be able to better help his schizophrenic sister – that my grandfather’s wish to become a psychiatrist arose, indeed to be a psychiatrist who would look after his patients in a more personal way.”
“In his childhood, his whole existence revolved around the down-to-earth and yet intellectually stimulating life of his extended family, which had a great regard for science and was well stocked with good books.”
“He got married in 1901 to Hedwig Waser, whom he got to know as a fellow campaigner in the abstinence movement.” He had “an interest in people, psychology, social issues.”
Bleuler’s wife Hedwig was a Swiss suffragette and, according to Wikipedia “In 1901 she met Auguste Forel, a Swiss myrmecologist, neuroanatomist, psychiatrist and eugenicist, and at his suggestion, she founded the Swiss Federation of Abstinent Women. She chaired the Federation as president until October 1921.”
The psychiatrist Forelwas a founder of the field ofmyrmecology – the scientific study of ants. According to Wikipedia, Forel published a major “treatise on the ants of Switzerland […] in 1874 and commended by Charles Darwin. He was appointed professor of psychiatry in 1879 at the University of Zurich Medical School. He not only ran the Burghölzli asylum there, but continued to publish papers on insanity, prison reform, and social morality. ”
In more recent decades, it was Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson – who died only a few days ago (NYT obituary here) – to study the field of myrmecology “on which he was called the world’s leading expert” and to be one of the funders of the controversial field called sociobiology. In 2011 he published his only novel ‘Anthill’, a “political allegory” based on the world of ants.
‘Le monde social des fourmis du globe comparé à celui de l’homme’. Genève, Kundig, 5 volumes (1921-1923).
From 1978 until 2000 Forel’s image appeared on the 1000 Swiss franc banknote – Auguste Forel – Wikipedia
“In 1913, they [the Bleulers, ed.] undertook their longest journey and only world tour, which lasted about two months. Bleuler had been invited to the opening of a clinic in Baltimore by Adolf Meyer, who was Swiss and also, at that time, a leading American psychiatrist.”
Meyer was a psychiatrist of primary importance in the history of the discipline and of related fields including psychiatric epidemiology and community psychiatry, in the United States of America. In 1913, Meyer was overseeing the founding and development of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
According to Wikipedia, “Following his interest in hypnotism, especially in its “introspective” variant, Bleuler became interested inSigmund Freud’s work. He favorably reviewed Josef Breuer and Freud’s ‘Studies on Hysteria‘.
Like Freud, Bleuler believed that complex mental processes could be unconscious. He encouraged his staff at the Burghölzli to study unconscious and psychotic mental phenomena. Influenced by Bleuler, Carl Jung and Franz Riklin used word association tests to integrate Freud’s theory of repression with empirical psychological findings. As a series of letters demonstrates, Bleuler performed a self-analysis with Freud, beginning in 1905. Bleuler laid the foundation for a less fatalistic view of course and outcome of psychotic disorders along with C.G. Jung, who further used Bleuler’s theory of ambivalence and association experiments to diagnose neurotic illnesses.
Bleurer found Freud’s movement to be overly dogmatic and resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1911, writing to Freud that “this ‘all or nothing’ is in my opinion necessary for religious communities and useful for political parties… but for science I consider it harmful”.
Bleuler remained interested in Freud’s work, citing him favorably, for example, in his often reprinted ‘Textbook of Psychiatry’ (1916). He also supported the nomination of Freud for the Nobel Prize in the late twenties.”
~~~
“He had clear and precise ideas about life and morality”, Bleuler’s granddaughter concluded in her article.
“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. He perceived the religiosity of many people as hypocrisy, although it never occurred to either of them to leave the Church: membership belonged to order of things and to tradition. Bleuler deemed it all the more his duty to do right and to fulfil his responsibilities toward his family, patients and country.”
“Of altogether nine grandchildren of Eugen Bleuler, only one became a psychiatrist. But, as a child growing up in the same, albeit smaller, director’s apartment, I felt at home in the Burghölzli.”
Ida Darwin was a pioneer in what we refer to as social work, mental hygiene and mental health, sometimes seen as movements.
According to Wikipedia, accessed 28th December 2021 (emphasis and some links added in further quotes as well): “Ida, Lady Darwin (née Farrer; 7 November 1854 – 5 July 1946) was the wife of Horace Darwin [at one point Mayor of Cambridge, he was son of Charles and great-grandson of Erasmus Darwin, previously discussed in PsyPolitics about ‘Cannabis’, ed.], member of the Ladies Dining Society, and a co-founder in 1913 of the Central Association for the Care of the Mentally Defective (in 1921 renamed the Central Association for Mental Welfare). Darwin was born Emma Cecilia Farrer and took the name Ida from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’.”
When in 1918 her husband Horace Darwin was knighted, Ida became Lady Darwin.
From ‘Horace Darwin’s shop : a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company 1878 to 1968’ (Bristol: Hilger, 1987).
“Ida and Horace Darwin settled in Cambridge, where they lived at “The Orchards”, a 24-room mansion on Huntingdon Road. A full complement of servants gave Darwin the leisure to pursue activities outside the home. In 1883 she was a founding member of the Cambridge Association for the Care of Girls (CACG), an organisation that identified working-class girls who were deemed to be wayward or out of control and placed them in domestic service or sent them to training institutions for service, and that also ran recreational clubs for girls. She later joined the Ladies Dining Society.” According to Ann Kennedy Smith, “Invited speakers included Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who gave a talk on ‘The medical profession for women’ and Beatrice Webb [a founder of the London School of Economics, ed.] on ‘The expediency of regulating the conditions of women’s work’.”
From ‘Horace Darwin’s shop : a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company 1878 to 1968’ (Bristol: Hilger, 1987).
Still according to Wikipedia, “Darwin was also on the committee of the Cambridge Charity Organisation Society and in 1908, in response to the recommendations of Royal Commission for the Care and Control of theFeeble-Minded, together with Florence Ada Keynes [mother of economist John Maynard Keynes and later the second female Mayor of Cambridge, ed.] formed a sub-committee to enquire into the number of “defective” children in Borough schools. This sub-committee became the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded [1909, ed.] and members included the Mayor of Cambridge, the Regius Professor of Medicine and representatives from the Borough Education Committee, the Eastern Counties Asylum in Colchester and the Cambridge Association for the Care of Girls. [Ida became chairman of the association, her husband Horace was on the committee and their daughter Ruth was Honorary Secretary, ed.]. The group campaigned for the passage of legislation that would put the recommendations of the Royal Commission into force and organised meetings and conferences. In 1912 the Association, jointly with Cambridge University Eugenics Society, held a meeting in the Guildhall, where Ellen Pinsent[mother of Lady Adrian, ed.] read a paper on ‘Mental Defect and its Social Dangers’.“
According to Christ’s College, Cambridge, “It was during this time that Ida became interested in eugenics, and the fact that certain weaknesses seemed to run in families. In 1910 Ida gave a talk on ‘Inherited Pauperism’ at the Annual Meeting of the CACG. She was not averse to using her husband’s position and influence to promote the best interests of her causes:
“When Mrs (Lady from 1918) Darwin wanted action she called personally on the Mayor, the Chief Constable, or the Chairman of the bench. She continued to rely on the support of her husband and the extensive Darwin family network to further her aims…”
(Paulson-Ellis, C., ‘The Cambridge Association for the Care of Girls, Social Work with Girls and Young Women in Cambridge 1883-1954’ : 2007)
Ida Darwin, from Darwin Archive Add 8904.4: 1282, Cambridge University Library.
“After the Mental Deficiency Act was passed in 1913 the Association merged with the Cambridgeshire Voluntary Association for the Care of the Mentally Defective, which had just been formed by the County Council. This organisation was affiliated to the Central Association for the Care of the Mentally Defective (later the Central Association for Mental Welfare). Darwin was a vice-president of the Central Association for Mental Welfare and as such was a signatory to a letter to The Times in 1929 calling for the segregation and supervision of existing defectives and an inquiry into the causes of mental deficiency:
“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”.
Although Darwin reduced her public commitments following the death of her son in 1915, she maintained links with the Central Association for Mental Welfare until the end of her life.”
Again according to Kennedy Smith, “During the war years Ida read Freudand Jung and followed with interest Dr William Rivers’ accounts in the Lancet of a new ‘talking therapy’ to treat soldiers suffering from the condition then known as ‘shell shock’, now commonly referred to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ida was convinced that the ‘talking cure’ should be used more widely among the civilian population, and after the Armistice was signed she asked Dr Rivers and Dr Charles Myers to lend their support to her scheme to establish a special clinic where people could be treated for ‘early mental disorders’ without the stigma of staying in an asylum. In 1919 the first outpatients’ psychiatric clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital was opened, one of the first in the country.”
“Darwin died 5 July 1946 and is buried in Cambridge at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground along with her husband. She had an obituary in The Times, with a further note by Leslie Scott who described her as “one of the pioneers in this country in the field of social work”.
“When her interest and sympathy were awakened in the unhappy and hazardous lot of the mentally deficient, she worked quietly and unweariedly on their behalf, and she had no small share in bringing about the Act of 1913.”
(The Times, Digital Archive 1785-1985 – Obituaries)
The Ida Darwin Hospital, built in the 1960s on the Fulbourn Hospital [the main psychiatric hospital for Cambridge, ed.] site, was named in her honour. She also has an iris, Mrs Horace Darwin, named after her.”
As the website of Christ’s College, Cambridge reports “At a meeting of the Regional Board in 1963, the Chairman Lady Adrian [daughter of Ellen Pinsent and wife of Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine Lord Adrian, ed.] suggested that the new unit be named ‘The Ida Darwin Hospital. This was to be in recognition of Ida and her contemporaries who were a “…great influence on the framing of early legislation for the care and control of the mentally handicapped and were personally responsible for the formation of voluntary bodies for the welfare of the mentally handicapped in Cambridge.” (Programme for the Official Opening of the Ida Darwin Hospital, East Anglian Regional Hospital Board : Cambridgeshire County Archives). Although residents were able to use the facilities from 1966 onwards, the Ida Darwin Hospital was officially opened in September 1970.”
The Ida Darwin Hospital site is now slowly closing down as the units are moving one by one to different sites.
The Central Association for Mental Welfare, of which Ida Darwin was vice-president, contributed to originate what is nowadays a major U.K. mental health charity called ‘MIND’.
“HORACE DARWIN. Born 1851 Died 1928. Son of Charles Darwin. And in memory of his only son ERASMUS. Born Dec. 1881 who fell near Ypres April 1915. IDA DARWIN. Wife of Horace Darwin. Born 1854 Died 1946. Ascension Parish Burial Ground – Wikipedia. Photo from here.
Fulbourn, near Cambridge, in 2018 (photo by the author).
~~~
[In the photo at the top, Ida Darwin. Darwin Archive Add 8904.4: 1254, Cambridge University Library.]
“An audience that had greeted, debated, and discussed Freud’s theoretical construction of psychoanalytic psychology, often before he published the results”
by Federico Soldani – 21st Dec 2021
On the 7th and 14th of December 1897, Sigmund Freud delivered his first two lectures to the B’nai B’rith in Vienna entitled ‘Traumdeutung’ (‘Interpretation of Dreams’). Two years later, in 1899, Freud published what became one of the most important books of the twentieth century, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’.
As reported in a journal of the B’nai B’rith in February of 1898 (emphasis added in the following quotes as well): “Two lectures by Brother Dozent Dr. Freud about the interpretation of dreams. The lecturer, beginning with the familiar physiological causes of dreams, discussed the psychology of dream life and established the principles of a self-contained theory. In the conclusion of his ingenious interpretation, he characterized the great significance of his scientific theory; he said: Whoever is occupied with the dreams of man and understands their true meaning peers into the secrets of the human soul and into a crater imbedded within the earth’s dark interior.”
These two were the first of twenty one lectures delivered to the B’nai B’rith from 1897, the year he joined the society, to 1917.
Other interesting lectures among these included one about “Hammurabi” in 1904, around the time a team of French archaeologists uncovered a large stone in the acropolis of Susa containing inscriptions of a codex dictated in the eighteen century B.C. by a “sun god” to the Babylonian King Hammurabi. This was the first collection of laws known at the time to antedate the Bible. Parallels were noted with the book of Exodus. Four centuries later than the Hammurabi’s codex, Moses gave his code of laws. Freud later touched upon similar themes in his last book ‘Moses and Monotheism’ when he was, as scholars noted, “writing from his death-bed.”
Another lecture on the 19th of March 1907 was on “Psychology in the Service of the Administration of Justice”, which was about a topic he already discussed in front of an audience of young lawyers about using psychoanalysis to determine whether statements made in court were true and on ascertaining the innocence or guilt of someone who is accused in court.
As discussed by Dennis B. Klein in his ‘The Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement’ (Preager, New York 1981; The University of Chicago Press, 1985), “Freud joined the Viennese lodge of the International Order of the B’nai B’rith on September 29, 1897. As he expressed to the B’nai B’rith members years later, his hostile professional reception and general sense of isolation “aroused in me the longing for a circle of excellent men with high ideals who would accept me in friendship despite my temerity. Your lodge was described to me as a place where I could find such men.” In both of his extant letters to the lodge, called Wien (Vienna), Freud stressed the need for relieving the burden of ostracism. “I felt as though outlawed, shunned by all,” he wrote in 1926. Nine years later, he added, “I soon became one of you, enjoyed your sympathy, and almost never neglected to go to the place, surrounded by extreme hostility, where I was certain to find friends.” Freud longed not just for friends, but by joining the B’nai B’rith, for Jewish friends. His reference to the “extreme hostility” suggests one reason for this: He had sought refuge specifically from anti-Semitic ostracism.”
“The significance of the B’nai B’rith for Freud” – Klein continued – “went beyond consolation. Had he merely been a participating member, the society might have been nothing more to him than a retreat from social and professional hostility – a circle of friends. But, as in the Karlsbad dream and in his association with Fliess, his association with Jews in the society became an integral part of the search for his destination, the “new psychology” of psychoanalysis. Only a month after his November letter of complaint to Fliess, Freud presented the first of two lectures to the B’nai B’rith, on the results of his work on dream interpretation. The occasion marked one of his earlier efforts at communicating his burgeoning views on dreams. Only Fliess and another Jewish society (Jüdische akademische Lesehalle) which he had addressed once in 1896 and again the following year, had heard his views on the subject before. The response of the B’nai B’rith and Freud reaction to its reception, launched a new, triangular relationship among the Jewish society, Freud, and psychoanalysis. One member acclaimed the “principles of self-contained theory” presented by Freud and the “ingenious [geistvollen] interpretation.” Another vividly recalled the impact Freud made on the brotherhood. “From beginning to end, everyone present listened with rapt attention to Freud’s words. He made the results of his recent studies clear to us not only in the cogency of his ideas but in his overall lucidity.” Still another commended his “masterful art of delivery,” remarking that his talk on dreams before the brotherhood made for “one of the most enjoyable evenings. The audience expressed their gratitude and approval with unrestrained applause.”
“Freud was jubilant about the lecture’s enthusiastic reception, and proclaimed, “I shall continue it next Tuesday.” Indeed, he continued to address the Jewish society many times after presenting the material on dreams. At the time he published the article on forgetfulness, Freud lectured to the B’nai B’rith on the same subject. Again he succeeded in provoking his attentive audience, which in turn inspired subsequent lectures given to the society. The following year (1900) he delivered two papers, “The Psychic Life of the Child” and “Chance and Superstition.” Here was an audience that had greeted, debated, and discussed Freud’s theoretical construction of psychoanalytic psychology, often before he published the results. Having abandoned the academic circles for the time being, Freud filled, through the B’nai B’rith, the professional as well as the social vacuum in his life. The Jewish society became an active intellectual forum for his metapsychological views during the productive five-year period 1897-1902, and, in this respect, was a precursor of the movement of psychoanalysis (Freud convened the first study session in October 1902). As Freud later said to the brotherhood, “At a time when no one in Europe would listen to me and I had no pupils in Vienna, you offered me your sympathetic attention. You were my first audience.”
Klein concluded in his 1981 book that “By regarding the brotherhood as his only audience for his scientific investigations prior to the organization of his own study group, the society assumes an additional significance as a complement to the theory and the movement of psychoanalysis.”
Uso politico del linguaggio psichiatrico: il rivoluzionario Sorokin su Lenin
di Federico Soldani – 8 Dicembre 2021
Vi presento qui sotto laprima traduzione in Italiano (non sono riuscito a trovarne di precedentemente pubblicate, ma potrebbero forse esserci, soprattutto vista la natura di nicchia di certe pubblicazioni politiche) dello scrittoche il rivoluzionario russoPitirim AleksandrovičSorokin pubblico’ a seguito di un dibattito politico su Lenin dopo la morte di quest’ultimo nel 1924.
Sorokin fu allievo dell’Istituto Psico-Neurologico di Bekhterev, segretario personale del primo ministro rivoluzionario russo Kerensky e poi fondatore dei dipartimenti di sociologia sia all’universita’ di Pietrogrado, poi Leningrado, in URSS sia all’universita’ di Harvard negli Stati Uniti d’America su invito diretto di Lowell, presidente di Harvard.
Sorokin, orfano di entrambi i genitori e non piu’ nella casa paterna gia’ da quando aveva poco piu’ di dieci anni, fu molto attivo come rivoluzionario sin dall’adolescenza al punto che dopo aver fatto il carcere nel 1906 soffri’ intorno al 1907 di un “esaurimento nervoso”. Divenne allievo dell’Istituto Psico-Neurologico dal 1909, appena l’anno dopo che questo apri’ agli studenti e due anni dopo la fondazione del 1907, ma si trasferi’ “all’Università di San Pietroburgo dopo un anno per sfuggire alla leva” (Richard, 1985). L’Istituto divenne poco tempo dopo “una grande università privata (la prima in Russia all’epoca)” nelle parole dello stesso fondatore Bekhterev.
Come spiega Sorokin in una delle sue due autobiografie, “la sociologia era stata introdotta nel curriculum universitario sotto il regime di Kerensky nel 1917”. Sorokin era anche stato segretario personale, come spiega lui stesso nell’autobiografia, di M. M. Kovalevsky, professore di diritto all’Università di San Pietroburgo e fondatore della sociologia all’Istituto Psico-Neurologico di Bekhterev nella allora capitale dell’Impero russo, San Pietroburgo (Pietrogrado dal 1914 e Leningrado dal 1924, per tornare al nome originario nel 1992). Come spiega ancora Sorokin, Kovalevsky fu “un influente membro del Consiglio di Stato (che corrispondeva in qualche modo al Senato degli Stati Uniti) e un leader di un partito liberale”.
Sorokin, secondo Michel P. Richard che lo incontrò negli anni ’60 nella sua casa di Winchester, nel Massachusetts, e scrisse un’introduzione alla versione ridotta (Routledge, Londra 1985, enfasi aggiunta anche nelle successive citazioni) del suo capolavoro “Dinamiche Sociali e Culturali” (1937-1941 in quattro volumi):
“Nel 1918 fu arrestato e accusato di aver complottato per assassinare Lenin. Amici influenti ottennero la sua scarcerazione, ma si impegnò immediatamente in operazioni militari contro i bolscevichi ad Arcangelo. Quando questo sforzo fallì, Sorokin con un compagno si nascose in una foresta per due mesi. Alla fine, per proteggere gli amici che lo ospitavano, si consegno’ alla polizia [politica, ndr] Čeka. Fu condannato a morte, ma ancora una volta amici influenti persuasero Lenin che fosse un buon candidato per la riabilitazione.”
“In un articolo di due pagine sulla Pravda, Lenin ha difeso l’ex ministro nel gabinetto di Kerensky e ha garantito per la sua purezza rivoluzionaria. Sorokin è stato immediatamente rilasciato, portato a Mosca e con l’offerta di una posizione di governo che non accettò.
Tornò invece al dipartimento di sociologia che aveva fondato all’Università di Pietrogrado. Tra gli uditori giornalieri nelle sue classi, dice Sorokin, c’erano due spie della Čeka (la polizia segreta del nuovo governo) che segnalarono le sue lezioni come ideologicamente discutibili.
Le speranze di Lenin che Sorokin si convertisse devotamente al bolscevismo furono deluse. In nuovi articoli Lenin attaccò Sorokin, definendolo “tipico della parte più implacabile dell’intellighenzia russa”, e nel 1922 Sorokin fu bandito dalla Russia.” Una volta esiliato si reco’ a Berlino e poi a Praga dove inizio’ a scrivere la sua Sociologia della Rivoluzione.
Copertina di “Russia e Stati Uniti” (1944), di Pitirim Sorokin – Routledge, Londra 2006 (routledge.com)
L’articolo su Harvard Crimson menzionava anche l’interesse di Sorokin per le tecniche di Raja-Yoga e si concludeva descrivendolo come “un uomo che un tempo parlava direttamente con Lenin e Trotsky, che fu condannato a morte e poi bandito dal suo paese, e che ha prodotto alcuni dei “fili” più importanti della sociologia”. La sociologia di Sorokin e’ stata inquadrata assieme a quella di altri come “sociologia profetica”. Come recita la voce dedicatagli in italiano su Wikipedia: “Nel 1962 fu eletto primo presidente della Società internazionale per lo studio comparato delle civiltà e, in occasione del primo Congresso tenutosi in ottobre a Salisburgo, conobbe lo storico inglese Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) la cui opera giungeva a conclusioni simili a quella di Sorokin.”
Un anno dopo la Rivoluzione d’Ottobre infatti, nel 1918, Lenin pubblicò sulla Pravda l’articolo: “Le preziose ammissioni di Pitirim Sorokin”. Di per sé questo scritto di Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov alias Lenin o Nikolai Lenin) su Sorokin mostra l’importanza dell’ex segretario personale di Kerensky.
“Pitirim Sorokin” – scriveva Lenin – “annuncia che lascerà il Partito Socialista-Rivoluzionario di Destra e lascerà il suo seggio nell’Assemblea Costituente. I suoi motivi sono che trova difficile fornire ricette politiche efficaci, non solo per gli altri, ma anche per se stesso, e che quindi “si sta ritirando completamente dalla politica”.
Continua Lenin: “Scrive [Sorokin, ndr]: “L’ultimo anno di rivoluzione mi ha insegnato una verità: i politici possono sbagliare, la politica può essere socialmente utile, ma può anche essere socialmente dannosa, mentre il lavoro scientifico ed educativo è sempre utile ed è sempre necessario al popolo. . . .”La lettera è firmata: “Pitirim Sorokin, docente presso l’Università di San Pietroburgo e l’Istituto Psico-Neurologico, ex membro dell’Assemblea costituente ed ex membro del Partito socialista-rivoluzionario”.
“Pitirim Sorokin si sbaglia quando dice che il lavoro scientifico “è sempre utile”. Perché anche in questo campo si commettono errori” affermava Lenin sulla Pravda. “D’altra parte, una dichiarazione franca di una persona di spicco, cioè una persona che ha occupato un posto politico di responsabilita’ noto alla gente in generale, che si sta ritirando dalla politica è anche questa politica” (enfasi nell’originale).
Era questo di Sorokin, cosi’ come riportato da Lenin, una forma di antipolitica, una sorta di posizione tecnocratica? La politica potrebbe essere dannosa, la scienza no, secondo Sorokin.
Qui il link all’articolo originale in inglese, dal sito PitirimSorokin.com: sorokin-was-lenin-a-failure-forum-1924.pdf (wordpress.com), pubblicato come ‘Was Lenin a failure? — A Debate: I — Lenin, The Destroyer’, Sorokin, Pitirim. Forum; Apr 1924; Vol. LXXI, No. 4. Enfasi in grassetto e’ stata aggiunta per evidenziare le parti di interesse politico piu’ attuale e in particolare l’uso di linguaggio psicologico, da quello a vario titolo pseudo o quasi tecnico sino addirittura al linguaggio esplicitamente psichiatrico.
Un dibattito politico viene cosi’ fortemente personalizzato e persino medicalizzato e psicologizzato (quindi psichiatrizzato). Una volta impostata una questione politica in senso medico o psicologico e’ nell’ordine del discorso passare alla patologizzazione o psico-patologizzazione del politico avversario e di idee, proposte, programmi che si disapprovano.
L’articolo di Sorokin su Lenin del 1924 inizia subito infatti con il paragone tra l’uomo di stato da una parte e il medico (o l’ingegnere) dall’altra e quindi della malattia, nonche’ con il paragone con la figura del pazzo che desidera essere il Salvatore dell’umanità: “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“.
Nikolai Lenin (Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov), in uno schizzo realizzato dal vero per il New York Times da Oscar Cesare a Mosca, novembre 1922 e autografato da Lenin
Lenin è stato un fallimento? — Un dibattito: I — Lenin, il distruttore. Di Pitirim Sorokin. Forum; aprile 1924; vol. LXXI, n. 4
L’unico servizio reso da Lenin all’umanità è stato quello di aver combinato un disastro così tragico con le proprie idee da screditarle per sempre, secondo il Professor Sorokin, che presenta una feroce denuncia delle politiche del defunto dittatore della Russia. Egli attribuisce a Lenin la colpa di tutti i mali che hanno colpito il suo paese dalla Rivoluzione, e lo riassume come un fanatico patologico e un agente di distruzione, senza nuove idee e nessun messaggio per l’umanità, un leader mezzo matto di brutali ribelli.
~~~
Stimiamo un medico, un ingegnere, un architetto, un pittore, non tanto secondo il suo desiderio soggettivo quanto secondo il risultato oggettivo della sua attività. 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. Solo quando un uomo di stato riesce nella realizzazione dei suoi scopi e questi si rivelano utili alle masse, – economicamente, biologicamente, moralmente e intellettualmente, – si può dire di lui che era grande e buono.
Da questo punto di vista oggettivo è abbastanza facile apprezzare la figura di Lenin e i risultati della sua vita e attività. Ha prodotto qualche nuova idea scientifica e teoria? Chiunque conosca i suoi libri e i suoi articoli deve rispondere negativamente a questa domanda. A partire dal suo primo libro: Lo sviluppo del capitalismo in Russia e finendo con i suoi ultimi libri, Stato e rivoluzione, Il rinnegato Kautsky, L’imperialismo come fase dello sviluppo del capitalismo, e con i suoi articoli e discorsi, Lenin non ha mai presentato una nuova teoria , una nuova ideologia o una nuova idea. Tutti i suoi libri, articoli e discorsi non erano altro che una noiosa e monotona ripetizione di quattro o cinque idee di Marx e di due o tre altri autori. Materialismo filosofico ed economico; volgare ateismo; lotta di classe; dittatura del proletariato; fede cieca nel metodo rivoluzionario di ricostruzione sociale, nell’utilità della nazionalizzazione forzata o collettivizzazione della produzione; credenza nella perequazione obbligatoria degli standard economici; infine un’ingenua convinzione che lo sviluppo spontaneo del capitalismo avrebbe condotto a un paradiso socialista sulla terra; che l’odio e la lotta sanguinosa ma non l’altruismo, l’aiuto reciproco e la cooperazione degli individui e delle classi sono le vere forze creative, – tali erano gli ingredienti principali dell’ideologia di Lenin. Questa ideologia è originale? No. La sua mentalità può essere definita ricca? Al contrario è molto povera. È l’ideologia di un mendicante intellettuale.
Ma Lenin era forse un attore pratico di successo che con il suo genio era in grado di mettere in pratica queste idee e migliorare in questo modo lo stato biologico, economico, mentale e morale del popolo, specialmente delle classi lavoratrici? Anche in questo caso i risultati oggettivi della dittatura di Lenin ci danno una risposta abbastanza precisa a questa domanda.
I risultati oggettivi dell’attività di Lenin furono, in breve, i seguenti (tutte le cifre che fornisco sono cifre ufficiali bolsceviste):
Diciassette milioni di uomini e donne perirono durante la Rivoluzione. Di questa “carne della Rivoluzione” circa due milioni furono le vittime della Guerra Civile (di queste circa 500.000 furono vittime del terrore rosso): gli ultimi quindici milioni furono vittime della fame e delle malattie provocate dalla Rivoluzione. Questa perdita significa non solo diminuzione quantitativa ma impoverimento qualitativo, perché le vittime rappresentavano in media gli elementi migliori della popolazione.
Tutta la vita economica in Russia è stata distrutta. Le industrie russe nel 1918-21 furono ridotte al 10 o 15 per cento della loro attività prerivoluzionaria e l’agricoltura ridotta al 20 o 25 per cento. Anche adesso, dopo l’abbandono del sistema comunista del 1921, le industrie russe rappresentano solo il 20 o 25 per cento e l’agricoltura il 40 o 45 per cento del periodo prerivoluzionario.
Ciò significa il massimo impoverimento economico di tutte le classi. Il salario medio di un lavoratore prima della Rivoluzione era di circa 22 rubli oro al mese. Durante questi anni ha oscillato tra 2 e 10 rubli. Il reddito medio annuo è sceso da 87 rubli nel 1916-17 a 36 rubli nel 1921-23. Invece di 19.000 locomotive e 476.000 vagoni ferroviari nel 1916, nel 1922 la Russia aveva solo 7.000 locomotive e 195.000 vagoni.
Nella sfera delle finanze, l’ 1 gennaio 1917, la Russia aveva un fondo statale di circa due miliardi di rubli d’oro e 9,27 miliardi di carta. L’ 1 maggio 1923, tutto il fondo aureo della Russia, così come quasi tutte le ricchezze private ed ecclesiastiche, erano state spese dai bolscevichi mentre la quantità di carta moneta aveva raggiunto i 6.076.00.000.000 di rubli, che valevano solo circa un milione di rubli d’oro.
La terribile carestia, senza precedenti nella storia della Russia (anche la carestia del 1601-3 non fu così terribile), la fame, le malattie, la sofferenza sovrumana, la mortalità spaventosa, la grande diminuzione della natalità e il deterioramento biologico e l’indigenza tra i sopravvissuti, specialmente la generazione più giovane, – tali sono gli ulteriori risultati di questa “attività di successo”.
Ma ahinoi! Questo non è tutto. Risultati simili si possono osservare in altri ambiti della vita sociale. Nella sfera della morale abbiamo avuto l’aumento invisibile della criminalità e della licenziosità. Gli omicidi, i furti, la corruzione, lo sciacallaggio e altri crimini aumentarono di molte volte. La criminalità dei bambini a Pietrogrado nel 1921 era sette volte maggiore rispetto a prima della rivoluzione. I furti alle ferrovie nel 1921 furono 150 volte più che prima della rivoluzione, e così via.
Disintegrazione della famiglia, aumento dei divorzi (da un divorzio su 500 matrimoni prima della Rivoluzione a un divorzio su undici matrimoni nel 1922), licenziosità sessuale, malattie veneree, ecc., tutto questo è un ulteriore risultato dell’attività di Lenin e dei suoi compagni.
La distruzione delle scuole e di un intero sistema di educazione e istruzione pubblica è un altro dei “benefici” di questo “liberatore” dell’umanità. Invece di 450 milioni di rubli d’oro spesi per l’educazione e l’istruzione pubblica nel 1914, nel 1922 furono spesi solo 36 milioni di rubli d’oro a questo scopo.
Accanto alla distruzione quantitativa, il sistema scolastico è stato distrutto qualitativamente. I migliori insegnanti e professori furono giustiziati, banditi, imprigionati e licenziati. Al loro posto sono stati nominati i “professori rossi” e gli “insegnanti rossi” che non hanno capacità, nessuna esperienza nell’istruzione e nell’insegnamento. Se la popolazione stessa non avesse agito nel campo dell’istruzione nonostante i “freni” messi dai comunisti per l’educazione e l’istruzione al di fuori delle scuole comuniste, Lenin e la sua banda sarebbero sicuramente riusciti a liquidare l’alfabetizzazione in Russia.
Infine, cosa è successo nella sfera delle libertà e della libertà? Nient’altro che un completo annientamento di tutte le libertà di tutte le classi della popolazione russa eccetto i comunisti stessi (372.000 sui 129 milioni della popolazione russa). La libertà di stampa è stata ed è completamente annientata. Tutti i giornali, ad eccezione dei giornali e delle riviste comunisti, sono stati vietati. Non solo libri e opuscoli, ma anche il tuo biglietto da visita non potresti stampare senza un permesso speciale.
Fu revocata anche la libertà dei sindacati, di fare riunioni, discorsi, riunioni religiose. Solo i comunisti stessi hanno avuto questi diritti. Ogni garanzia di diritti e di appartenenza, ogni sicurezza di vita è scomparsa. Ogni vera elezione o tentativo di autogoverno e autonomia, ogni realizzazione dei principi della democrazia furono dichiarati “pregiudizi borghesi” e perseguitati.
I lettori non pensino che queste limitazioni siano state riservate solo alle classi aristocratiche e capitaliste. Sono state applicate anche ai contadini e agli operai.
Invece della liberazione, sono stati creati un dispotismo, un’autocrazia e una tirannia illimitati. Ma questo non è tutto. Le persone furono trasformate negli schiavi del governo. Fino al 1922 non avevano diritto di scegliere la loro occupazione e professione, il loro alloggio, il loro cibo, il loro abbigliamento, di viaggiare senza il permesso del governo, di leggere i libri e i giornali che volevano; in breve, invece della libertà è stato creato un tale sistema di schiavitù come si può trovare solo molti, molti secoli fa.
Nessuno sfruttamento capitalistico potrebbe essere paragonato allo sfruttamento degli operai e dei contadini russi da parte di questo piccolo gruppo comunista e dei loro alleati, avvenuto in questi anni. Anche adesso i contadini russi sono sfruttati, sei o sette volte più efficacemente che durante il regime zarista.
Questi risultati sono evidenti a qualsiasi uomo che abbia vissuto in Russia in questi anni e che conosca la situazione reale. Nemmeno l’invasione napoleonica della Russia, né tutte le guerre, carestie, epidemie e disgrazie che la Russia aveva vissuto in venti secoli furono così distruttive come sei anni di attività dittatoriale di Lenin e dei suoi seguaci.
La storia ha la sua ironia. Come culmine di questo colossale fallimento abbiamo il rifiuto stesso di Lenin del suo sistema e della sua teoria, – la sostituzione al sistema comunista del 1918-1920 della “Nuova politica economica” nel 1921, che è semplicemente il primitivo sistema capitalistico portato avanti dai comunisti stessi. Che cosa significa, se non un completo fallimento del comunismo stesso, se non un inconfondibile testimonium peuperitatis dell’attività di Lenin!
Invece del comunismo ora abbiamo in Russia una crescita senza precedenti dell’individualismo e il completo discredito del comunismo e del socialismo. Invece dell’annientamento dell’istinto al possesso e alla proprietà privata ne abbiamo ora il rafforzamento e il trionfo; invece dell’ateismo, una rigenerazione senza precedenti del sentimento religioso. Invece dell’estirpazione del nazionalismo come risultato della propaganda comunista dell’internazionalismo, abbiamo uno spirito di nazionalismo e patriottismo senza precedenti. Queste condizioni sono esattamente l’opposto di ciò che Lenin ha cercato di ottenere. Non riesco a immaginare una prova più eclatante del suo fallimento.
Per un uomo che sa che Lenin dal momento del suo ritorno in Russia nel 1917 era all’ultimo stadio della paralisi progressiva [neuro-sifilide, ndr], sa che anche allora era anormale, che questa anomalia alla fine del 1921 è stata attestata da un medico – per un tale uomo tutta la psicologia e il comportamento di Lenin sono abbastanza comprensibili su basi patologiche. Mezzo matto e malato, era adatto a essere a capo di un governo caratterizzato da distruzione selvaggia, bestialità illimitata, crudeltà e animosità. Le frasi generose e le parole d’ordine con cui ha cercato di “abbellire” tutta l’inferiorità della sua natura, la sua antisocialità, follia e attività sfrenata, non sono altro che i soliti “veli” con cui tali individui cercano anche di tradire se stessi come altre persone.
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.
L’unico servizio positivo di Lenin è che lui stesso ha screditato le sue stesse idee di comunismo e socialismo più completamente di quanto chiunque altro potesse fare. Ma difficilmente desiderava un simile risultato, e gli altri comunisti e socialisti difficilmente gli saranno grati per un tale merito. In verità, la storia ha una sua logica e una sua ironia. In effetti che il colpo mortale al comunismo sia stato inferto dal leader comunista è davvero qualcosa di provvidenziale e simbolico.
E’ trattato in questo scambio in modo molto conciso, acceso, ma piuttosto significativo il significato della parola “follia” in filosofia e in politica – si veda per esempio la citazione di Karl Marx da parte di Severino: “questa parola ‘follia’, che poi usa tanto Marx”.
Come si legge sul sito della RAI (link ed enfasi aggiunti, anche nelle successive citazioni), “Con “Mixer Cultura” Arnaldo Bagnasco è riuscito a catturare l’interesse dei telespettatori affrontando temi impegnati come l’arte, il teatro, la filosofia, grazie ad accesi dibattiti e grandi ospiti, da De Crescenzo ad Achille Bonito Oliva. Su RaiPlay tutte le 15 puntate della prima stagione, andata in onda dal 20 febbraio 1987.”
Rispetto alla puntata da cui e’ tratto questo scambio, si legge: “Dopo i filosofi gli dei: Luciano De Crescenzo risponde al quesito se sia possibile divulgare la filosofia. Autore di una celebre storia della filosofia, De Crescenzo è stato ferocemente attaccato dai filosofi contemporanei: fra detrattori e sostenitori, in studio Gianni Vattimo, Sebastiano Maffettone, Emanuele Severino, Lucio Colletti e Girolamo Cotroneo.” In studio era presente ed intervenne anche il filosofo Carlo Augusto Viano.
Ospiti in sala, come spettatori, alcuni studenti della Scuola Normale di Pisa.
Severino fa una distinzione tra “follia” intesa in senso filosofico o forse anche morale (es. Lucifero) e “follia” intesa in senso psicologico (es. stupido). Ad ogni modo e’ piuttosto interessante lo scambio a suon di commenti sugli “umori” o i “deliri” dell’interlocutore – a cui se pur in forma piu’ contenuta non si sottrae neanche Severino – e di inviti a stare buoni tra filosofi che discutono di follia della civilta’ “occidentale” e di significato e uso della parola ‘follia’ in ambito anche politico.
La parola e il concetto di ‘follia’ si confondono cosi’ in questo scambio tra Colletti e Severino tra ambito filosofico, morale, psicologico e politico. Entrando anche all’interno delle modalita’ stesse del dibattito sulla follia e sulla rilevanza filosofico-politca di questa.
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Severino menziona Marx che sosteneva come il capitalismo fosse una “follia”.
Impressionante per esempio e’ leggere lo scritto di Sorokin su Lenin del 1924, “Lenin, il distruttore” (forse sino ad oggi non tradotto in italiano):
“Per un uomo che sa che Lenin dal momento del suo ritorno in Russia nel 1917 era nell’ultimo stadio di paralisi progressiva [neuro-sifilide, ndr], che sa che anche allora era anormale, che questa anomalia alla fine del 1921 è stata testimoniata dal medico – per un tale uomo tutta la psicologia e il comportamento di Lenin è abbastanza comprensibile su basi patologiche. Mezzo matto e malato […] Qualsiasi psicologo, psichiatra e comportamentista serio lo sa molto bene. Solo un popolo ignorante e ingenuo da un lato, e individui di tipo matto, 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 meno bisogno di essere convinti che curati”.
Anche nel saggio utopico ‘Vita in una Tecnocrazia’ di Harold Loeb del 1933 (non ancora tradotto in italiano, riscoperto alla fine del 2020 e discusso ampiamente su PsyPolitics nel 2021, si veda la serie di quindici articoli‘Un soviet di tecnici… in America?”), c’e’ ampio uso di termini sia metaforici sia letterali legati alla medicina e in particolare alla psichiatria.
Persino con una esplicita invocazione dell’uso degli psichiatri – e delle “visioni mistiche” (testuale) – qualora le persone non dovessero accettare il passaggio rivoluzionario dal capitalismo alla forma di tipo socialista o comunista chiamata tecnocrazia. Harold Loeb arrivava a preconizzare l’uso sistematico di “visioni mistiche” legate alla “tensione estatica” in modo tale che cittadini spoliticizzati accettassero quanto accadeva all’esterno mentre attraverso queste visioni “riprodotte a volonta’” potevano conoscere o, come scrisse esplicitamente, “pensare di conoscere il significato della vita”.
“Gli americani, la loro fede nel capitalismo intatta, negano la malattia”, scrisse Loeb (enfasi aggiunta). Sui test sanitari: “Alcuni individui considerano l’esame sanitario periodico un’invasione dei loro diritti privati; ma tali invasioni non si risentono a lungo”. “È solo la diffidenza dei poveri, ai quali l’esperienza insegna a non aspettarsi alcun bene dall’ignoto, che li rende recalcitranti ai consigli medici”.“Con i medici che assumessero il ruolo intimo di consulenti familiari, i deficienti mentali verrebbero inevitabilmente riconosciuti. Se sospettati di tendenze pericolose, le loro abitudini verrebbero tenute sotto osservazione; quando necessario, le loro azioni contenute”. Sull’arte e le strettamente connesse psico-discipline: “L’uomo e il suo ambiente agiscono l’uno sull’altro. Entrambi sono alterati nel processo”. “Alcuni uomini lavorano sul mondo esterno. Il rimodellamento della crosta terrestre per renderla più congeniale alla vita umana e l’uso di materiali naturali per soddisfare i bisogni fisici sono funzioni degli uomini d’azione”. “Altri uomini rimodellano la natura umana. Il loro tentativo è di adattare l’uomo al suo ambiente e non viceversa. La trasmutazione della natura dell’uomo, lo sviluppo delle sue percezioni in modo che sia in grado di sintonizzarsi con quelle armonie interiori che danno valore alla vita, il digerire i fenomeni affinché invece della paura e del disgusto diano piacere“. “Per arte… intendo lo sviluppo di quelle facoltà mediante le quali l’uomo si adatta al suo ambiente”. Sulla necessita’ di lavorare sul dentro e non sul fuori: “L’energia umana, applicata alla ricerca di modi di vita che soddisfino, alla creazione di valori che elevino lo spirito, può migliorare la sorte dell’uomo sulla terra nella stessa sfera psichica interna, come il genio dell’uomo, diretto alla conquista del mondo materiale esterno, ha migliorato le condizioni della sua esistenza fisica”. “Una tecnocrazia cercherebbe di liberare quel grande surplus di energia vitale che ora si sta consumando, inutilmente, nel gioco degli affari, e reindirizzarlo verso canali inesplorati”. Sul disadattamento, auspicava un “lavoro di ricerca, diretto alla scoperta delle cause dei disadattamenti psichici“.
Sull’ “Avvento della Tecnocrazia” (testuale) descritto in termini quasi messianici e sulla necessita’ di pianificare la rivoluzione, con relativa descrizione dei passi necessari da effettuare nella pianificazione della rivoluzione: “Probabilmente l’unico evento in grado di provocare un cambiamento così fondamentale sarebbe un grande collasso“.
Loeb sosteneva nel libro apertamente l’uso della psichiatria con funzione politica: “Come ultimo provvedimento il certificato energetico” – una misura che puo’ ricordare l’attuale sistema di “credito sociale” in Cina – “potrebbe essere annullato. Questa punizione dovrebbe rivelarsi efficace nella maggior parte dei casi. Qualora un individuo si dimostri ostinatamente recalcitrante per ragioni oscure, gli psichiatri proverebbero a risolvere il problema”.
Emanuele Severino per parte sua aveva ampiamente scritto sul rapporto tra politica e tecnocrazia, si veda a titolo di esempio l’articolo del 2014 anch’esso – proprio come Loeb in Vita in una Tecnocrazia del 1933 – con toni messianici‘La tecnica guida del mondo sostituirà tutte le ideologie’ dal Corriere.it in cui concludeva: “Alla guida dell’agire del mondo si pone la tecnica, l’ideologia vincente che sostituisce il capitalismo alla guida del mondo e ha come scopo l’incremento indefinito della capacità di realizzare scopi. L’ultimo Dio”.
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Al termine della trascrizione – qui sotto con il video – dello scambio tra Colletti e Severino, c’e’ anche per chi fosse interessato il video dell’aprile 2019 in cui Emanuele Severino dialogava con l’allora Presidente del Consiglio italiano e in cui trattava della rilevanza di alcune sue idee filosofiche per la politica contemporanea.
Conduttore: Senta, mi scusi, il protagonista in questo momento e’ lei. De Crescenzo e’ stato la nostra introduzione, e’ un pretesto […]. Approfittiamo della sua presenza, ritorno a Parmenide, da 2500 anni circa abbiamo sbagliato tutto, viviamo nella follia. Qui, la televisione, una folgorante battuta tipo Nietzsche quando dice “il rimedio e’ peggiore del male”.
Severino: Non e’ proprio cosi’ vede, perche’ ritornare a Parmenide vuol dire ripetere il parricidio compiuto da Platone. E cioe’ dopo Parmenide si e’ andati avanti, si e’ fatto un gran passo. Ecco quel passo e’ stato estremamente pericoloso. E allora bisogna farlo in modo diverso, ma andando oltre Parmenide.
La televisione, ma non so, e’ simile alla fotografia, rientra in questa sorta di follia, che pero’ detto cosi’ Colletti avrebbe ragione a dirmi che il matto sono io. Se appartiene all’essenza della fotografia allora anche la televisione ha la mania di volere fissare il divenire, laddove non c’e’ bisogno di fissare in immagini cio’ che non e’ cosi’ transeunte come penserebbe non so, Faust quando dice all’istante ‘fermati, sei bello’. No, le cose sono gia’ li’ stabili e ferme senza bisogno di fermarle con le macchine.
Conduttore: Ecco ha detto una cosa, devo dire, interessante, appassionante e anche televisiva.
Severino: Ma troppo lunga.
Conduttore: No – no, no, no il dono della sintesi ha. Vorrei invitare il professor Colletti, che e’ presente in sala, un altro grande protagonista della nostra Mixer Notte, perche’ a proposito del contenuto della filosofia di Emanuele Severino ha detto delle cose feroci.
Colletti: No, guardi che lei e’ male informato e quello che e’ peggio e’ male informato lo stesso Severino.
Severino: “Ne son contento.”
Colletti: “Perche’ tutto quello che io ho detto, producendo poi i vivaci umori reattivi del nostro Severino, l’ho detto rispondendo a una telefonata di un redattore de L’Espresso. La mia risposta e’ di tre righe, detta al telefono quindi lei puo’ considerare con quale impegno, uno sta facendo una cosa, squilla il telefono. Ho espresso soltanto una riserva generica che per una congiura di circostanze favorevoli, perche’ e’ bene poi che si producano queste cose anche quando sfiorano il cattivo gusto, ha avuto dico un effetto esplosivo come se fosse una bomba ed era una dichiarazione di tre righe che non conteneva nulla di offensivo nei riguardi di Severino. Poi noi abbiamo avuto delle polemiche a parte, ma queste si sono sviluppate in delle sedi piu’ adeguate, dico, e non attraverso una dichiarazione di due righe fatta al telefono.
Conduttore: No, no, pero’ la sua dichiarazione tradotta male sul giornale, io sono felice che avvenga questo perche’ e’ un fatto televisivo.
Colletti: Lei evidentemente, le e’ arrivata attraverso una cattiva divulgazione.
Conduttore: Mi e’ arrivata dal giornale.
Colletti: Quale giornale?
Conduttore: da L’Espresso.
CollettI: Ma, guardi, erano due righe assolutamente…
Conduttore: Dunque lei ha detto che Severino fa pensare a certi brillanti ingegni di provincia che stampano opuscoli a proprie spese per dimostrare che la teoria della relativita’ poggia su un errore grossolano che solo loro hanno scoperto.
Colletti: Senta, ingegni brillanti lei mi concedera’ che non e’ un’offesa, vivere in provincia e’ l’aspirazione suprema per me che vivo in questo Cairo che e’ Roma. Per quanto riguarda l’ingegno brillante che crede di poter confutare Einstein mi sembra una riduzione ai toni minimi perche’ confutare Einstein e’ ancora niente rispetto alla condanna proclamata su 2500 anni di storia di tutto l’Occidente. Tutto l’Occidente, la follia dell’Occidente. Mi sembra insomma che ho minimizzato, era la minestrina che danno le suore rispetto dico alla… Quindi ecco non vedo cosa ci fosse di offensivo. Si vede, che probabilmente ha coinciso con un momento in cui il nostro Emanuele era come dire con il petto gonfio, stava per pronunciare un do di petto, ed era forse dico visitato da quella cosa che puo’ succedere insomma momentaneamente, quelle forme di delirio di grandezza, no?
Conduttore: Professore, Severino, ha diritto a parlare.
Severino: Certo che ho diritto…
Colletti: Si, non vorrei che corresse il sangue eh.
Conduttore: No, no, no, no, anzi se volete smettiamo subito e chiudiamo la questione. Pero’ mi sembra di una chiarezza la questione…
Colletti: Dovevate avvertirmi, sarei venuto non in giacca ma con una corazza.
Conduttore: No, ma noi siamo soltanto curiosi, sappiamo che la cultura italiana quando si scontra veramente fa dei minuetti. Se quindi vi dite delle cose vere, insomma, ha un senso.
Severino: Dunque ecco, ma lo stesso Colletti vuole sminuire la cosa, lasciamo perdere…
Colletti: No, non e’ che voglio sminuirla…
Severino: Vuoi sminuire quello che tu hai scritto, cioe’ non e’ offensivo. Si’. Adesso lascia parlare me, buono! Adesso parlo io.
Colletti: Non l’ho scritto… un secondo, devi considerare che era riportata all’interno di un servizio giornalistico come un parere raccolto… basta.
Conduttore: Ma questo l’abbiamo capito, prego.
Severino: Direi di lasciar perdere tutta questa faccenda.
Colletti: Massi’.
Severino: E invece quello che vorrei dire a Colletti, che e’ un’altra persona che mi e’ tuttora simpatica perche’ quante volte l’ho invitato a Venezia…
Colletti: Ma infatti… anche tu…
Severino: Eh, pero’ tu devi star buon adesso, su. Eh.
Conduttore: Per favore, Colletti…
Severino: Una cosa che vorrei dire a Colletti e’ il senso di questa parola ‘follia’, che poi usa tanto Marx. Quando tu usi la parola follia e’ come se tu dessi del cretino a qualcuno, quando tu parli della follia… adesso mi ascolti in silenzio fino a che io ho finito.
Per te quando si dice follia e’ un equivalente di diminutio psicologica. Non e’ cosi’ per me.
Quando io parlo di follia dell’Occidente… anche Marx aveva molto rispetto per il capitalismo e diceva che era una follia. Allora quando noi per esempio diciamo che Lucifero e’ qualche cosa di assolutamente negativo e di folle perche’ va addirittura contro Dio, intendiamo dire che sia una specie di stupido, di cretino, di poveruomo? Mentre quando tu dai del folle nelle tue critiche, introduci – tu e altri – questa caratteristica psicologicamente negativa.
Invece nel mio discorso la follia e’ cio’ che di piu’ grande, di piu’ bello, di piu’ essenziale, perche’ l’errore e’ qualche cosa di essenziale.Quindi non e’ il fatto che Pinco Pallino che si chiama Emanuele Severino dice a tutti gli altri, voi siete dei poveri diavoli, il vero che ha capito sono io. No! Si sta considerando la struttura di un grande errore il quale e’ essenziale, cio’ senza di cui non ci sarebbe nemmeno la verita’.
Quindi direi che tu dovresti modificare, oltre ai tuoi umori, anche il tuo modo di intendere la categoria di follia che e’ presente nei miei scritti.
Conduttore: Benissimo…
Colletti: Posso…
Conduttore: No, no, no, scusi, dopo, no, no, no, no un attimo solo, un attimo solo. Perche’ io vorrei che il dibattito, se cosi’ e’, vada avanti…
Colletti: Si’ pero’ mi lasci precisare che io non ho mai adoperato, neppure in quella benedetta dichiarazione che lei ha letto prima la parola ‘folle’.
Severino: “L’hai detta adesso, l’hai detta adesso! L’hai usata adesso.”
Condottore: L’aveva usata adesso, aveva parlato di delirio.
Colletti: Ma no ripetendo una sua affermazione…
Condottore: No, no, aveva parlato di delirio provinciale, no? Senta, andiamo avanti, tanto questo e’ un problema che credo non si puo’ risolvere in questo momento.
~~~
Dialogo del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri Giuseppe Conte con il Professor Emanuele Severino – Palazzo Chigi Youtube channel
Contents of such volume and the two book covers of the hardback 1965 and paperback 1966editions are presented. The importance and “rediscovery” of such book in PsyPolitics is motivated by the extraordinary concordance – as previously noted – with some of the themes present in today’s transforming global politics, currently in mass and digital media, as well as in formulations independently developed over the past three years and largely presented in PsyPolitics.
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According to Encyclopaedia Britannica online (bold added for emphasis), Harold Dwight Lasswell was an “influential political scientist known for seminal studies of power relations and of personality and politics and for other major contributions to contemporary behavioral political science. He authored more than 30 books and 250 scholarly articles on diverse subjects, including international relations, psychoanalysis, and legal education.
Lasswell received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics in 1922 and his Ph.D. in 1926 from the University of Chicago, and he studied at the Universities of London, Geneva, Paris, and Berlin during several summers in the 1920s. He taught political science at the University of Chicago (1922–38) and then served at the Washington School of Psychiatry (1938–39) and was director of war communications research at the U.S. Library of Congress (1939–45). After World War II, he went toYale University, where he served until the 1970s in various capacities, including as professor of law, professor of political science, and Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Sciences and emeritus fellow of Bramford College. He was also a professor of law at John Jay College of the City University of New York and at Temple University. He was a visiting lecturer at campuses throughout the world and was a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies.
Lasswell viewed political science as the study of changes in the distribution of value patterns in society, and, because distribution depends on power, the focal point of his analysis was power dynamics. He defined values as desired goals and power as the ability to participate in decisions, and he conceived political power as the ability to produce intended effects on other people. In Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)—a work whose title later served as the standard lay definition of politics—he viewed the elite as the primary holders of power, but in Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (1950), written with Abraham Kaplan, the discussion was broadened to include a general framework for political inquiry that examined key analytic categories such as person, personality, group, and culture.
His works on political psychology include Psychopathology and Politics (1930), which seeks the means of channeling the desire for domination to healthy ends; World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1935); and Power and Personality (1948), which deals with the problem of power seekers who sublimate their personal frustrations in power. In these and later works, Lasswell moved toward a moralistic posture, calling for the social and biological sciences to reorient themselves toward a science of social policy that would serve the democratic will for justice. Other features of political science that can be traced to Lasswell include systems theory, functional and role analysis, and content analysis.
Some of his other major works include Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), World Revolutionary Propaganda (with Dorothy Blumenstock, 1939), Politics Faces Economics (1946), The Policy Sciences: Recent Developments in Scope and Method (with Daniel Lerner, 1951), and The Future of Political Science (1963).”
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From my perspective, the first time I heard of Lasswell – who can be considered among the pioneers in the study of so-called psycho-politics – was in a video in 2019 by political psychiatristSteve Pieczenik. Dr. Pieczenik, among other things, in the 1970s acted as special member sent to Italy by the Carter administration of a “psy” committee during the case of Aldo Moro – President of the major Italian party Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy, in English) – kidnapping and killing in Italy by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). See for instance the book “La Pazzia di Aldo Moro” (Aldo Moro’s Madness).
Gregory Zilboorg – born Girsh Moseevich Zil’burg – according to the most prominent historian of psychiatry of the late 20th century Roy Porter, was one of the first historians of psychiatry with his 1935 “The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance” and especially with his major historical work “A history of medical psychology” (1941). He also wrote “The passing of the old order in Europe” (1920).
Zilboorg – as previously described in an article about the Psycho-Neurological Institute revolutionaries in PsyPolitics – “accompanied Kerensky almost everywhere during the revolution first week, even to a room on the palace’s top floor where the leader ate and slept” according to his biography just published in 2021. Zilboorg acted in the revolutionary Provisional Government as personal secretary to Matvey Skobelev, mister of labor and also a key member of thePetrograd Soviet.
After the October Revolution or Bolshevik coup, Zilboorg moved to New York City where he became a famous psychoanalyst. His patients or clients included a number of members of the Warburg family.
‘Russian Psychiatry – Its Historical and Ideological Background’
by Gregory Zilboorg. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Oct 1943 (links added, bold for emphasis)
THE history of Russian culture cannot easily be understood unless one bears constantly in mind the special circumstances of its evolution. Russia is an old country, of course; she is rich in tradition and great events. But unlike the rest of Europe, she was never in intimate historical contact with the classical civilization of Greece and Rome, and the Byzantine influences came late and were more or less limited to the religious trends of the Eastern Church. Whatever streams of classical inheritance there were in Russia came via Western Europe, after Europe had already gone through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and was approaching the French Revolution. Russia remained isolated for many centuries. When Ivan III, in 1480, threw off the yoke of the Mongolians who had overrun Russia, Europe was already at the great turn from medievalism to the Renaissance. When Rodrigo Borgia ascended the throne of St. Peter in 1492, the year America was discovered, Russia was still almost as isolated as China and had nothing to contribute to the Western World. Nor did she yet possess the curiosity and impulse to acquire and assimilate what Europe had to offer. When Galileo died and Newton was born in 1642, Francis Bacon had been dead for sixteen years and Shakespeare for twenty-six, but Russia was still deeply rooted in her own semi-Byzantine tradition, without a literature of her own, torn by civil strife, steeped in problems which were far from the scientific, artistic, and religious revolutions of Europe. Russia did not establish any definite cultural contact with Western Europe until the eighteenth century. The French Revolution was already in the making and a new economic class was about to enter the political scene of Europe; Russia was at the time still a vast feudal country with millions of serfs, an autocratic governing class, no middle class, and almost no industry.
The cultural contact with the Western World once established, Russia proved a capable and original pupil. Within one century, or not very much more than that, she not only became a legitimate member of the European cultural family but succeeded in making great contributions to that culture. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Tschaikovsky belong to the whole world as well as to Russia; the work of Mendelyeev in chemistry, Bechterev in neurology, and Korsakov in psychiatry became an integral part of European science; as early as 1818 Lobachevsky’s contributions testified to the maturity of Russian mathematical scholarship and its revolutionary approach to the revision of Euclidian geometry. Now, some one hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution, hardly a century and one-half after Russia joined the Western World, Russia stands politically, economically, and scientifically a full equal and in many respects a superior to the old Western European tradition. Such phenomenal assimilation of centuries of European culture could not help but produce certain unique paradoxes.
Through the channels of institutional religion, England, the oldest parliamentary country in the world, found herself on rather intimate terms with Imperial Russia, the oldest and the most absolute autocracy in Europe until 1917. For generations the Bishop of Canterbury felt spiritually at home in the Holy Synod of the Russian Church Orthodoxy. The Russian liberal, academic intellectualsespoused the cause of constitutional, parliamentary government in the English tradition, while Russian imperial policy stood out as the logical enemy of British imperialism.
The revolutionary forces of Russia, coming from the lower economic strata, espoused the most advanced European economic theories, those of Marxism; these theories were based on problems which arose in the most industrialized countries of Europe, while Russia remained primarily agrarian and almost feudal to the very last day of the Empire. The cultural varnish of the upper classes became French; the industrial trends were taken mostly from Germany and only recently from America; the scientific methodology was as much German as it was French. Philosophy and literature and music remained singularly Russian. In short, the picture of Russian culture is truly kaleidoscopic. The history of Russian medicine, and particularly of psychiatry, reflects both the meteoric rise of Russian science and those especially Russian peculiarities which were not lost in the process of rapid assimilation of foreign importations.
These Russian peculiarities could be summarized very briefly; any aspect of Russian cultural efforts is permeated with the spirit of high humanitarian social aspirations for reform combined with a spirit of revolutionary struggle against the bureaucracy and the autocratic cruelty and stupidity of Russian political and economic absolutism. It is this social motif that reverberates through every step of Russian medical history. This is no less true of psychiatry, the youngest of all medical specialties, one not yet wholeheartedly accepted even by the medicine of the Western World. Psychiatry has its own history, and because psychological problems are more intimately connected with the development of religions and philosophy, psychiatry was delayed and almost stunted in its growth all over the world. It first languished outside medicine and later lagged behind it. Only within our time has psychiatry established itself as a legitimate branch of medicine and as a discipline which has succeeded in building its own methodological foundation and in developing its own scientific procedure. Russian psychiatry, while no exception in this respect, had a longer and more arduous road to cover.
There was no inkling of psychiatry in Russia till the latter part of the eighteenth century. The first retreat for the mentally ill in St. Petersburg was opened as late as 1779. France at that time already had a detailed classification of mental diseases produced by Boissier de Sauvages. Young Philippe Pinel, who was to revolutionize the care of the mentally ill, was already in Paris. Mesmer was known in Paris as well as in Vienna. How small and insignificant the retreat in St. Petersburg was one may deduce from the fact that five years after its opening it had but thirty-two rooms; in another five years-in the year the first shot of the French Revolution was fired-the number of rooms was increased to forty, ten of which were reserved for more affluent patients. By way of contrast, let us recall that there was a hospital for the mentally ill in Cairo five hundred years earlier. There was one in Valencia at the beginning of the fourteenth century. There was one in Saragossa around 1425, in Toledo in 1483, in Madrid in 1540, in Stockholm in 1551, and in Zurich in 1570. Bedlam was already an ancient institution in 1779. The York Lunatic Asylum was opened in 1777 – it was three stories high and accommodated one hundred and eighty patients.
There were many mentally ill in Russia, of course. They wandered about in the streets and in the woods and some of them were taken care of by the monasteries. But in one respect, Russia stands out as a happy exception in the otherwise gruesome history of psychiatry the world over. The European tradition of burning the mentally ill as witches did not develop independently in Russia, nor was it imported into Russia from Western Europe. Not being influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, Russian Church Orthodoxy, which has such a bloody and dark record in the political history of Russia, did not couple mental disease with Lucifer and produced no special theological psychiatry, nor did it have an Inquisition to raise the heated quarrels with the medical profession. The idea, if not the concept, that mental diseases are real diseases seems to have been established toward the beginning of the eighteenth century in Russia.
The following incident occurred in 1701. A psychotic by the name of Nikonov wandered among some guards who were on duty and told them the Tsar should be cursed because he had introduced into the Moscovite Tsardom such innovations as “German” stockings and shoes. Nikonov was arrested. An investigation was started but the offender could not be examined properly: “He screamed and threw himself about and used unintelligible words and spat on the image of the Holy Virgin. He was chained and held to a heavy trunk by three soldiers, but he broke away, fell to the floor, and snorted loudly for a long time; while doing so he fell asleep. The investigators concluded that the man was crazy and suffered from falling sickness.” No mention was made in the report of any attending physician.On April 28, 1701, the Tsar himself issued a ukase to the effect that the miscreant be sent to a monastery for a month’s observation in order to establish “what sickness and craze he may reveal.” A month later the monastery reported that “no sickness or craze was found, that the man spoke no foolish words, and that he was on the whole in possession of his mind and reason.” Thereupon the Tsar ordered that Nikonov, “in consequence of his misdemeanor and indecent language, be punished with a whip, then branded, and exiled to Siberia for life with his wife and children.” [U. Kannabich, History of Psychiatry (in Russian). State Publishing House, 1928].
Peter the Great evidently understood the medicopsychological inadequacy of monasteries, and as early as 1723 he formally forbade sending the mentally ill to monasteries and ordered the construction of mental hospitals. But even the power of a despotic Tsar cannot overcome the inertia of his own bureaucracy or that of a historical tradition. Nothing was done. Almost forty years later, in 1762, the Senate ordered specifically that the psychotic prince Kozlovski “should not be sent to a monastery but to a special house which is to be built for this purpose, as is the custom in foreign lands, where they have established dollhouses so be it” (Ibid.).
The origin of the term “dollhouse” is not clear. It is used frequently in the Russian psychiatric literature of the eighteenth and of the first part of the nineteenth century. It is apparently a perversion of the German Tollhaus, house for the insane.
There was no Russian physician at that time who could advise how to build a “dollhouse” in accordance with “the custom in foreign lands.” The Senate inquired of the Academy of Sciences and a historiographer by the name of Muler provided the authorities with a brief description of what a “dollhouse” should be and what kinds of insane people there are. He recommended that a doctor be put in charge of such a house, and he stated definitely that the business of treating the mentally ill should be left in the hands of the physician. The priest, he said, had nothing to do with insane people until they come to their senses and regain their reason.
However, some years passed before finally the “yellow house,” as they began to be called, opened. In 1766 an order was issued in St. Petersburg demanding that anyone who knew of or gave refuge to a mentally ill person should report the latter to the police. The police were very soon overwhelmed with reports. In 1776 a small “yellow house” was opened in Novgorod, and another in Moscow. As has been mentioned already, the capital of Russia did not have one until 1779. All were founded in the close neighborhood of monasteries and most even carried the names of the latter.
From this time on a series of hospitals opened all over Russia. In 1814 they were put under the supervision of a department of the Ministry of the Interior. By 1860 there were forty-three hospitals for the mentally ill in Russia – all small, all inadequately run, and all governed in the tradition of cruelty. The cautery, whips, chains, so-called “isolators” – more or less Russian editions of the European padded cells – were all used freely in the management of patients. In 1820 the Moscow “dollhouse” had twenty-five sets of chains for one hundred and thirteen patients.
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II
The years during and following the Napoleonic Wars brought Russia closer to European political thought and European scholarship. But the brief honeymoon of the sentimental liberalism of Alexander I ended in disappointment for those whose liberal hopes outlived the youthful impulses of the Russian Emperor. The Decembrist rebellion in 1825 ended with the complete triumph of autocracy. The reign of Nicholas I started with blood and continued in an atmosphere of darkest reaction. In the meantime, Russian economic life underwent the gradual but definite change which had characterized Europe two full generations earlier. A commercial and industrial class developed which was unable to make peace with the selfish, autocratic rule of Tsardom or to support the ruinous tradition of serfdom on which the ruling classes of the Russian Empire had fattened. The opposition of the newly born class served only to intensify the iron rule of autocracy. The country’s needs grew; problems of public health, of building new hospitals, of caring for the mentally ill were all concentrated in the hands of a dull, complacent, and self-contained bureaucracy to which a well-organized secret police system was of greater value than measures of social welfare. Under the circumstances, psychiatry did not have the necessary opportunity to develop. Mental patients were not only treated with cruelty but even their most elementary needs were not provided for. They were fed atrociously, meat being served at only rare intervals; laundry was not provided; filth, hunger, and cruelty summarize briefly but poignantly the status of the mentally ill. In the words of a contemporary writer, the mental hospitals were “a branch of Dante’s Inferno.”
However, the fermentation of newer forces in Russia, once started, would not stop. Russian autocracy was forced to abolish serfdom in 1861, and by 1867 Russian bureaucracy had to yield a little more ground. It transferred the supervision of mental hospitals to the “zemstvos” – the semi-official, civic organizations which represented the major strivings of the new “third estate” for rational public welfare. Permission was given to the zemstvos and even to certain municipalities to build new hospitals. The need for physicians and surgeons was acute; greater still was the need for physicians trained in psychiatry.
The early ‘sixties of the past century marked the true beginnings of Russian psychiatry. In 1862 the short-lived “Society of Physicians for the Insane” was organized. This was the parent of the Petersburg Society of Psychiatrists, which was founded in 1880. How slowly psychiatry grew in Russia may be judged from the fact that out of the four hundred and forty physicians who attended the first all-Russian psychiatric meeting at Moscow, in January 1887, there were only eighty-six who specialized in the study and treatment of mental diseases. The very small number of psychiatrists was due not to the lack of interest. This interest was very great indeed, but there were no well-organized institutions where one could learn clinical psychiatry, nor was psychiatry taught in the medical schools.
It is easily seen that Russian psychiatry is hardly three-quarters of a century old, and that it began in an atmosphere of political strife, bureaucratic inefficiency, cultural darkness, and economic misery. The fact that within the short period of seventy to seventy-five years Russian neurology and psychiatry caught up with Europe and contributed to the world such men as Merjeyevski, Korsakov, Bechterev, and Pavlov testifies to the uniquely untiring and creative activity of Russian medical science, which found itself capable of overcoming the immense obstacles which the bleak autocratic regime, wars, and revolutions continually raised in its path.
The particular political and economic circumstances in which Russian psychiatry had to develop also determined its major trends. It was inspired with the ideal of building as many mental hospitals as possible, and of abolishing all forms of restraint. The nonrestraint movement inaugurated in England by Hill, Charlesworth, and Conolly, and associated primarily with the name of the latter, was a source of major inspiration to the Russians. The vicissitudes of this movement within Russia symbolized to a great extent the struggle for freedom which kept the country in a constant state of revolutionary fermentation till the end of the last War.
Next to nonrestraint and the creation of new hospitals, it was the education of the psychiatrist that stood in the foreground as a major problem. As to the scientific orientation of psychiatry, unlike Russia’s literature and art or even some aspects of her political philosophy, it took a strictly materialistic turn rather narrowly conceived as neurobiological. The new contact with scientific Europe fascinated the Russian scholar, who sensed in it the rationalism and freedom of thought which he craved so much and which stood in such contradiction to the superstitious and bigoted tradition inculcated into Russian life by Russian Church Orthodoxy and the political autocracy which used the latter as its tool. Biological materialism was in great vogue in the ‘sixties. The most popular book was Buchner’s Stoff und Kraft, which became a sort of guidebook and passport for scientific respectability. Turgeniev described this trend beautifully in his Fathers and Sons. His Bazarov, the young physician who finally died of septicemia contracted at an autopsy, was typical of the time. He treated the idealistic fathers who still enjoyed playing ‘cello music with a cold sneer and reproach. There was work to be done, there were things to be learned, there was a service to be rendered to the community, and all this musical sentimentality and leisurely romanticism had to be shed with scorn and determination. Since frogs were experimental animals, they were more valuable and therefore more important than a Beethoven. Even in his terminal delirium, Bazarov was preoccupied with dogs and not with mystical hallucinations.
Russian psychiatry, born at that period, established itself on a purely somatic and neurological basis. The first Russian professor of psychiatry was the pioneer, Balinsky. Balinsky graduated in medicine in 1856 and started specializing in pediatrics, which he soon abandoned. He went abroad to study and returned in 1867, in the same year the mental hospitals were turned over to the zemstvos. He took charge of the frightful psychiatric division of the Military Medical Academy, devoted himself to its reorganization, and made it a real hospital. He gave an immense amount of energy to the supervision of various projects for new mental hospitals all over European Russia. Balinsky was so busy with problems of psychiatric organization that he never had time to make any written contribution to psychiatry, and he always regretted it. Though he had no time for scientific research, he was an excellent, intuitive clinician. His influence as an inspired and inspiring teacher was incalculable.
Balinsky’s somewhat younger contemporary and pupil, Merjeyevski, succeeded him as professor in 1877. Merjeyevski, rightly recognized as the father and dean of Russian psychiatry, was a great teacher and organizer. He trained more than fifty psychiatrists, eleven of whom taught psychiatry and occupied chairs of neurology and psychiatry. Twenty-six doctor’s theses dealing with psychiatric subjects and one hundred and fifty scientific papers were written and published under his direction. But unlike his predecessor Balinsky, Merjeyevski found time not only for teaching and organization but also for scientific research. He was in contact with European psychiatrists, particularly the French. His first study dealt with microcephalics; in this he tried to refute the new Darwinian hypothesis represented by Fogt which suggested that the brains of microcephalic individuals are related to those of anthropoid apes. Merjeyevski advanced the very keen and fruitful suggestion that the microcephalic brain was embryonic in nature. In 1872, jointly with Magnan, he made a study on the brain ventricles in general paralysis. In 1874, at the International Congress at Norwich, Merjeyevski described independently the giant pyramidal cells which became known as the cells of Betz, who was also a Russian neurologist, from Kiev. Merjeyevski was president of the first Congress of Russian Psychiatrists in 1887 and held the chair of psychiatry until 1893. He was the founder of a tradition which later became known as the Petrograd School and, since the Revolution, as the Leningrad School of Psychiatry. This school was later headed by V. M. Bechterev (1857-1927), who also became the occupant of Merjeyevski’s chair of psychiatry in the Military Medical Academy.
In a brief review such as the present one, it is impossible to do justice to the many important features of Russian psychiatric history or even to mention all its worthy representatives. P. I. Kovaevsky was the first to establish psychiatry in the south of Russia, in the University of Kharkov. Bechterev established it in the University of Kazan, and Kojevnikov in Moscow. The University of Dorpat, being directly under the cultural influence of Germany, as was all the Baltic region of Russia, was led by German professors. Emminghaus, from Freiburg, occupied the chair of psychiatry at Dorpat from 1880 to 1886, and for four years, from 1886 to 1890, Kraepelin was the incumbent. Yet on the whole Russian psychiatry was more under the influence of French than of German psychiatry. Even in later years, when the influence of Kraepelin’s nosology spread all over the world, there was opposition to Kraepelin in Russia. Serbsky, the successor of Korsakov in Moscow, was not alone in objecting to Kraepelin’s suggestion that the major psychoses should be diagnosed on the basis of their ultimate outcome, on the basis of what would happen to a given patient in the future. When Kraepelin claimed that dementia praecox could be recognized by the fact that it usually ends in mental deterioration, he himself admitted that about thirteen per cent of dementia praecox patients do recover. Serbsky is said to have observed, not without caustic wonderment, “Those patients, then, are dementias which do not end in dementias?” He considered the Kraepelinian diagnostic suggestions not a little puzzling.
It was French psychiatry with its succinct logic and clarity of description that seemed to appeal more to the Russian psychiatrists. They stood closer to Morel, Magnan, Charcot, and Janet. That Merjeyevski published a joint paper with Magnan has been mentioned. Korsakov’s meticulous neuropsychiatry was certainly reminiscent of the methods of Magnan and Charcot, and Bechterev’s work was definitely in the tradition of Charcot and Pierre Janet.
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III
By 1893, when Merjeyevski retired from active work, Russian psychiatry had established itself as far as its clinical and scientific methodology was concerned; it had also become a specialty, and it was represented by a number of well-trained and brilliant men. While Merjeyevski was laying the foundation of the Petersburg School, Moscow was developing more or less independently. The Moscow School is closely identified with the name of S. S. Korsakov.
Korsakov was born in 1854. He was not seventeen years old when he entered the Medical School of the University of Moscow. At the age of twenty-one he was already a member of the staff of the Preobrajensky Hospital in Moscow, and soon afterwards he became assistant to Kojevnikov, the pioneer of Moscow psychiatry. There was no really well-organized mental hospital in Moscow, nor was there any separate chair of psychiatry. Kojevnikov started giving a theoretical course in mental disease in 1863. Theretofore neurology and psychiatry had been a part of general pathology.
Not until 1887 was a good psychiatric clinic opened in Moscow. This clinic was built with the money donated by a private citizen (V. A. Morozova) in 1882 [in the picture at the top of this article, ed.]. Kojevnikov was its first director, Korsakov was its factual head. How exiguous was the equipment offered at that time to a young physician interested in psychiatry one could judge from Korsakov’s own reminiscences. “When I finished my medical course,” he relates, “I came to the Préobrajensky Hospital in Moscow to apply for a job as physician. The physician-in-chief, a psychiatrist who enjoyed a well-deserved good reputation, said to me: ‘You were taught very little psychiatry in medical school, were you not? I am sure you don’t even know how to tie down an insane person.’ My first lesson was that of tying down. It is difficult to believe this – yet it all happened so very recently” (Ibid.).
Korsakov devoted himself to the liberation of the mentally ill; to the abolition of all measures of restraint, to the organization of the colony method of management. Through his efforts the “isolators” were abolished in 1895 and transformed into apartments for young physicians or chemical laboratories. His ideal of a mental hospital was one made up of a series of homelike, small houses in which patients were treated as sick people, as human beings. He achieved a great part of his ideal in a small colony for the mentally ill near Moscow. It was a gigantic task to which Korsakov devoted his inspiration and energy. His pupil Serbsky called this achievement “Korsakov’s scientific work which was never published anywhere.”
In accordance with the tradition of Russian psychiatry, Korsakov’s efforts were organizational and humanistic, but he found time for intensive clinical research. He left a complete and rather voluminous classification of mental diseases which demonstrates great powers of observation and rich clinical experience. While he was interested in all aspects of psychiatry, Korsakov’s chief interests were concentrated on the neuropsychiatric aspects of alcoholism. The choice of this interest was not accidental. Russia offered unusual opportunities for the study of alcoholism. The Tsarist regime was one of the major factors in the development of alcoholism, for alcohol was a monopoly of the state, under the direction of the Ministry of Finance. The Tsarist treasury was regularly replenished at the expense of the population, which was given a liberal opportunity to develop alcoholic addiction. The stores selling vodka were known in Russia not as saloons, but as “monopolkas.” The workingman would enter the government store, would buy a bottle of vodka duly sealed with the government sealing wax, uncork it in the street at the door of the monopolka, and drink it straight without food or chaser. Alcoholism in Tsarist Russia was as typical and chronic a disease as was Tsardom itself.
Heavy drinking was so much a part of Russian life that it is reflected in a legend, probably apocryphal, about the adoption of the Greek Orthodox Christian faith by Russia. It was Prince Vladimir, later canonized by the Russian Church, who decided to espouse one of the monotheistic religions. He invited representatives of all existing religions; the Catholics, the Mohammedans, the Jews, and the Greek Orthodox sent delegates to bid Vladimir join their respective churches. Vladimir rejected the Catholics because a Russian prince, he averred, would pay no obeisance to anyone, even to the Prince of the Church. The Jews Vladimir rejected because their religion forbade eating pork. This was in the middle of the ninth century, and Russia was mostly what now is the Ukraine; the population raised a number of pigs, and Vladimir’s rejection of the Mosaic religion seems to have been dictated by prudent economic considerations. The Mohammedans had even less to offer; on hearing that Mohammed forbade the use of intoxicating liquor, Vladimir is supposed to have become more explicit. “Russia,” he claimed, “lives on the joy of drinking and cannot live without it.” This reduced his choice to the Greek Orthodox Church, the tenets of which he accepted by mass baptism in 862. From that year on the Russian Tsars were devout rulers, ruling Russia and the obsequious church, which was an obedient servant of Tsardom and helpful in promulgating the theory of “the joy of drinking without which Russia could not live.”
A little over one thousand years after the official consecration of Russian alcoholism, Korsakov made a studious examination of the clinical consequences of this legendary choice. It was at the first Congress of Russian Psychiatrists, which opened in Moscow on January 5, 1887, that Korsakov presented his first studies. The president of the Congress, Merjeyevski, reflected in his opening address the deep concern of Russian psychiatry – a concern which found its practical and creative expression only after the Soviet Revolution. The topic of the address was “The conditions which are conducive to the development of mental diseases in Russia, and the measures necessary for their prevention.” Korsakov read two papers, one on the care of the mentally sick in private homes and the other on nonrestraint. Thus we may see that the sociological orientation of Russian psychiatry and its civic conscience came to full expression at that early date.
In the very same year, Korsakov submitted his thesis “On Alcoholic Paralysis.” Two years later he published a paper entitled, “Some cases of a singular cerebropathy combined with polyneuritis.” He worked out in detail not only the neurological picture of the alcoholic psychosis, but also the psychological one-the typical memory disturbances, the characteristic, retrospective pseudologias and fabrications.
Korsakov was a quiet, unassuming, modest worker; he even gave the impression of being insecure. His was the true attitude of a scientist in whom modesty and greatness were perfectly integrated. At the International Congress of Medicine in Paris, in 1900, Professor M. Ritti, speaking in memory of Korsakov, recalled: “It was at the International Congress in 1889. I remember vividly how Korsakov came over to me modestly, almost timidly; his characteristic face reflected a vital, keen mind, goodness and endless gentleness. His was the nature of an apostle and of a scientist. He had in his hands a manuscript and asked my permission to present it; it was not scheduled on the program. I was glad to give him permission. You all know the monumental contribution which this happened to be, a contribution which opened a new era in our science. It was entitled simply: ‘A form of mental disease which is combined with degenerative polyneuritis.’ The paper was received with warmest applause. The great scientist who presided over that meeting was Professor Benedict of Vienna. This man of vast knowledge and incontestable competence evaluated that highly original paper with the following words: ‘We thank Doctor Korsakov for his interesting paper. He has confirmed to the highest degree the theory that all psychopathology can be reduced to lesions of the brain and nerve-tissue in general.’ “
As we know now, Benedict’s hopes were too expansive, although they are still cherished by many today. Benedict’s at the time more obscure colleague and compatriot, Sigmund Freud, was already back from Paris where he had worked with Charcot, and together with Joseph Breuer he was initiating an even greater revolution in psychopathology than was Korsakov’s in the consideration of alcoholic reactions. This is noted, not to deter from the greatness of Korsakov, but rather to emphasize the fact that while European psychiatry was studying hysteria, revealing a new insight into neuroses, and preparing a new theory of psychopathology, Russian psychiatry seemed in a strange way to neglect the whole field of neuroses and to concentrate on the neuropathological conditions which were brought into focus by the special social and cultural circumstances in which Russia lived.
At the International Congress of Medicine held in Moscow in 1897, the Berlin neurologist Jolly proposed that the alcoholic psychosis described by Korsakov be called the Korsakov Psychosis, which is the official term used in all psychiatric classifications today.
Korsakov’s career left an indelible imprint on the history of Russian psychiatry, and the period in which he lived and wrote is known as the “era of Korsakov.” Korsakov died on May first, 1900, closing less than half a century of exceptionally eventful psychiatric history.
~~~
IV
The twentieth century opened rather inauspiciously. The Russo-Japanese War, the tempestuous revolutionary upheavals, the famines and the persecutions on the part of the Tsarist regime hampered Russian culture and Russian science, disturbed and disrupted Russian life, till finally the structure of Tsarist Russia crumbled, as one day it had to in March and November, 1917.
The special conditions of Russian political and social history only enhanced the scientific and cultural orientation of Russian psychiatry. As everywhere else in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, psychiatry was not psychological but administrative, custodial, descriptive, and neurological. The deep-seated human psychological conflicts, the inner tragedies of man’s relation to himself and to the outside world, were still as if by general, silent consent considered as belonging more to literature than to psychiatry. The psychological aspects of psychiatry were left in Russia to Dostoyevsky as much as they were left in France to Hugo, Dumas the younger, Maupassant, and Proust, or in Sweden to Strindberg, or in Norway to Hamsun. The old, mistaken view that psychiatry, in order to be scientific, must be objective-that is, must leave the subjective states, the ideational content, out of consideration in favor of their neurophysiological equivalents-prevailed in Russia perhaps to a greater degree than in the rest of Europe. The term “neuro-psychiatry,” which is more or less new in English speaking countries, is an old term in Russia.
The twentieth century is marked by the development of what has become known as objective psychology, or reflexology. These terms were introduced by Bechterev. The history of this period is too recent, and a proper historical evaluation of it is not yet timely. Suffice it to say that already there are signs of considerable distortion of the historical perspective regarding the recent trends of Russian psychiatry, and an attempt to correct this distortion may not be out of place.
The reflexological ideas in psychiatry are not very recent. Almost one hundred years ago Griesinger spoke of “the reflexes of the brain,” and in 1863 the Russian neurologist Syechenov published a monumental work entitled, The Reflexes of the Brain. The work of I. P. Pavlov was purely physiological, and for a long time Pavlov failed to deal with the possible psychological implications of his experiments. He never actually worked on human beings, and he never subjected the variety of emotional subjective states of human beings to experimental evaluation. Having been a direct witness of this page of Russian psychiatric history, I may be permitted to testify that the first reflexological experiments on human beings were made by Bechterev in the Psycho-Neurological Institute in Petrograd as early as 1912, and at that time Bechterev was already giving a course on “Objective Psychology or Reflexology.” His Objective Psychology, in three volumes, was published between 1907 and 1912 and was translated into French and German. His Foundation of Reflexology of Man was published in 1918, and his Collective Reflexology in 1921. All these contributions were for some reason overlooked both in America and in England.
Pavlov‘s great contribution to the subject of conditioned reflexes remained outside medical psychology, and the recent theoretical constructions of what has become prematurely known as Pavlov’s School do not go beyond a general neurophysiological theory. The so-called “experimental neuroses” in animals do not offer any conclusive results, in so far as the behavior of these “neurotic” animals is interpreted by the experimenter on the basis of his subjective impressions only. There is no proof that the animals actually labor under the stress of a psychological conflict. On the other hand, the method of Bechterev, while still more related to behaviorism than to true analytical psychology, nevertheless deals directly with human beings and therefore represents actual psychiatric work.
The last twenty-five years, the most interesting and valuable in the history of Russian medicine, mark more poignantly than ever before the sociological and neurophysiological orientation of Russian psychiatry. 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. Numerous clinics in municipalities and in industrial centers have been opened, and the whole working population is brought into the orbit of psychological supervision and educational efforts. Psychiatry, to use the words of the great leader of Soviet psychiatry, L. M. Rosenstein, has become a system for “the protection of neuropsychic health.”Sanatoria for borderline cases and for neuroses have been organized. These are psychotherapeutic and physicotherapeutic centers. Social hygiene and prophylaxis are the guiding principles. The accent is on purely cultural factors. As the Russian historian of psychiatry, Kannabich, summarizes it briefly, “The study of the cultural conditions and of the influence of environment, the concentration of special attention on the role of social factors and psychogenic moments, leads more and more to the rejection of the endogenous and to the increasing acceptance of the exogenous forms” in the consideration of psychopathological reactions.
~~~
[In the photo at the top, Varvara Alekseevna Morozova by K. Makovsky (1884). A Russian industrialist from the prominent Morozov family, members of which funded the Russian revolutionary movement. She funded what Zilboorg – a revolutionary himself, psychoanalyst, and historian of psychiatry – described as the first “good psychiatric clinic opened in Moscow” in 1887.]
I present to you, accompanied by three quotes by the German philosopher Hegel, by the English writer Aldous Huxley, and by the Swiss chemist who synthesized LSDAlbert Hofmann, the new hypothesis I am working on.
To my knowledge such a hypothesis has never been formulated before in these simple but in my opinion extraordinarily current terms. Other authors and relevant references, for those wishing to report them to me, would certainly be welcome and useful.
~~~
Politics is a movement from the inside out, while anti-politics that would like to replace politics with technocratic discourse, in the organicist / medical and spiritualist / mystical variants, is a movement from the outside in. From the polis to the psyche.
That is, anti-politics as a substantial and powerful regression of human civilization as it has historically developed up to our days.
According to my working hypothesis, we therefore find ourselves in a phase of inversion of the Hegelian “prodigious transfer” which involved the creation of European political and legal institutions throughout history.
The Hegelian “prodigious transfer” from inside to outside: politics.
The contemporary movement from outside to inside: the psychiatrization of politics, or anti-politics.
Hence the medicalization and psychologization of politics as privileged tools by the technocracy that is carrying out the Globalist Revolution.
The medicine of behavior and of the psyche, or psychiatry, was born and partly developed in the revolutionary context, with figures such as Rush in America, Pinel in France, Bogdanov in Russia. An aspect, that of the historical relationship between psychiatry and political revolution, which I am studying and which, to my knowledge, is still almost entirely to be explored.
The ongoing anti-political movement also has another, apparently paradoxical, aspect: the formation of a global psyche. The focus of public discourse and language moves at the same time more and more in / close to the body and mind and at the same time “more outside” / far away, that is, we are witnessing psychiatrization, digital globalization and the consequent disappearance of the social, economic, and political intermediate bodies.
In three magnificent quotes that make us understand, in my opinion, more than many pages.
~~~
“In contrast with the truth thus veiled behind subjective ideas and feelings, the genuine truth is the prodigious transfer of the inner into the outer, the building of reason into the real world, and this has been the task of the world during the whole course of its history. It is by working at this task that civilised man has actually given reason an embodiment in law and government and achieved consciousness of the fact.”
G. W. F. Hegel – Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)
~~~
“The fundamental problem of international politics is psychological.
The economic problems are secondary and, but for the psychological problems, would not exist.
The good intentions of such statesmen as desire peace – and many of them do not even desire it – are rendered ineffective by their consistent refusal to deal with the war-disease at its source.
The attempt to cure symptoms, such as tariff-wars and armaments, without at the same time attacking the psychological causes of these symptoms, is a proceeding foredoomed to failure.
What is the use of a disarmament or a World Economic Conference so long as the people of each nation are deliberately encouraged by their leaders to indulge in orgies of group-solidarity based on, and combined with, self-congratulation and contemptuous hatred for foreigners?
Our need is reather for a World Psychological Conference, at which propaganda experts should decide upon the emotional cultures to be permitted and encouraged in each state and the appropriate mythologies and philosophies to accompany these emotional cultures.”
Aldous Huxley – Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
~~~
“The large social, ecological and health problems of today are connected to the dual materialistic philosophy of life which shapes the industrial age.
The psychedelic experience often produces a change in consciousness which leads towards an integrated experience between humanity and nature, helping to create the intellectual and cultural prerequisites for the necessary change in our threatened world.”
The overdue transcript, with an introduction and brief comments, subdivided in thirteen parts is now being published in PsyPolitics.
The video was published at the end of September 2019 with a sense of urgency for the acceleration world events appeared to take, however there was no trace of any global virus or pandemic, including the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).
Primary attention to language and to metaphors and metaphorical language as a way of analyzing a political discussion about the mental health of a political figure, a democratically elected one in this instance, on the media was placed at the beginning of the presentation.
This theme was further developed later during the talk, noting how despite the two presented views, by two psychiatrists, were opposed, in the end the “message” via language that they were delivering to the TV viewers was going in the same direction.
For Dr. Frances, who was claiming that we should discuss politics instead of psychiatry, language was moving from political to psychological metaphorical, while for Dr. Lee language was moving directly from political to literal technical psychological language and concepts, used to discuss a political theme. Both psychiatrists were moving, despite specific content discussed, language to the psychological sphere, metaphorically for Dr. Frances, literally for Dr. Lee.
While opposing each other on a political theme, the net movement of the two debating psychiatrists is from political to psychological language.
~~~
More than two years later, there are now in 2021 prominent public intellectuals such as Giorgio Agamben and even media experts who are beginning to highlight, in the context of the huge socio-economic crisis caused by the coronavirus and the disease / illness called CoViD-19 and policies adopted as a response by governments worldwide:
[1] the current critical importance of language use as well as of [2]metaphors use in government and media communications, as almost subliminal means or anyway to influence public opinion, transform popular views and in turn political and legal institutions with an overall effect of “de-politicization.”
Such public intellectuals also highlight in 2021 how the manipulation of language is at the root of the current paradigm shift in power that we are witnessing since the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and related policies. And how current changes in political and legal institutions are first of all based on changes in language, a thesis presented first in my May 2019 abstract, then in my September 2019 London talk, and one year later in October and November 2020 in two TV interviews also published by the international website Foucault News. Not to mention a number of relatedarticles and a university seminar published in the PsyPolitics blog during 2020 and 2021. Especially on what I called in 2019 ‘psyspeak’ or ‘ideopathological lexicon’, including the spread of such psyspeak as an under-recognized “epidemic” of sort, an original formulation discussed for the very first time during the London 2019 presentation and reiterated publicly in 2020. Also, another original formulation presented and discussed in PsyPolitics during 2020 and 2021 has been the identification of a globalist revolutionary movement via the recognition of its use of psyspeak, which is the language of the psyche instead of the language of the polis in dealing with public matters.
The relationship between language as an institution on one side and political and legal institutions on the other side is highlighted also in Roberto Esposito‘s ‘Institution’ (il Mulino, 2021). In this book he mentions – in relation to political and legal institutions – Foucault’s thought about penitentiary and psychiatric systems as well as the “lexicons of anthropology, psychology and linguistics.” Such book also discusses, among other related topics: [a] Hegel’s “objective spirit” as present in institutions, giving to subjective desires an objective character; [b] Montesquieu’s separation of powers and the U.S. Constitution; and [c] Foucault’s view of legislations and constitutions that emerged from the “age of Revolution” which are regressing within a biopolitical paradigm. All themes previously discussed in PsyPolitics (see in particular my TV interview on the 2nd of October 2020 also published in Foucault News, the one on the 13th of November 2020, as well as the 4th of May 2020 university seminar at the IUC Turin).
In theMay 2019 abstract published in the proceedings of the Royal College of Psychiatry conference it was highlighted how (emphasis added, in the below talk transcript as well) “political language related to “phobias” has rapidly surged to commonplace” and also “similar lexicon derived largely from psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis might lead to a progressive internalization and de-politicization of civic concepts, without most citizens realizing it.”
Also, use of symbols to influence global culture and to prepare and produce a paradigm shift in power was proposed: “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.
Such a public spectacle is broadcasted around the world via TV and digital social media (e.g, Twitter) in real time. 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.”
~~~
‘CNN Talk Show’ – 1/13 [transcript]
Okay, thank you very much. So, I’m going to present a talk about “Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power?”
Essentially what I’m going to ask is are we witnessing the emergence of globalization and of psychiatrization of society at the same time? And what’s the relationship between these two?
And I will take a chance to start from a recent piece from a talk show by CNN. This was broadcasted just on the 25th of August [only nine days before this talk was delivered; the abstract comparing the two books directly was submitted on the 15th of May].
It actually reproduces the kind of dialogue that I imagined in my abstract between the ‘Duty to Warn’ movement if you are familiar with it, so people who say Trump has a mental health condition or, even if he doesn’t, he his dangerous on grounds of mental health. And on the other side, Dr. Allen Frances, former Chair of DSM-IV who has a slightly different view of this.
So let me show you. And I would ask you to please try to pay attention to the language that they use:
[CNN Journalist]: “So something’s wrong. There are lots of theories about what it is, there are some doctors who think they know, there are others who say we shouldn’t speculate.”
There are ethical questions about even having this conversation at all. But we can’t tiptoe around it anymore. We’ve got to talk about this. So let’s talk about it, let’s do it. Let me bring in two guests, two psychiatrists with differing views about this.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee is a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, she co-authored and edited the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” It originally came out two years ago, it started this conversation in many ways about Trump’s mental health.
And Dr. Allen Frances, he is in Philly [Philadelphia] for us, a Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical College. And he authored the book “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.”
So Dr. Lee, first to you. You have been trying to sound an alarm for the past two years about the President’s fitness. Has the press been listening to what you and your colleagues have been saying?”
[Dr. Lee]: “Hum, not at all. I feel that the press has actively tried to shun us especially the New York Times editorial that seems to have been published in collaboration with the past APA President. And I’ve been very concerned about the fact that the American Psychiatric Association has been working pretty much as an agent of the State.”
[CNN Journalist]: “To stop people from talking about this issue?”
[Dr. Lee]: “Yes I’m speaking of the new… what many of us have started to call a gag rule. They have modified the original Goldwater rule, which I’m a staunch supporter of, into an order that allows for no exception and it basically says that we’re not just allowed to diagnose, but to say anything of any kind in relation to a public figure. Here’s what the original Goldwater rule says that psychiatrists have a responsibility to society as well as to patients and we are expected to contribute to activities that improve the community and better public health. And so when we’re asked about a public figure we should educate the public in general terms, just not diagnose… “
[CNN Journalist]: “Right, without saying ‘I am diagnosing’ because you’ve never met him.”
[Dr. Lee]: “Exactly.”
[CNN Journalist]: “You can describe what you are seeing. So, Dr. Frances I know you disagree with this view that Dr. Lee and a couple other dozen psychiatrists have published in this book. You say it’s dangerous to be talking this way, why?”
[Dr. Frances]: “Well, I think that medicalizing politics has three very dire consequences. The first is that it stigmatizes the mentally ill, I’ve known thousands of patients, almost all of them have been well behaved, well mannered, good people. Trump is none of these. Lumping the mentally ill with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill, and they have enough problems and stigma as it is.
The second issue is that calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.
Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century, he may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.
It’s crazy for us to be destroying, the climate our children will live in. It’s crazy to be giving tax cuts to the rich, that will add trillions of dollars to the debt our children will have to pay. It’s crazy to be destroying our democracy by claiming that the press and the courts are the enemy of the people.
We have to face these policies, not Trump’s person.
Now, it’s absolutely impossible, you can bet the house, that the Congress, that Pence, that the cabinet will never ever remove Trump on grounds of mental unfitness. That will never happen.
Discussing the issue in psychological name-calling termsdistracts us from getting out the vote.”
[CNN Journalist]: “But I’m not talking about name-calling, I’m talking about asking questions that are really uncomfortable. Not saying we have the answers, I’m saying we need to bring it up.”
~~~
Okay, so let’s try to bring it up. I hope you noticed the language that they used.
So, on one side we have Dr. Lee. She is the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” which is a book with 37 authors, I actually worked with some of them in the past.
And we have another book which is Dr. Frances one, “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump.”
Now, essentially what they [Dr. Lee and others] say is he [Trump] has a mental condition and he’s dangerous.
And what he [Dr. Frances] answers is ‘no’ the voters who actually put him [Trump] in that position are actually crazy.
And he [Dr. Frances] actually used the word crazy seven times, if you noted. But I would say he used it in a metaphorical way, at least six out of the seven, depending how you count.
And then he mentioned psychological name-calling. Okay, so, I will try to analyze language a little bit.
~~~
So, this is an outline: CNN video, than I will analyze language a bit.
I will try to draw a parallel between the current psychiatrization of Trump and what happened with the psychiatrization of King George the Third of England at a really critical time when there was the birth of psychiatry and when there were the French and American revolutions.
According to Foucault at this time we moved from, there was this paradigm shift between sovereign, from sovereign power to what he calls disciplinary power.
And finally I will just mention, if I have time, just a little bit of context.
In a book by MIT Press written and edited by Harold D. Lasswell and Daniel Lerner in 1965 and entitled “World Revolutionary Elites. Studies in coercive ideological movements”, there is a chapter about “The World Revolution of Our Time: A Framework for Basic Policy Research”. The last three paragraphs of such chapter are: ‘The Bourgeois Revolution’, ‘The Unnamed Revolution (The Permanent Revolution of Modernizing Intellectuals)’, and finally ‘The Unspeakable Revolution (Transhumanity)’.
Contents of such volume and the full section about the “unspeakable revolution” are reported below, given the extraordinary concordance with some of the themes present in today’s transforming global politics, currently in mass and digital media, as well as in formulations independently developed over the past three years and largely presented in PsyPolitics.
~~~
‘The Unspeakable Revolution: Transhumanity,’ by Harold D. Lasswell (1965)
“We have implied that the emergence of racist ideology in Germany may mark an ideological step toward a new world revolutionary emergent whose potentiality for caste may bring about a reversal in the long-range trends toward the realization of human dignity in highly mobile societies.
Among the relevant factors to be assessed is the future of computers.
We have in mind the possibility that computers can be developed to a level at which it is impracticable to distinguish machine from men. If we speak of subjectivity as exhibiting moods and images, and define the latter to include abstract as well as concrete references, the creative prowess of computers has been sufficiently demonstrated to suggest that they have a brilliant future. Machines seem to depart from humanity in the realm of mood, which covers such swings as from euphoria to melancholy, anxiety to serenity, rage to fright. Guilt, humiliation, love, curiosity, and cupidity, for instance, are moods; they are not yet unanalyzable, nor it is necessary to suppose that equivalent internal sequences cannot be built in.
We may, of course, consider the possibility of supermachines; and, if so, the question is whether they will be constructed in ways that prevent them from constituting a superior caste that relegates man to a subordinate role.
In the world of contingency it is inappropriate to overlook the future of biological research and the development of new and possibly superior species of life. The recent decoding of the information system that controls the mechanisms of inheritance and development has brought a multitude of new emergents into the foreground.
Parallel with these events is the perfecting of conditioning procedures, with or without the aid of drugs and hypnosis. The abolition of privacy – already well along in our day – is placing potent instruments of control in the hands of elites who may see an opportunity to consolidate their position by policing the population medically. The “paralysis bomb” and its derivatives can make large-scale coercion truly obsolete.
We are on the threshold of an era of astropolitics, and we perceive even now that the elites of the Earth may encounter higher forms of life in space.
In addition to these contingencies we do not overlook the abolition of death by the technique of detecting worn-out molecules and making suitable replacements. Nor is it sensible to ignore the chance that new factors (for instance, parapsychological processes) may further complicate the future of man’s politics.
When I referred to the “unspeakable revolution,” I had in mind the disturbing contingencies that follow if man’s knowledge continues to be poorly translated into policies that harmonize with his professed aspirations. If we are in the midst of a permanent revolution of modernizing intellectuals, the succeeding phase obviously depends on no small degree on perfecting the policy sciences that aid in forestalling the unspeakable contingencies latent in tendencies already more than faintly discernible.”
~~~
[In the photo at the top, Harold D. Lasswell; University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf1-10329], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.]
The last Emperor of Russia and Vladimir Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute revolutionaries
by Federico Soldani – 29th Oct 2021
“The Institute offered medical training of the highest order, but its students’ revolutionary tendencies were becoming a concern for the government. In 1912, the mayor of Saint Petersburg had reported on political activity among the capital’s students. In margin of the section on the Psycho-Neurological Institute, Tsar Nicholas II had written, “What benefit does Russia derive from this Institute? I wish to have a well-founded answer”. In the spring of 1914 the minister of public education presented an additional report on the anti-governmental attitudes of Bekhterev’s students and recommended the Institute’s closure.”
Tsar Nicholas II was the cousin of King George V of the United Kingdom. They are together in the 1913 photo above, at the time leading to the Great War, what we usually refer to as World War I. Nicholas II ended up being the last Emperor of Russia.
George V ancestor was of course George III, known as “the mad king”. As written in a previous article in PsyPolitics “according to biographer Desmond King-Hele, after the events of the American Revolution started in 1773, “the Lunar circle’s father-figure, Benjamin Franklinwas still in England in 1774, acting virtually as American ambassador: King George III [who came to be known in history for his madness, ed.] was to call him the evil genius behind the Revolution, and Lord North branded him as ‘the great fomenter of the opposition in America.’
~~~
The capital of the Russian Empire changed name from Saint Petersburg – which sounded German – to Petrograd officially in 1914 at the start of the Great War. Then, in the period after the Revolutions of February and of October 1917, the name was changed after Lenin’s death in 1924 to Leningrad. In 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union it was changed back to the old St. Petersburg.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica online (emphasis and links added, including in further quotes below from different sources): “Vladimir Mikhaylovich Bekhterev, (born Jan. 20 [Feb 1, New Style], 1857, Sorali, Vyatka [now Kirov], Russia—died Dec. 24, 1927, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Russian neurophysiologist and psychiatrist who studied the formations of the brain and investigated conditioned reflexes.
Bekhterev received a doctorate from the Medical-Surgical Academy of St. Petersburg in 1881 and then studied abroad for four years. He returned to Russia in 1885 to become professor of psychiatric diseases at the University of Kazan, where he established the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Russia the next year. He became professor of psychiatry at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1893 and founded a psychoneurological institute there in 1907, though he was forced to resign his professorship in 1913. He was restored following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and chaired the department of psychology and reflexology at the University of Petrograd (i.e., St. Petersburg) from 1918 until his death.
Bekhterev founded the Nevrologichesky Vestnik (“Neurology Journal”), the first Russian journal on nervous diseases, in 1896. His insistence on a purely objective approach to the study of behaviour and his conviction that complex behaviours could be explained through the study of reflexes influenced the growing behaviourist movement of psychology in the United States. Among his more significant writings are Conduction Paths in the Brain and Spinal Cord (1882; 2nd ed., 1896) and Objective Psychology (1907).”
The Psycho-Neurological Institute created in 1907 was meant, in Bekhterev’s words reported in Holl 2017, as a private institute “with a whole series of scientific disciplines forgeneral research on the personality, the training and hygiene of the mental sphere, and also to set up courses to study the prophylaxis and cure of nervous and mental diseases.” The institute had to attend to a serious lack in tsarist society. “Due to the enormous number of attendees, it was necessary after a few years to transform the courses of the Psychoneurological Institute into a large private university (the first in Russia at the time), already accredited, which comprised up to 8,000 students and was not inferior in either the quantity nor the quality of the teaching staff to any Russian state university.”
~~~
According to an article about his life in the Lancet Neurology published in 2018 ”the amount of work he has done seems impossible”, “his father, a district police officer, died of tuberculosis when Bekhterev was just 9 years old, leaving his mother, a daughter of a civil servant, alone with three boys. At a young age, Bekhterev spent his nights reading and taking notes on books about natural science. In 1873, at the age of 16, Bekhterev enrolled at the Imperial Medical and Surgical Academy in St Petersburg” – the Military Medical Academyaccording to a 2005 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
“Within 3 months he diagnosed himself with “acute neurasthenia” and spent 28 days at the local Balinsky Clinic. Anatoliy Nikiforov, one of Bekhterev’s biographers, believes that his time in the Clinic was the reason he later chose to study neuropathy. In his autobiography, Bekhterev wrote that this specialty, “nervous and mental diseases”, would allow him to help more people.”
“That time the old expression ‘textura obscura, functiones obscurissimae [an obscure texture, and the most obscure functions]’ could be fully applied to our knowledge of the brain. My desire to lit this darkness was the reason to study the brain structure and functioning”, Bekhterev wrote in his autobiography.”
He “went to Europe in 1884–85 for further training. Bekhterev worked with notable neurologists including Paul Emil Flechsig, Wilhelm Wundt, and Jean-Martin Charcot.” According to a 2005 article in History of Psychiatry also with Meynert and Westphal: “Their influence may have led him to branch out from neurophysiology to the field of psychology and eventually to psychiatry, in which he became famous (Brazier, 1987).” According to other sources, like his teacher Sechenov and his rival Pavlov, had worked in the psychological laboratory of Carl Ludwig.
“Bekhterev” – the Lancet Neurology article continued – “was remarkably productive during this time publishing some of the scientific material in the first edition of Conduction Paths in the Spinal Cord and Brain in 1893, followed by the second edition in 1896, which contained the most comprehensive description of the structure of the human brain at the time. The book made Bekhterev so famous that the German Professor of Anatomy, Friedrich Kopsch, said, “There are only two persons who know the anatomy of the brain perfectly— God and Bekhterev.”
“He founded the Psychoneurological Institute [1907, ed.], which combined research, clinical work, and academic courses. Notably, the Institute had flexible entry requirements. ‘Bekhterev cancelled the restrictions which existed in Russia for those entering universities. He accepted non-Christians, those who did not study in classic grammar schools, and women; he was the first one in Russia who allowed them to study medicine with men. He opened the doors for everybody‘.”
His relationships with the political sphere were numerous, as a revolutionary as well as a psychiatrist, including with Lenin and with Stalin.
Several sources, see European Journal of Neurology in 2004 or European Neurology in 2011, mention that Bekhterev was called at Lenin’s bedside and “examined Lenin at least once.” The authors in 2004 concluded that “concealment of Lenin’s incapacity during his lengthy terminal disease enabled the consequent usurpation of Soviet leadership by Stalin.”
According to an article in a 2005 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry “on returning to Russia in 1885, he was already well known. He accepted a Chair in Psychiatry and worked in a psychiatric clinic in Kazan until 1893 and then at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. He served as a professor and director of the clinic for mental and nervous illnesses in the following years until his sudden and mysterious death in 1927. After his death, his name and works were deleted completely from the textbooks and scientific literature by Stalin’s orders.”
In an article in History of Psychiatry (2005) is reported how “Bekhterev planned to participate in the First Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists of Soviet Russia to be held in Moscow in December 1927, and had been nominated as an honorary chairman of this congress. Before he left Leningrad (St Petersburg), he received a telegram from the Medical Department of the Kremlin with an urgent request to travel to Moscow (Demin, 2002; Domil, 2003; Topolyansky, 1989). In the course of the congress, Bekhterev was late for one of the important meetings and, when asked why, he answered, ‘I examined a paranoiac with a dry hand’ (Antonov-Ovseyenko, 1981; Demin, 2002; Domil, 2003; Topolyansky, 1989). It appears that somebody reported this remark to the authorities.”
“Bekhterev served as a member of Leningrad Soviet, and he was a friend of Stalin’s old foe – Zinov’ev. It seems likely that Stalin could not tolerate the possibility of a world famous professor of psychiatry and neurology spreading rumours that he was suffering from paranoia (Topolyansky, 1989).
“It is thought that the OGPU poisoned Bekhterev because, shortly before, he had examined Stalin” – Lenin’s successor after the October 2017 Revolution and Lenin’s death, ed. – “and diagnosed him as paranoid (Clarfield, 2002; Hachinski, 1999; Keitel, 2002; Topolyansky, 1989; Volkov, 1979).”
Stalin (right) confers with an ailing Lenin at Gorky, Lenin’s estate just south of Moscow, in September 1922. According to the Metropolitan Museum, New York website: “Although Stalin did visit Lenin there frequently, the photograph has been heavily reworked: retouchers smoothed Stalin’s pockmarked complexion, lengthened his shriveled left arm, and increased his stature so that Lenin seems to recede benignly beside his trusted heir apparent. The reality was quite different: in a letter dictated around the time the picture was taken, Lenin described Stalin as intolerably rude and capricious and recommended that he be removed from his position as the Communist Party’s secretary general.”
In the previously cited 2005 article in History of Psychiatry, the authors reported that “Stalin was especially sensitive and suspicious surrounding the subject of his health. For example, his personal physician for many years, Professor Vladimir Vinogradov, diagnosed Comrade Stalin to be at risk of a stroke and was foolhardy enough to recommend, ‘Complete rest, freedom from all work.’ Stalin, seeing a conspiracy to remove him from power, furiously demanded Vinogradov’s arrest.” Vinogradov was accused of being part of what came to be known as “the doctor’s plot” between 1952 and 1953. According to the New York Times, “Dr. Vinogradov shared the responsibility of treating the leaders of the Soviet Communist party, the heads of the Soviet Government, and foreign Communist chiefs who came to Moscow for medical care” and “was one of 15 leading Soviet physicians arrested in November, 1952, on charges of plotting to kill Soviet Government and military figures by improper medical treatment.”
~~~
“Bekhterev was extremely versatile in his academic interests and fields of research, which embraced hypnosis and even psychosurgery. […] Independently of Pavlov, Bekhterev” – the 2005 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry continued – “developed a theory of conditioned reflexes and invented the term reflexology, which he defined as a scientific discipline that studies the response to external or internal stimuli. Bekhterev assumed the existence of two psychological systems: subjective, whose basic method of study is introspection, and objective (conditioned reflex). Thus, before Watson, Bekhterev had founded an objective psychology“.
Ivan Pavlov, his lifelong rival and the other great Russian behavioural scientist at the time, was also a significant influence for the behaviorists in the U.S.A.. “During fifty years, the lives of Bekhterev and Pavlov ran parallel, and their paths frequently crossed; Bekhterev was the younger of the two by eight years” (History of Psychiatry, 2005).
Bekhterev also authored “About neuro-psychic disorders in chronic ergotism” (1892), “Suggestion and its Role in Social Life” (1899), “Consciousness and its Borders” (1888), “Psyche and Life” (1902), “Personality and the Social Conditions of its Development and Health” (1906), “Objective Psychology” (1907), “Subject Matter and Tasks of Social Psychology as an Objective Science” (1911), “Collective Reflexology” (1921) and his magnum opus “General Principles of Human Reflexology” (1917-1928).
The chapter about ‘Psycho-reflexology’ in Holl’s ‘Cinema, trance and cybernetics’ (Amsterdam University Press 2017) begins with the following episode: “In October 1927 at Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio a symposium was held under the title “Feelings and Emotions.” The occasion was the inauguration of a new psychological laboratory, which, as a brand new institution, was being housed together in one building with the chemists. The lists of those lecturing was impressive. In the volume that was published shortly thereafter of the lectures, all the great men – and Margaret Washburn as the only woman – of experimental psychology were represented, including Pierre Janet from Paris, Alfred Adler from Vienna, Edouard Claparède from Geneva, the Hamburg institutional director William Stern, the physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon from the Harvard University Medical School, and from Leningrad the old reflexologist Vladimir Makhailovich Bekhterev.
On the program were 34 lectures by scientists who belonged to the avant-garde of psychology and who represented the second generation of the classic school: Karl Bühler as a student of Ebbinghaus, David Katz as a student of Georg Elias Müller, Adler as the fallen student of Freud. The whole was under the auspices of James McKeen Cattell, Wilhelm Wundt’s very first assistant in Leipzig.”
“There are contradictory reports of who exactly was in Ohio. […] Bekhterev, whose visit Ellenberger seeks to authenticate, was in the process of being politically sidelined at the time, and in 1927 in the Soviet Union this meant much more than a travel ban.”
“Shortly before the lights had gone out in Europe – to borrow a documentary film title from Alexander Hammid – before the various fascist systems could practically demonstrate that they could stabilize their power in a targeted manner through mass mobilization of certain feelings, the scientists were attempting to find their way in the darkness of “feelings and emotions.”
What is certain is that the Wittenberg Symposium in 1927 was one of the last great international psychological congresses before the Second World War. It is also clear that the topic “Feelings and Emotions” was so explosive that the National Research Council in Washington supported the symposium. The invitations and the interest of the speakers show that the problem of feelings and sensations was the focus of neurological and psychological research all over the world. What we can see from the contributions is that the theories of how to explain, measure, control, and regulate emotions were still quite diffuse. It is clear that there were certain convergences in the discussions in Ohio. It is also clear that one person was definitively not invited: the inconvenient Sigmund Freud. “Feelings and emotions” were no longer available to simple therapeutic or cultural critical work. At the time, Freud was writing Civilization and its Discontents, expressing doubt that a strictly physiological description could do justice to the historical and cultural networks in which emotions are differentiated.”
“It is possible that Bekhterev was not in Ohio in October, 1927, but his lecture was definitely given. In it he presented a proposal for a linked system in which nerves and apparatuses, metabolism and chemistry would be amalgamated beyond the individual body. Feelings are the measurable signs of this interconnection. Bekhterev’s proposal, which he had worked out in parallel to the first effective mass use of the press in the second half of the nineteenth century and the significant use of the press and film in the First World War, marked the aesthetic concepts of many avant-garde artists in Russia, then in the Soviet Union, during the tens and twenties. Meyerhold’s theater of biomechanics, in which bodily expression simulated and induced mental activities as the primacy of the “external”, Eisenstein’s montage of attractions,Kuleshov’s coordinate system of feelings for film, or Vertov’s kinoki concept are directly or indirectly based on Bekhterev’s research and are inconceivable without his medial turn in reflexology.
With his lecture in Ohio Bekhterev was attempting to establish transatlantic contact. He directed his message at those to whom it would concern, due to their own research: the physicians surrounding Walter B. Cannon from Harvard, this “shadow community” who had also begun to examine not only individual organs, but connections and relations between physiological circumstances and homeostasis within complex physiological systems.
Emotions, which had always been considered an infraction into the controlled experiment in laboratory medicine, were now to be seen as signs and signals of an affective interaction, as information about the states of the body!“
At the time “brain specialists hoped “to provide a physiological foundation for ethics […] in order to be able to base law on this whenever possible”, as Flechsig suggested in his rector’s speech in 1894. At the end of the nineteenth century neurology was asserting itself directly as a science of power.”
~~~
“Here, however, it must be emphasized that in our use of the term ‘energy’” – Bekhterev wrote in 1902 – “we are in no way associating this with the common usage of ‘physical energy,’ as is currently assumed. In our view, the energy or force for the being is nothing other than an active principle disseminated in the nature of the universe. We know nothing more of the essence of this active principle, which appears as the milieu of the global aether, but we see the expressions themselves in the constant conversion of substance all around us.” This theory of a universal transformability of the world was Bekhterev’s answer to Herbert Spencer [who coined the “survival of the fittest” expression, ed.] as well, whose theses were being fiercely debated in Russia around the turn of the century. Bekhterev extended Spencer’s neo-Darwinian thesis, that the activity of the nervous system was an adjustment of internal circumstances to external ones, by inverting it.”
“In his book about suggestion, Bekhterev distinguishes between an accessible consciousness and an inaccessible one, which he assumed to be collective. […] it remained unconscious only for the subject itself, but not for objective psychology with its apparatuses, measuring devices, and observations.”
“The mixture of nerve physiology and research on possession, which was only socially acceptable under the term “psychic infection”, the numerous transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary experiments, and also the medical self-reflection of reflexology seem to have made Bekhterev suspect for all time and under all regimes.”
“The concept “collective consciousness” is the basis for a psychological model that assumes a connection among subjects in which, alongside pure language and conscious communication – as is evident in the model of the telephone – all sorts of roaring is transmitted that no one understands. These transmissions connect every individual personally and directly with the “collective consciousness.” The individual is distracted and scattered by it, but also socialized and cultivated or subjected to suggestions:
“In such cases the external impression passes by our personal consciousness, thus managing to reach the sphere of the psyche without our ‘ego.’ In this case it is not through the main entrance, but through the backdoor, so to speak, that it lands directly in the inner chambers of the mind. […] Suggestion is thus the direct over-inoculation of certain mental states from person to person.”
“In the “psychic waves” and “electrical charges” are the electrified media nets without which the leaders of the uprisings of 1905 and 1917 could not have brought their commands to the masses, presented as an ideal revolutionary model from the control room of brain physiology. Bekhterev’s scientifically defined agitation lends the artistic and dramaturgical metaphors of the revolution a neurological foundation.”
“The Bolsheviks, inspired by thoughts of a mass empire that could be uniformly governed by general electrification, welcomed the attempt to research the nervous system as the state basis in regulatable personality. In the model of the neurologists who conceived the nervous circuitry according to the idea of the telegraph system, they saw their own strategies in good hands. [..] After the Revolution Bekhterev even subsumed Marxism into reflexological knowledge: “Existence which determines consciousness” is the activity of associative reflexes that can become visible as “(in reflexological terminology) human behavior.”
“Unlike Pavlov, who reduced the processes of perception to a pattern of stimulus and reaction, Bekhterev researched the combinations of neuronal microprocesses in order also to be able to understand thinking, speaking, and remembering using the methodology of objective psychology.”
“Anyone who spends a lot of time with the people and has his own experiences knows what the value of logical persuasion is. In the best case it only has a very slow effect, while suggestion through encouragement or command almost always leads quickly and surely to the goal“, Bekhterev wrote in Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life (1905).
“Bekhterev’s hypothesis that “consciousness”, “ego”, and all personal activity were made up of reflex combinations, which could be completely explained through biochemical processes, was not entirely original. Bekhterev would have been able to draw on, for example, the teachers of Freud as predecessors of reflexology: even Brücke, Meynert, and Exner had seen the foundations of the ego as a thinking subject in the reflexes and their connections in a system of cortical tracts.”
Bekhterev wrote: “But if matter is a fiction, and only energy is real, there is no ground for the contraposition of the psychic to the material, and vice versa, and we have ask ourselves: Is it not possible to reduce psychic activity, too, to physical energy?” “In this way, also, the external world – of course, not that which we perceive and imagine, but that which exists in reality –is subject to the law of causality or, more accurately, to the laws of relations. And when we prosecute our analysis to the end, we must acknowledge one fundamental and first principle of all being, and this we call energy. In the concept of energy we have the idea of various manifestations of movement under the form of great masses […]. To the basis of this movement, a basis which must be common to all phenomena of nature, including ourselves as a part of the universe, we give the name universal energy.”
“In this universality energy is reminiscent of Schreber’s rays. Paranoia and science always lay side by side,” Holl comments.
“Freud’s first neuron-machine model for the psyche, as he describes it in Project for a Scientific Psychology, also runs with an energy that he initially calls “quantity.”C.G. Jung’s somewhat later reform of the libido as a form of energy also belong to these models. […] “But people are, i.e., they must be regarded as energy accumulators resulting from their past individual experience and hereditary influences”, is written in [Bekhterev‘s] Collective Reflexology […] the second volume in the series “Contributions to Mass Psychology”.
“In the twenties this research was still “questions that had not been examined much”, and there were not many centers in the world where they were so intensively examined than at the Medical School at Harvard or at MIT. And there was hardly anywhere that this research was so systematically pursued in clinical practice than at the Psychoneurological Institute in Leningrad. Alongside a few attempts with psycho-pharmaceuticals Bekhterev’s practice primarily focused on hypnotic group therapy, which was meant to initiate intersubjective homeostasis – similar forms of therapy, following systematic, cybernetic models, were developed for schizophrenia patients in the USA only in the sixties by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues.”
“Bekhterev was very familiar with Cannon’s research. […] In Ohio in 1927 Bekhterev wanted to make contact with those whose research was the most advanced at the time, and to speak about the science that – as the significance of the Macy Conferences would show in the forties – was to be the science of the future. […] His lecture in Ohio was obviously an attempt to consolidate neuronal and biochemical homeostasis into a theory of the biosocial – or at least to discuss the possibility of such a “fundamental basis for everything that exists.” World energy, according to Bekhterev’s wish, was meant to be a scientific fusion of east and west, a homeostatic force. Cannon took the call from the Soviet Union seriously and posed two questions following Bekhterev’s lecture that show that he had clearly carried out similar experiments with different results. [… an] historical encounter between the two proto-cyberneticists.
“Bekhterev’s last work, Collective Reflexology, is an elegant synthesis of all his research, at once mass psychology, war psychology, psycho-history, political theory, and – social critique from the perspective of objective psychology. What Bekhterev opposes to Flechsig’s “ethics grounded in physiology” as the coming project of a biosocial society are accumulator bodies, linked to one another but at the same time freely developing, which learn and learn to learn in exchange with their surroundings, much like anti-authoritarian cyberneticists like Bateson and von Foerster will imagine and try out much later.”
The utopia of a society mediated by feelings and emotions remained Bekhterev’s dream: “Like a living organism, society represents a dynamic equilibrium rather than something static.”
In the Introduction to ‘Collective Reflexology’ Bekhterev wrote: “much of the data used in this book as the basis for my postulations have been drawn from the Russian Revolution, which I, together with all Russian citizens, had to live through both in 1905 and from 1917 onward.”
~~~
“During the rule of Tsar Nicholas II, Bekhterev was a courageous social critic” according to the above mentioned 2005 article in the journal History of Psychiatry. “For example, in 1905 at a psychiatric conference in Kiev he severely criticized the Tsar’s policies on reforms in education and on alcoholism. After the speech he was arrested for a few hours and warned.”
“In his autobiography, Bekhterev reported the case of a patient who told him that a fanatic religious militia unit planned to locate the famous anarchist Kropotkin who was staying abroad and to assassinate him. Bekhterev described his dilemma as a physician: he was obliged to medical secrecy and confidentiality, but on the other hand, as a liberal and humanist, it was very difficult for him to remain silent about a plot to commit political assassination. He decided to deliver a warning message to Kropotkin, through a friend of his who was travelling to Paris. Later Bekhterev met Kropotkin, who thanked him for saving his life (Bekhterev, 1928).”
From a political standpoint, Bekhterev political and revolutionary involvement was for instance certified – as reported in Zilboorg 2021 biography – by his presence during a critical Democratic Conference in September 1917 – only one month before the Bolshevik Revolution in October. Bekhterev shared the same box at Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petrograd during the days of the conference with Zilboorg and with Alexander Zarudny – until a few weeks earlier minster of justice in the Provisional Government – and Alexandra Kropotkin, daughter of the anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin. This was a meeting of representatives from soviets all over the country in order to decide the nature of Russia’s government.
‘La Suggestione’ di W. Bechterew, Professore di Psichiatria all’Universita’ di Pietroburgo, Fratelli Bocca Editori, Torino 1909
Alexander Kerensky became the head of the Provisional Government before power was finally seized by the Bolsheviks during the coup or Revolution of 1917. Two former students of the Psycho-Neurological Institute were very close to Kerensky during the year of the two revolutions in 1917.
Gregory Zilboorg, born Girsh Moseevich Zil’burg, who “accompanied Kerensky almost everywhere during the revolution first week, event to a room on the palace’s top floor where the leader ate and slept” according to his biography just published. Zilboorg acted in the Provisional Government as personal secretary to Matvey Skobelev, mister of labor and also a key member of thePetrograd Soviet.
And Pitirim Sorokin, who became Kerensky’s personal secretary. Kerensky acted as minister of justice, then minister of war before becoming prime minister.
This novel has been mentioned by several authors as anticipating and inspiring more famous later works by English writer Aldous Leonard Huxley (‘Brave New World’ 1932), Russian-American writer Alisa Zinovyevna RosenbaumaliasAyn Rand (‘Anthem’ 1938), and English writer Eric Arthur Blair alias George Orwell (‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ 1949). The anti-utopia by Zamyatin has “psychology as the novel’s primary subject” according to Caroline Zilboorg’s biography of her father just released.
According to the most prominent historian of psychiatry of the late 20th century Roy Porter, one of the first historians of psychiatry was indeed Gregory Zilboorg with his 1935 “The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance” and especially with his major historical work “A history of medical psychology” (1941). He also wrote “The passing of the old order in Europe” (1920).
After the October Revolution or Bolshevik coup, Zilboorg moved to New York City where he became a famous psychoanalyst. His patients or clients included a number of members of the Warburg family. According to Zilboorg’s biography by his daughter, “Ron Chernow in ‘The Warburgs’ concluded that Zilboorg ‘mesmerized’ the Warburg family, extracting his patients secrets in order to control them.”
‘A History of Medical Psychology’ (1941), by Gregory Zilboorg, W. W. Norton, New York 1967
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One year after the October Revolution, in 1918, Lenin published in the Pravda the article: “The Valuable Admissions Of Pitirim Sorokin”. By itself this writing by Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov alias Lenin or Nikolai Lenin) about Sorokin shows the importance of the former personal secretary of Kerensky.
“Pitirim Sorokin” – Lenin wrote – ” announces that he is leaving the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party and relinquishing his seat in the Constituent Assembly. His motives are that he finds it difficult to provide effective political recipes, not only for others, but even for himself, and that therefore he “is withdrawing completely from politics”.
Lenin continued: “He writes: “The past year of revolution has taught me one truth: politicians may make mistakes, politics may be socially useful, but may also be socially harmful, whereas scientific and educational work is always useful and is always needed by the people. . . .” The letter is signed: “Pitirim Sorokin, lecturer at St. Petersburg University and the Psycho-Neurological Institute, former member of the Constituent Assembly and former member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party”.
“Pitirim Sorokin is wrong when he says that scientific work “is always useful”. For mistakes are made in this sphere too” Lenin stated. “On the other hand, a frank declaration by a prominent person—i.e., a person who has occupied a responsible political post known to the people at large—that he is withdrawing from politics is also politics.”
Was this by Sorokin as reported by Lenin, a form of anti-politics, a sort of pro-technocracy stance? Politics might be harmful while science cannot, according to Sorokin.
Lenin also talked about the obligation “to make great national sacrifices for the sake of the supreme interests of the world proletarian revolution.” He added that “Anglo-French and American imperialism will inevitably destroy the independence and freedom of Russia if the world socialist revolution, world Bolshevism, does not triumph.” He also talked about the “faith in “democracy” in general, as a universal panacea” and the “failure to understand that this democracy is bourgeois democracy”. “It would be ridiculous and foolish to refrain from employing terror against and suppressing the landowners and capitalists and their henchmen, who are selling Russia to the foreign imperialist “Allies”. It would be farcical to attempt to “convince” or generally to “psychologically influence” them.” And he pointed to the possibility of “increasing panic and multiplying cases of the dissemination of panic, of treachery, and desertion to the imperialists, and so on and so forth.”
~~~
Despite what Lenin wrote about Sorokin and what later Sorokin wrote in turn about Lenin, in his second autobiography ‘A Long Journey’ (1963) Sorokin remarked how “political activities, plus participation in the same seminars and scientific work in the University, were responsible for the establishment of friendly relations and cooperation with the leaders and members of the Social-Democratic (Bolshevik and Menshevik), the People’s Socialist, and other radical parties. At that time all these parties did their anti-Czarist revolutionary work together, as one revolutionary front fighting the common enemy. […] It was through participation in these seminars of Petrajitzsky, Kovalevsky, and Tugan-Baranovsky, through shared revolutionary work, and eventually through many heated, informal discussions that a mutual friendship developed between myself and several Social-Democratic students, such as Piatakov, Karakhan, and others, who later became Communist leaders and members of the first Communist Council of the People’s Kommissars headed by Lenin (Karakhan was the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Piatakov, Secretary of Industry and Commerce, and so on).”
During the same time “as a result of their unduly high appreciation of my scholastic achievements, in my sophomore and junior years M. M. Kovalevsky [law professor at the University of St. Petersburg and the founding chairman of sociology at the Psycho-Neurological Institute, ed.] offered me a position as his private secretary and research assistant, de Roberty the position of assistant in his courses and of co-editor of the series “New Ideas in Sociology,” while Petrajitzsky and Bekhterev invited me to be co-editor of New Ideas in Science and Law and of Journal of Psychology and Criminal Anthropology.”
“Through Kovalevsky, who was an influential member of the State Council (which corresponded somewhat to the Senate of the United States) and a leader of a liberal party, and through Petrajitzsky, who was one of the leaders of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, I met many influential officials and statesmen, members of the Duma (Russian House of Representatives), and other leaders of conservative and progressive political parties. Kovalevsky, Petrajitzsky, de Roberty, and other professors knew of my affiliation with the Social-Revolutionary Party and of my past and present “subversive” activities; however this knowledge in no way spoiled our good relations. If anything they rather approved of my political views as being quite natural for a young man of my background. Kovalevsky often half-humorously introduced me to political leaders as “a young Jean Jacques Rousseau,” while Petrajitzsky, de Roberty, and others commented favorably on the broad and idealistic-realistic character of my political ideology which was free from a narrow fanaticism and intolerance”
Later on, still according to Sorokin, “sociology had been introduced into the university curriculum under Kerensky’s regime in 1917, and in the years of 1919-22 was expanded into a separate department [at the University of St. Petersburg, ed.] with myself as its elected chairman.”
Sorokin, according to Michel P. Richard who met with him during the 60s at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts and wrote an introduction to the abridged version of his magnum opus “Social and Cultural Dynamics” (1937-1941 in four volumes):
“The amazing thing about Sorokin’s life is that he managed to survive. He was born in 1889 in a village in northern Russia, the second son of an itinerant artisan and a Komi-speaking peasant girl. His earliest memory was the death of his mother in the middle of Winter, when he was about three years of age. His father subsequently developed a severe drinking problem, and at the age of ten Pitirim left home with his older brother. Forced to make his own living by doing odd jobs, Sorokin had little formal education until he entered a teacher’s seminary at the age of fourteen, at which time he also joined one of the revolutionary parties. In 1906 he was arrested at a rally and spent four months in jail. This resulted in expulsion from the teacher’s seminary, but Sorokin continued his revolutionary work in the countryside under the assumed name of “Comrade Ivan.” One of the mass meetings he addressed was broken up by mounted Cossacks; there were numerous casualties, and Sorokin fled to St. Petersburg in a state of nervous exhaustion. For two years he worked at various jobs and attended night school to prepare himself for the university entrance examinations. In 1909 he was admitted to the Psycho-Neurological Institute” – only two years after its foundation in 1907, ed. – “but transferred to the University of St. Petersburg after one year to escape the draft.
To escape the czarist police Sorokin changed addresses frequently. […] In 1913 he was again briefly imprisoned for conspiring to write a pamphlet critical of the Romanov dynasty, and he also completed his first book, about law and sociology, entitled ‘Crime and Punishment, Service and Reward: a sociological essay on the main forms of social behavior and morality’. […] After the collapse of the czarist regime he was appointed secretary of Prime Minister Kerensky. […] When the Provisional Government fell, Sorokin again found himself on the “wanted” list for his outspoken attacks against the Bolsheviks. In 1918 he was arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate Lenin. Influential friends obtained his release from prison, but he immediately involved himself in military operations against the Bolsheviks in Archangel. When this effort failed, Sorokin with a companion went into hiding in a forest for two months. Finally, to protect friends who were harboring him, he gave himself up to the Chekha police. He was sentenced to death, but again influential friends persuaded Lenin that he was a good candidate for rehabilitation. (His two brothers were not so fortunate; both lost their lives during this period.)
In 1919 Sorokin returned to his posts at the University of St. Petersburg and the Psycho-Neurological Institute. […] By September 1922 the Soviet Union had had its fill of Professor Sorokin, and he was exiled. A series of lectures in Berlin and Prague led to an offer to visit the United States in 1924, and a permanent appointment at the University of Minnesota. […] In 1930 he was invited to organize the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1959. […] In 1960 he became the first president of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations.”
Some of his views about the interaction of individual personality and society might appear in line with those of his former teacher Bekhterev. Sorokin was influenced by the philosopher K. F. Jakov or Zhakof – with whom he conducted field studies – as well as by the Russian early behaviorists, in particular his teachers Bekhterev at the Psycho-Neurological Institute and Pavlov at the institute and the University of St. Petersburg.
In his essay “Lenin, the destroyer”, Sorokin in 1924 wrote (empasis added): “We estimate a doctor, an engineer, an architect, a painter, not so much according to his subjective desire as according to the objective result of his activity. It is not enough to have a desire to cure an illness or to imagine a wonderful machine to be a good doctor or a skilful engineer. The same may be said for statesmen. Even a madman may have a profound desire to be the Saviour of Mankind.”
This essay was part of a debate after Lenin’s death entitled “Was Lenin a Failure?”. The presentation of Sorokin’s piece included the following summary: “He fastens upon Lenin blame for all the ills that have befallen his country since the Revolution, and sums him up as a pathological fanatic and an agent of destruction, with no new ideas and no message for humanity – a half-mad leader of brutal rebels.”
“But was Lenin perhaps a successful practical actor” – Sorokin continued – “who by his genius was able to put these ideas into practice and to improve in this way the biologic, economic, mental, and moral state of the people, especially of the labor classes? Again the objective results of Lenin’s dictatorship give us quite a definite answer to this question.”
“For a man who knows that Lenin from the moment of his returning to Russia in 1917 was in the last stage of progressive paralysis, who knows that he was even then abnormal, that this abnormality at the end of 1921 was medically testified – for such a man all Lenin’s psychology and behavior is quite comprehensible on pathological grounds. Half-mad and ill, he was suited to be at the head of a government distinguished by wild destruction, unlimited bestiality, cruelty, and animosity. The generous phrases and catch-words with which he tried to “beautify” all the inferiority of his nature, his anti-sociability, madness, and wild activity, are nothing but usual “veils” with which such individuals try to betray themselves as well as other people.
Any serious psychologist, psychiatrist, and behaviorist knows this fact very well. Only an ignorant and naïve people on one hand, and individuals of mad, anti-social, and inferior type (who are very numerous amongst the right and left extremists, radicals, and “super idealists”) on the other, are deceived by these “gorgeous speech-reactions”; for them only Lenin is “the saviour of mankind,” “the liberator of humanity,” “the great reformer,” “the new Jesus Christ,” and so on.
I have no desire to convince them because they need less to be convinced than cured.”
“In fact that the deadly blow to communism was administered by the communistic leader” – Sorokin concluded – “there is indeed something providential and symbolic.”
Nikolai Lenin (Vladimir Ilyitch Ulianov), a sketch made from life for The New York Times by Oscar Cesare in Moscow, November, 1922, and autographed by Lenin
His books include, among others which have been translated overall into 17 languages, ‘The Sociology of Revolution’ (1925), and also ‘The Crisis of Our Age. The Social and Cultural Outlook’ (1941) and ‘Man and Society in Calamity’ (1942) – the last two both published by E.P. Dutton – today part of Penguin Random House.
On the Bolshevik side there was the psychiatrist Aleksandr Aleksandrovič Malinovskij alias Alexander Bogdanov, previously discussed in PsyPolitics. He co-founded Bolshevism with Lenin; their close working relationship was established after what some sources report as their first meeting in Geneva, Switzerland in 1904. Four years later in 1908 Bogdanov published the utopia Red Star and during the same year was meeting with Lenin in Capri, Italy at Gorky’s villa. In 1918, the year following the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, his book from ten years earlier, Red Star – the first utopia of the Soviet era – was republished by the Petrograd Soviet.
Harold Loeb’s (author of Life in a Technocracy, 1933) family company was Kuhn Loeb & Co., a significant financial backer of Russian and Bolshevik revolutionary leaders and of Lev Davidovich Bronstein alias Leon Trotsky in particular. Trotsky was an intimate friend of the socialist Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst of the “will to power,” a pioneer in bringing psychological concepts outside the clinic emphasizing the role of the wider society on individual psychology, seen nowadays as a forerunner of community psychiatry.”
In the History of the Russian Revolution published in 1930, it is interesting to note that the author Leon Trosky – who was initially a Menshevik (minority faction) – appears to refer consistently to Bogdanov as a Menshevik. Indeed it was Boris Bogdanov he was referring to and apparently there is no mention of the co-founder of Bolshevism (majority faction) Alexander Bogdanov in his history of the Revolution. The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia reports that “Trotsky headed the Red Army as People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs and played a vital role in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. He became one of the seven members of the first Bolshevik Politburo in 1919.”
“On April 3, 1917, Trotsky was detained at the Citadel, and shortly thereafter was brought to the POW camp in Amherst. (His wife Natalia Sedova and children remained in Halifax at a hotel, reporting daily to the police station.) Trotsky referred to the camp as a concentration camp. He wrote about the British commanders’ attempts to block his mobilization of the other prisoners to join the Russian Revolution.
“The whole month I was there was like one continuous mass meeting. I told the prisoners about the Russian revolution, about Liebknecht, about Lenin … the British colonel … forbade me to make any more public speeches. But this did not happen until the last few days of our stay at the camp, and served only to cement my friendship with the sailors and workers, who responded to the colonel’s order by a written protest bearing five hundred and thirty signatures. A plebiscite like this, carried out in the very face of Sergeant Olsen’s heavy-handed supervision, was more than ample compensation for all the hardships of the Amherst imprisonment.”
On the 17th of May he arrived in Russia to be a political protagonist during the months leading to the October, Bolshevik Revolution.
Tsar Nicholas II after the Bolsheviks took power was assassinated less than a year later with his family and he is known today in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer.
In his diary, the King wrote, ‘At 4.0. we were dressed ready for the Wedding, I wore the 8th Cuirassier uniform, & were photographed, I was also done with Nicky.’
The two cousins met for the last time, in Berlin in 1913, one year before the Great War, on the occasion of the marriage of Prince Ernest Augustus of Hanover (1887-1953) and Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia (1892-1980), only daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and King of Prussia, who was also a cousin of both.
The Great War one year later will involve all three.]
“L’analisi delle forme di follia sarà molto più importante di quella dei conti nazionali, ela fantascienza sarà più utile dei libri di testo di economia”
Nel giugno 2020 il blog PsyPolitics pubblicava il primo articolo, una prima assoluta in italiano: la traduzione di un articolo dal giornale di college Yale Daily News del 29 Febbraio 1972 riguardo al ruolo che il collegio medico di Yale svolse in Cina durante le prime fasi della carriera politica di Mao, il “padre fondatore” della Repubblica Popolare Cinese.
Come recita l’articolo, “l’unione studentesca di Yale-in-China invito’ Mao a farsi carico della direzione del loro giornale”. Mao accettò la posizione e cambiò il formato della rivista studentesca: ora avrebbe affrontato le critiche sociali e i problemi attuali e si sarebbe concentrato sul “riorientamento del pensiero”.
L’articolo, anche nella versione inglese che gia’ era presente online per quanto ampiamente misconosciuta, prendeva spunto dallo storico viaggio del Presidente statunitense Nixon in Cina – preparato dal suo consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale Kissinger e in cui Nixon incontro’ Mao e parlo’ de “la settimana che cambio’ il mondo”. L’articolo sul Yale Daily News si basava sugli studi e le ricerche di uno storico della universita’ di Yale, Jonathan Spence – Sterling Professor, il titolo piu’ alto che quella universita’ conferisca – professore “eccellente” di storia cinese.
Clare Boothe Luce, la diplomatica, ambasciatrice in Italia, che aveva sposato il fondatore delle riviste Time, Life e Fortune e che sperimento’ con l’LSD, commento’ il viaggio dicendo a Nixon “tra mille anni, diranno di te, lui ando’ in Cina.”
Sul Web si trovano pubblicazioni in inglese quali “Mao Zedong era un laureato di Yale e altre cospirazioni dell’oscuro”, che potrebbero apparire come una risposta all’articolo del giornale di college dell’universita’ di Yale, ma l’articolo sopra che riporta le scoperte storiche di Spence riguarda non ad esempio una laurea ma i rapporti significativi che ci furono tra il giovane Mao – prima che facesse carriera politica nel Partito Comunista Cinese – il collegio di medicina di Yale e l’associazione Yale-in-China.
L’articolo di Yale Daily News su Mao tradotto per la prima volta in italiano su PsyPolitics era inteso per un’altra pubblicazione online che pero’, nonostante l’interesse iniziale e il fatto che si trattasse di una semplice traduzione senza commenti o aggiunte, dopo qualche settimana di attesa decise di non pubblicarlo sostenendo l’articolo non fosse sufficientemente interessante. Ad oggi resta l’articolo letto con maggiore continuita’ e il secondo piu’ letto su PsyPolitics.
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Era il secondo rifiuto in pochi mesi, visto che il primo era avvenuto per un articolo prima richiesto espressamente e poi accettato formalmente da parte del blog Mad in America – probabilmente dalla parte opposta dello spettro politico rispetto al primo caso. Dopo una aggiunta all’articolo sullo psichiatra Bogdanov – fondatore del bolscevismo con Lenin – l’accettazione si trasformo’ repentinamente in una decisione irrevocabile di non pubblicazione.
Questi due episodi, in particolare quello riguardante Mao e Yale, sono stati la motivazione che ha portato ad aprire il blog PsyPolitics. Un amico mi aveva suggerito da un anno se non di piu’ di aprire un blog, idea che non trovavo utile o interessante inizialmente, ma che dopo questi episodi e in un periodo di grandi cambiamenti sociali e politici mi sembro’ a quel punto l’unica via praticabile per pubblicare e mettere in circolazione documenti, fatti storici e prospettive politiche di rilevanza pubblica e idee pertinenti. Senza dover passare da processi decisionali spesso apparentemente arbitrari o discutibili e che comunque avrebbero potuto rallentare significativamente pubblicazione e circolazione.
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Non e’ facile riassumere o comunque commentare anche solo per sommi capi il lavoro di scrittura e non solo di piu’ di un anno. Questo naturalmente include il non trascurabile lavoro di apertura e di disegno del sito e del blog, con annessi e connessi. Un lavoro non visibile a chi legge ma decisamente impegnativo. Molti concetti gia’ sviluppati non saranno qui spiegati di nuovo, rimandando quindi agli articoli originali.
Oltre ottanta articoli sono stati pubblicati in inglese – primariamente – ma anche in italiano, alcuni in entrambe le lingue, anche se per motivi pratici mentre la traduzione cercava inizialmente di essere sistematica questo non e’ potuto accadere in modo continuo.
Tutti gli articoli sono comunque traducibili in diverse lingue in modo automatico tramite una funzione presente dopo la fine di ogni articolo a meta’ pagina.
Durante il primo anno circa di pubblicazioni online, il blog PsyPolitics ha avuto oltre trentacinquemila contatti da piu’ di centotrentacinque paesi nel mondo, potendo contare solo su un poco di pubblicita’ durante il primo mese e mezzo. I podcasts per gli articoli in inglese, introdotti solo da qualche mese, sono stati ascoltati ad oggi piu’ di mille volte.
Il blog PsyPolitics si e’ basato da subito ampiamente sul lavoro di lettura, collezione di documentazione e letteratura, e di ricerca storica sui rapporti tra psichiatria e psico-discipline da una parte e politica dall’altra, che gia’ avevo svolto nei tre anni precedenti. Questo lavoro era confluito in una sintesi presentata nell’estate del 2019 al Royal College of Psychiatrists a Londra (qui sotto il video con sottotitoli in italiano o inglese), una relazione intitolata “Stiamo assistendo all’emergere di un nuovo potere psichiatrico globale?”, titolo che riprendeva quello della serie di lezioni al Collège de France di Michel Foucault negli anni settanta su ‘Il Potere Psichiatrico’ (1973-1974, Feltrinelli 2004).
In questa relazione a Londra 2019 e nelle formulazioni li’ presentate si prefiguravano – in assenza di virus – diverse situazioni quali il passaggio dai regimi democratici costituzionali a una fase post-democratica, tecnocratica, di totalitarismo scientifico, articolando questo passaggio con antecedenti e documenti storici, ragionamenti e meccanismi, personaggi politici, scientifici ed intellettuali, e organizzazioni rilevanti. Meno di sei mesi piu’ tardi queste formulazioni ipotetiche trovavano nel 2020 un interesse senza precedenti nella risposta globale al virus.
Il potere è passato da una struttura sovrana a una struttura disciplinare 250 anni fa, all’incirca nel periodo in cui è nata la psichiatria. L’uomo più potente del mondo in quel momento, re Giorgio III d’Inghilterra monarca di un impero britannico globale, fu trattato come un paziente contro la sua volontà senza che l’alto tradimento fosse messo in discussione, attraverso la medicina di nuova concezione della mente e del comportamento, all’epoca non ancora chiamata psichiatria.
Tale “cerimonia di incoronazione inversa”(“inverse coronation ceremony”, testo dal discorso in inglese) di un Giorgio III psichiatrizzato è stata posta come cuore della presentazione del 2019. Secondo Michel Foucault nella sua serie di lezioni sul potere psichiatrico (1973-1974), è stata la scena fondante della psichiatria e allo stesso tempo la pietra miliare che segna il passaggio dal potere sovrano a quello disciplinare nel mondo moderno.
La tesi innovativa formulata a Londra nel 2019 e’ che per desovranizzare colui che in principio e’ il sovrano contemporaneo, ovvero il cittadino, si debba operare una psichiatrizzazione di massa, a livello globale. Cosi’ come in qualche modo avvenne con l’uomo piu’ potente del mondo a fine ‘700. Questo si puo’ fare oggi ampiamente, anche in funzione simbolica, tramite i media.
A proposito di media fu l’ex presidente dell’Associazione Americana di Psicologia Zimbardo a sostenere la cosiddetta TV della realtà come mezzo per insegnare la psicologia al pubblico: per “promuovere una visione positiva della psicologia come disciplina impegnata a migliorare la qualità della nostra vita come individui e come società. Tutta la mia vita consiste nel regalare la psicologia al pubblico”. In un articolo dello Stanford Report intitolato “Psicologo mette il “reale” nella TV della realtà”, “Zimbardo vede la TV della realtà come un formato logico per insegnare la psicologia”.
Nell’abstract del maggio 2019 si concludeva: “l’attuale psichiatrizzazione pubblica dell’ ”uomo più potente del mondo”, come spesso i media descrivono il presidente degli Stati Uniti d’America, potrebbe essere vista come un nuovo cambio di paradigma nel potere contemporaneo.
Un tale spettacolo pubblico viene trasmesso in tutto il mondo tramite TV e social media digitali (ad esempio Twitter) in tempo reale. Oltre al crescente uso di un lessico psicologizzato nel linguaggio quotidiano, un ruolo potrebbe essere giocato da tale spettacolo comunicando simbolicamente e contribuendo a uno spostamento culturale globale verso una visione del mondo soggettivista e una progressiva de-politicizzazione della cittadinanza.”
Una tesi espressa in un seminario a maggio 2020 come corollario alla psichiatrizzazione come desovranizzazione di massa e’ che l’applicazione della psichiatria al caso singolo – in particolare ma non solo quando contro la volonta’ del paziente – possa essere vista, dato il funzionamento e le origini storiche della disciplina, come “una scorciatoia legale, uno stato di eccezione o una rivoluzione a livello individuale”.
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Incredibilmente dal mio punto di vista, quasi nessuno sembrava interessato a capire come fosse stato possibile prefigurare le formulazioni di Londra 2019 in assenza di pandemia globale. A paragone, quando c’era da parlare di temi politicamente corretti in passato il problema era piuttosto frenare, non stimolare, l’interesse della stampa e dei media, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la mia esperienza nel periodo dopo essere apparso in un articolo (qui sotto) su Time magazine nel 2010.
Mentre parlare al pubblico di come abbia potuto prefigurare nel 2019 degli scenari di notevolissima rilevanza politica e che mai si sono verificati prima nella storia, vale a dire il concomitare di globalizzazione, soprattutto digitale, e di psichiatrizzazione generalizzata della societa’ e’ stato e continua ad essere difficilissimo.
Gia’ dall’estate del 2019 avevo iniziato anche a pubblicare in modo informale sui cosiddetti social media considerazioni di ordine politico utilizzando sistematicamente – e per primo, in assenza di pandemia virale e risposte governative globali – le formule #RivoluzioneGlobalista e #GlobalistRevolution.
A mio avviso è in atto una rivoluzione globalista di cui nessuno parlava all’epoca, vale a dire prima del 2020, con diversi attori politici di spicco che hanno ormai discusso esplicitamente dal 2020 in poi di un rifacimento globale del potere (Gorbaciov, Brown, Kissinger, tra gli altri), un tema che sicuramente non era nell’agenda pubblica solo due anni fa.
Le ‘bio’ politiche e le ‘psico’ politiche legate alle emozioni – gia’ in preparazione da tempo e riconoscibili prima del 2020 – sono infatti mezzi idonei per una cosiddetta ‘governance’ che prescinda dalle differenze di quello che e’ stato definito l’ego nazionale delle diverse popolazioni, legate a culture, istituzioni politiche, giuridiche, religiose, tradizioni storiche, lingue differenti.
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Ad agosto 2020 , circa un mese dopo l’inizio della pubblicita’ di alcuni articoli di PsyPolitics sul sito chiamato Facebook (e’ importante a mio avviso relativizzare e prendere le distanze da queste entita’ digitali date ormai per imprescindibili), tale sito toglieva senza alcuna spiegazione la pubblicita’ a un articolo (con il ripetuto intervento umano – non semplicemente automatico – come possono mostrare gli scambi ripetuti per posta elettronica con il personale di tale sito).
Si trattava di una semplice trascrizione da una intervista dello psichiatra Viktor Frankl – sopravvissuto a piu’ di un campo di concentramento nazional-socialista – in cui Frankl spiegava negli anni sessanta la sua contrarieta’ alle droghe e alla sperimentazione in corso ad Harvard su LSD e altri allucinogeni quali la psilocibina, i cosiddetti funghi magici. Frankl esprimeva la sua contrarieta’ a esperienze soggettive causate da sostanze chimiche senza legame con esperienze oggettive corrispondenti nel mondo: esperienze soggettive indotte tramite allucinogeni portano a una perdita di significato oggettivo e sono causa di potenzialita’ non espresse. L’articolo aveva superato le diecimila visualizzazioni in pochi giorni – diventando stabilmente l’articolo piu’ letto su PsyPolitics – e circa mille interazioni tra commenti e apprezzamenti sul sito Facebook. Articoli connessi a questo tema degli allucinogeni – tema che solo sotto il profilo culturale e non medico si puo’ definire psichedelico – su PsyPolitics hanno in seguito anche riguardato autori quali Evola e Murray.
Pochi giorni dopo l’articolo con l’intervento di Frankl, veniva tolta la pubblicita’ anche al breve video che riproduceva uno spezzone di pochi secondi preso dalla mia relazione nell’estate 2019 al Royal College of Psychiatrists in cui si accostavano la sedia tranquillizzante ideata dallo psichiatra e rivoluzionario americano Benjamin Rush con l’apparenza esterna della realta’ virtuale di oggi. Il video pubblicizzato – che raffigurava un elemento per cosi’ dire cyber – aveva gia’ realizzato oltre centomila visualizzazioni.
Vietato criticare la nuova ideologia totalitaria del capitalismo cyber-psichedelico, cuore della Rivoluzione Globalista?
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Nel primo anno PsyPolitics ha raggiunto dei risultati sicuramente interessanti e che hanno a mio modo di vedere complessivamente superato le aspettative.
Nuovi termini e relativi concetti proposti attraverso PsyPolitics includono quello di [a] ‘pneumadelico’ (che libera lo spirito, anziche’ psichedelico, visto che gli allucinogeni nelle parole usate da Osmond, ideatore del termine psichedelico, dovrebbero dissolvere la psiche – di cui fa parte anche l’ego psicoanalitico cosciente – mentre lo stesso non accadrebbe per il pneuma o spirito che in base a concezioni gnosticheggianti verrebbe cosi’ liberato); lo stesso termine [b] ‘psypolitics’ (in italiano il termine corrispondente esisteva gia’ ma e’ di incerta definizione, psicopolitica); e soprattutto [c] ‘psyspeak’ proposto nel 2019 ovvero ‘psicolingua’, teorizzato quale neolingua centrata sulla psiche che sta debordando in ogni aspetto della nostra vita anche politica a livello globale.
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Il settimanale The New Yorker a marzo 2021 pubblicava un articolo su “therapy-speak”, il linguaggio della terapia che dal lettino dello psicoanalista sta oramai debordando in ogni aspetto del piu’ vasto mondo: “L’ascesa del linguaggio terapeutico. Come un linguaggio ha lasciato il lettino dello psicoanalista per entrare nel mondo”.
L’abstract del maggio 2019 poi sviluppato e presentato a settembre a Londra iniziava cosi’: “Negli ultimi anni abbiamo osservato una crescente attenzione al linguaggio e ai concetti relativi alla salute mentale nel più ampio mondo sociale e politico. Ad esempio, il linguaggio politico relativo alle “fobie” è rapidamente diventato di uso comune. Un simile lessico derivato in gran parte da psichiatria, psicologia e psicoanalisi potrebbe portare a una progressiva interiorizzazione e de-politicizzazione di concetti civici, senza che la maggior parte dei cittadini se ne renda conto.”
In linea con le fomulazioni di Londra 2019, su PsyPolitics si era scritto nel 2020 dell’ “apprendimento di massa della psicolingua” mentre il New Yorker nel 2021 ha scritto di “adozione di massa del linguaggio psicologico” facendo anche riferimento a Foucault e all’interpretazione dell’opera di questo autore che se ne era data su PsyPolitics – quindi non necessariamente ad affermazioni dello stesso Foucault, come invece sostiene la giornalista del New Yoker.
La giornalista del New Yorker nel 2021: “Come hanno osservato filosofi da Michel Foucault a Peter Conrad, il vocabolario medico eleva l’oratore: affermare che il tuo vicino invadente ha un “disturbo borderline di personalità” ti ammanta di autorità mentre lo patologizza“.
In una intervista TV del 2020 rilanciata anche da Foucault News e poi pubblicata integralmente in video su PsyPolitics, e successivamente anche in trascrizione testuale, si diceva: “quando vedo un interlocutore lo incomincio a guardare con lo sguardo esperto – forse come avrebbe detto Michel Foucault – con l’occhio clinico, con lo sguardo clinico, dall’alto al basso, quindi facendo quasi un gioco del dottore e del paziente, etichettandosi a vicenda, non considerando più la persona che la pensa anche molto diversamente da me come un legittimo interlocutore, ma come qualcuno che ha un problema che deve essere risolto da un tecnico“.
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Si potrebbe aggiungere come i rivoluzionari globalisti, anche quando non esplicitamente tali, si possano riconoscere da come parlano. Sorprendentemente, certamente nel panorama italiano, sono spesso coloro che vengono identificati dai mass media e dai media digitali piu’ diffusi come oppositori del potere globalista – e piu’ o meno esplicitamente come difensori della sovranita’ nazionale e della Costituzione – che usano in modo profuso la psicolingua globalista, una terminologia psicologica mai cosi’ diffusa in politica. Non solo dando per valido il linguaggio fobico per esempio e i relativi concetti, dalla xenofobia alla omofobia o omotransfobia e ai variegati neologismi fobici la cui importanza strategica e’ stata discussa sin dalle formulazioni di Londra 2019, ma anche il liguaggio dei “deliri”, della “follia”, del “siamo impazziti”, degli “idioti”, degli “psicopatici”, della “demenza”, dei “bias cognitivi”, ecc.
La tesi sostenuta su PsyPolitics e nelle formulazioni di Londra 2019 e’ che il linguaggio psicologico applicato a politica e societa’, chiamato ‘psicolingua’ – anche quando pseudo o para o quasi tecnico, o metaforico, o presentato addirittura come il liguaggio della ‘opposizione a’ e della ‘liberazione da’ tecnocrazia e globalismo – sia un linguaggio intrinsecamente anti-politico (quindi anche anti-democratico), in linea con lo spostamento culturale tecnocratico, la autentica neolingua globalista.
Chi contribuisce alla sua diffusione, dando la psicolingua per buona, per valida, opera a favore del globalismo anche quando si professa opposto a questo o in altri ambiti opera in direzione opposta. Non e’ possibile e costituisce una contraddizione radicale essere a favore della sovranita’ – sia delle persone su sé stesse sia del popolo sulla nazione – e usare, diffondere e dare per buona la psicolingua.
Chi parla la psicolingua – anche se per appoggiare le costituzioni o le sovranita’ popolari – ovvero il liguaggio del dentro, della psiche, della malattia, della rivoluzione individuale dell’io, del sé o dello spirito, della cura in ambito sociale e politico – favorisce la diffusione e l’affermarsi di uno degli strumenti strategici della tecnocrazia e del globalismo. A questo conduce inequivocabilmente l’analisi delle origini storiche e delle funzioni del linguaggio della psiche applicato alla polis.
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Il progetto di PsyPolitics ne sottende un’altro piu’ ambizioso, ovvero la necessita’ di lavorare a una definizione e articolazione dello studio delle politiche della psiche e delle psicodiscipline, un nuovo ambito disciplinare per il quale qui si sono proposti i termini ‘psypolitics’ in inglese e ‘psicopolitica’ in italiano.
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Uno dei temi base trattati con costanza su PsyPolitics e’ quello della psicologizzazione e medicalizzazione, e quindi della patologizzazione, della politica – in particolare del linguaggio – e piu’ in generale del discorso pubblico. Inclusa una sorta di psicologizzazione, ovvero una lettura sempre piu’ psicologica, persino di articoli chiave delle costituzioni, per esempio di quella statunitense (25mo emendamento) – la prima Costituzione repubblicana moderna – e di quella italiana (Articolo 3). Da “We the People” a “We the Crazy”?
Si e’ piu’ volte descritto il passaggio da un linguaggio politico a un linguaggio metaforico tecnico o pseudotecnico per approdare infine a un linguaggio letteralmente psicologico e medico anche in politica. Cosi’ come si e’ parlato della funzione dei media di massa e digitali nel diffondere a livello globale la psicolingua che supera il linguaggio della polis e della politica e conduce invece a una visione del mondo soggettivista.
Come scritto da Freis in Psicopolitica tra le due guerre (Palgrave, 2020): “una razionalità scientifica e tecnologica oggettiva e non partigiana appariva come una reale alternativa alla presunta miopia, emotività e interesse personale dei partiti politici. […] gli anni tra i due conflitti mondiali divennero il periodo di massimo splendore delle idee utopiche di “ingegneria sociale” e videro l’ascesa e la caduta della “tecnocrazia” – una nozione introdotta nel 1919 – come movimento organizzato.”
I processi politici del mondo esterno e della polis sono sempre piu’ rappresentati sui media, spesso in modo surrettizio, come oggettivi (si pensi solo alla retorica sul virus dal 2020 a oggi) al punto da dover essere sottoposti a una rigida ragione scientifica e non piu’ politica o democratica, in un processo che e’ stato recentemente chiamato di “scientizzazione della politica”, mentre la diffusione della psicolingua – questa e’ la tesi sostenuta dall’autore nel 2019 a Londra e su PsyPolitics dal 2020 – contribuisce a soggettivizzare sempre piu’ il sovrano moderno, ovvero il cittadino elettore.
La visione del cittadino quindi piu’ che rispecchiare il mondo esterno sarebbe sempre piu’ solo una proiezione del proprio mondo interno, quindi sempre piu’ inutilizzabile per le decisioni politiche e sempre piu’ da considerare candidata per cure vuoi biomediche vuoi psicologiche e psicoterapeutiche, in un processo di psichiatrizzazione della politica con inequivocabili risvolti anti-democratici e persino anti-politici. Questa scissione tra la visione soggettiva dei cittadini e la dimensione oggettiva del mondo esterno – di cui soltanto gli scienziati, gli ingegneri e i tecnici anche medici dovrebbero occuparsi – venne sorprendentemente descritta, cosa che ho letto a fine 2020 dopo avere gia’ formulato quanto sopra, in un testo che e’ stato riscoperto e riportato alla pubblica attenzione, con ben quattordici articoli, su PsyPolitics: Vita in Una Tecnocrazia di Harold Loeb, del 1933.
Altra espressione proposta su PsyPolitics e’ quella di [d] ‘cyber-psichedelico’, la forma piu’ esplicita del gia’ esistente cyber-delico, per denotare il vasto mondo di rapida e crescente importanza che si trova a vario titolo tra il mondo del digitale e del virtuale e quello delle sostanze allucinogene e delle filosofie che le accompagnano (anche il concetto di ‘cyber-pneuma-delico’ potrebbe funzionare).
Della connessione tra elementi cyber “i personal computer, gli smartphone, i videogiochi, internet e la realtà virtuale” e psichedelici in una comune sottocultura, si e’ parlato su queste pagine a nostra conoscenza per primi o ad ogni modo tra i primi in Italia. In particolare e’ stata coniata su PsyPolitics e qui usata per la primissima volta l’espressione ‘capitalismo cyber-psichedelico’, sia in italiano che in inglese. In inglese si potrebbe parlare – da cyber e psychedelic – di ‘cypsy capitalism’.
Una forte enfasi e’ stata anche posta sull’opportunita’ di chiamare le sostanze cosiddette psichedeliche (espressione che non denota alcun effetto, nemmeno in medicina) con nomi che ne indichino alcuni effetti principali, sia sotto il profilo storico che clinico, ovvero allucinogeni o psicotomimetici.
Su PsyPolitics e’ stata formulata l’idea secondo la quale il capitalismo, sempre piu’ finanziarizzato, si stia trasformando passando da un paradigma individualista e per cosi’ dire anti-psicotico a uno maggiormente collettivista e psicoto-mimetico. Psicoto-mimetico (che somiglia agli stati psicotici) e’ il nome che fu dato alle sostanze allucinogene negli anni ’50. Il primo paradigma basato su un saldo ‘ego’ psicoanalitico dei cittadini, lavoratori ed elettori, sottoposti a costituzioni alla Montesquieu che prevedono la separazione dei poteri e dove le leggi si basano primariamente sui compartamenti oggettivi. Il secondo in linea con la cosiddetta ideologia californiana, in cui il digitale supera in parte la distinzione tra individualismo e collettivismo, ciascuno e’ sempre piu’ solo sul Web ma allo stesso tempo sempre piu’ coordinato con gli altri dall’automazione. Un nuovo paradigma basato sulla dissoluzione dell’ego psicoanalitico – o piu’ in generale del sé o della psiche – di cittadini trasformati in pazienti e sempre meno lavoratori, sempre piu’ usatori di cannabis o altre sostanze che inducono fenomeni psicotici, quali gli allucinogeni.
Cittadini controllati non piu’ tanto dalla societa’, da una morale interiorizzata e autonoma, e dalla legge che regola comportamenti oggettivi quanto dalle tecnologie della sorveglianza digitale che regolerebbero pensieri soggettivi attraverso un potere maggiormente centralizzato, che calcola il rischio statisticamente e tenta cosi’ di individuare associazioni tra fattori per prevenire comportamenti devianti o ritenuti pericolosi a sé e agli altri.
La desovranizzazione del cittadino e’ sempre piu’ presentata come un processo di liberazione o di rivoluzione individuale, un passaggio empatico dall’io al noi, dalla razionalita’ che non ci sarebbe mai appartenuta a sensazioni, percezioni, emozioni, esperienze che ci rendono piu’ simili agli altri animali e piu’ vicini al resto della natura. Da pensanti a semplicemente senzienti, che sentono. Il misticismo anche chimico delle sostanze si accompagnerebbe dunque all’armonizzazione – non piu’ sociale e decentralizzata – tramite la tecnologia, di cittadini trasformati in pazienti che sempre meno hanno sovranita’ sulla propria mente e sul proprio corpo e che non avrebbero piu’ la necessita’ di coordinarsi autonomamente tra di loro attraverso la societa’ e i corpi intermedi.
Per fare un esempio per adesso ipotetico, si pensi al traffico in cui ciascun automobilista, dopo avere imparato, guida oggi il proprio veicolo, mentre con una guida automatizzata il coordinamento del traffico non avverrebbe piu’ in futuro attraverso l’interazione di migliaia di persone autonome. Al limite, ciascun automobilista potrebbe persino essere sotto l’effetto di cannabis o di sostanze allucinogene o psicotomimetiche, senza che questo comporti necessariamente un rischio per il traffico.
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Il legame originario che secondo una tesi innovativa presentata su PsyPolitics esiste tra psichiatria e rivoluzioni politiche diventa di importanza cruciale nel momento in cui la societa’ intera e ciascun cittadino vengono sempre piu’ psichiatrizzati, ovvero de-sovranizzati, sottoposti a uno stato di eccezione o a una rivoluzione individuale di massa. Un apparente paradosso superato attraverso le tecnologie digitali che, essendo invasive e pervasive – onnipresenti e capillari – permettono almeno in parte il superamento della contrapposizione individualismo vs. collettivismo.
Questa trasformazione avverrebbe anche grazie a una campagna martellante dei media di massa e digitali che pongono alla pubblica attenzione temi psicologici e psichiatrici, anche tramite una moltitudine di casi apparentemente solo contingenti ma le cui modalita’ di presentazione al pubblico possono avere questa lettura. Si pensi da ultimo al caso del piu’ volte primo ministro Berlusconi, con una richiesta di perizia psichiatrica molto dibattuta sui media.
Come se la capacita’ di intendere e di volere di ciascuno fosse sempre meno data per scontata come invece e’ necessario in una societa’ di persone autonome – nella polis – in cui l’onere della prova spetta eventualmente a chi disputi tale capacita’. Per Aristotele la polis e’ basata su una forma di amicizia.
La fiducia che riponevamo senza nemmeno pensarci nelle altre persone anche a noi completamente estranee circa la loro capacita’ di intendere e di volere e circa una loro razionalita’ e moralita’ di fondo e’ sempre piu’ erosa a favore della sfiducia di fondo e dello spostamento dell’onere della prova. Come in una autentica societa’ “di estranei”. E’ il cittadino-paziente sempre di piu’ a dover dimostrare magari persino attraverso un procedimento medico – addirittura preventivo – di possedere cio’ che prima era doveroso dare per buono, per scontato. L’onere della prova verrebbe cosi’ ad essere ribaltato.
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Infine, rispetto al linguaggio, il metodo genealogico (non meramente etimologico, legato all’etimo o al significato) nel risalire all’origine storica di parole chiave e di chi e quando le abbia coniate e usate inizialmente si e’ rivelato particolarmente e forse inaspettatamente fruttuoso su PsyPolitics.
Il significato politico delle sostanze allucinogene venne messo in chiaro dallo psichiatra britannico Osmond da subito, proprio nel saggio in cui proponeva il termine ‘psichedelico’. Quindi sia ‘cibernetica’ che ‘psichedelico’ sono espressioni con una chiara origine politica.
Bentham, il giursta e filosofo dell’utilitarismo, fondatore di University College London (UCL) ideo’ sia il temine “patologia psicologica” sia il panopticon. Inoltre sviluppo’ diversi temi chiave che si ritroveranno successivamente in Freud. Come scritto su PsyPolitics nel 2020 (enfasi aggiunta): “È interessante notare come Bentham, che coniò l’espressione “patologia psicologica” – e riteneva che ogni comportamento umano fosse motivato da “dinamiche psicologiche” rivelate o nascoste, a loro volta fondate in modo cruciale sulla “patologia psicologica” – fosse anche l’inventore dell’idea del panopticon. Un’associazione (Bentham inventore sia della “patologia psicologica” che del panopticon) che nell’odierno capitalismo psichiatrico della sorveglianza merita ulteriori studi e riflessioni. Per quanto ne so, l’ideazione di entrambi i concetti da parte di Bentham viene qui notata per la prima volta in relazione agli attuali fenomeni del capitalismo della sorveglianza e della psichiatrizzazione della società.”
Partendo dal modello della mente che Freud propose durante l’ultima parte della sua vita (tripartito in id / es, ego e super-ego) vede la dissoluzione della parte razionale e autonoma della mente civilizzata che interagisce con il mondo esterno attraverso i sensi, il cosiddetto ego, nel contesto della falsa contrapposizione tra il super-ego della cieca obbedienza veicolata sempre piu’ dalle tecnologie ‘cyber’ di sorveglianza digitale vs. l’id o es selvaggio in cui risiedono le energie psichiche fondamentali legate alla sessualita’ e all’aggressivita’, una dimensione quest’ultima che dovrebbe adesso essere – in chiave ‘psichedelica’ appunto – “liberata” anche attraverso l’uso di sostanze allucinogene.
Sostanze psicotrope che alterano profondamente il senso della realta’ e che verranno proposte sul mercato e in una sorprendente inversione promosse attivamente dal capitalismo – non piu’ meramente contenute anche tramite la retorica della “riduzione del danno” – come sostanze per uso medico o meno, ma da provare comunque anche una volta sola, per le masse.
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Nuovi concetti introdotti su PsyPolitics includono [1] l’origine storica ampiamente politica e rivoluzionaria della disciplina della psichiatria, tesi avanzata qui per la prima volta e suggerita nel 2019 a Londra; [2]l’antipolitica contemporanea come spostamento del focus del discorso – e quindi anche delle cause su cui intervenire – dal fuori al dentro, dalla polis alla psiche; e [3]la trasformazione generale da cittadini a pazienti e la risultante depoliticizzazione della cittadinanza, tesi formulate gia’ in questi termini nel 2019 a Londra, e seguite per esempio nel 2020 e 2021 da affermazioni come quella del direttore della rivista medica britannica The Lancet secondo cui “verremo trasformati in cittadini biopolitici”.
Le origini politiche e rivoluzionarie della psichiatria sono state presentate, per quanto ne so come tali per la prima volta: la psichiatria è nata rivoluzionaria. Emblematici in tal senso furono i casi di Rush in America e di Pinel in Francia; considerati rispettivamente il fondatore della psichiatria statunitense (sul simbolo dell’American Psychiatric Association per quasi un secolo e su ogni copia del DSM, la cosiddetta “bibbia” della psichiatria, fino ad oggi) e la figura fondatrice della psichiatria tout court, rispettivamente.
“La politica e’ un movimento da dentro a fuori, mentre l’anti-politica che vorrebbe sostituire alla politica il discorso tecnocratico, nelle varianti organicista / medica e spiritualista / mistica, e’ un movimento da fuori a dentro. Dalla polis alla psiche.
Ovvero l’anti-politica come una sostanziale e poderosa regressione della civilizzazione umana cosi’ come si e’ svolta storicamente sino ai nostri giorni.
Ci troviamo dunque, secondo la mia ipotesi di lavoro, in una fase di inversione dell’ “immane trapasso” hegeliano che ha comportato la creazione delle istituzioni politiche e giuridiche europee nel corso della storia.”
Queste foto storiche sono state poi riprese da siti italiani e anche da storici popolari come divulgatori TV e Web. Si e’ persino parlato in relazione a temi quali Rivoluzione francese, Napoleone, e Rivoluzione d’ottobre dell’importanza di discutere di argomenti storici cruciali in quanto questo sarebbe “fondamentale per la sanita’ mentale della nostra civilta'”.
Un articolo che riguardava Bogdanov pubblicato inizialmente il 15 marzo 2020 quando ancora non si parlava di questi temi e che riguardava anche il “fenotipo digitale” e la “diagnosi digitale per i cittadini” – tema di cui si e’ iniziato a parlare qui in questi termini – si concludeva cosi’: “Il rischio reale è politico e democratico. Ovvero che un tale nuovo contesto tecnico “clinico” si estenda a tutta la società, aggirando efficacemente i diritti e le garanzie legali e costituzionali dei cittadini.”
Lenin gioca a scacchi con Bogdanov durante una visita alla villa di Gorky a Capri, in Italia, nel 1908
Si puo’ considerare a suo modo una scoperta anche il fatto che una delle piu’ famose distopie del secolo scorso, Il Mondo Nuovo di Huxley del 1932 si apra con una citazione dell’uomo – Berdyaev– che descrisse come lo psichiatra bolscevico Bogdanov trattasse surrettiziamente con modalita’ psichiatriche le idee metafisiche dello stesso filosofo Berdyaev. Su PsyPolitics e’ stato quindi notato per la prima volta come il Mondo Nuovo di Huxley si apra con l’epigrafe di uno psichiatrizzato eccellente.
Cosi’ come sono state ribadite le letture e gli scritti a carattere psicoanalitico e psicologico, rispettivamente, all’origine delle concezioni dei due principali economisti del XX secolo ovvero Keynese Hayek. Di Hayek si e’ messa in evidenza forse per la prima volta con questo taglio la sua connessione con una figura chiave per le origini di quella che diventera’ la sottocultura cyber-psichedelica ovvero lo psicologo sperimentale Klüver. Klüver scrisse ripetutamente negli anni su mescalina e allucinazioni, fu una delle figure centrali delle conferenze Macy sulla cibernetica, e fece una introduzione alla prima edizione del 1952 del saggio di psicologia di Hayek ‘L’ordine sensoriale’.
A proposito del rapporto tra economia e psicologia fu Huxley a scrivere nel suo libro Oltre la baia del Messico (1934, enfasi aggiunta):
“Il problema fondamentale della politica internazionale e’ psicologico.
I problemi economici sono secondari e se non fosse per i problemi psicologici non esisterebbero.
Quale e’ l’uso di una conferenza per il disarmo o di una World Economic Conference fino a quando i popoli di ciascuna nazione sono incoraggiati deliberatamente dai loro leaders a indulgere in orge di solidarieta’ di gruppo basata su, e in combinazione con, l’auto-congratulazione e l’odio sprezzante per gli stranieri?
Abbiamo bisogno piuttosto di una World Psychological Conference, alla quale esperti di propaganda decidano le culture emotive da permettere e incoraggiare in ciascuno stato e le mitologie e filosofie appropriate per accompagnare queste culture emotive.”
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Per la prima volta i due medici, Reil e Beyer, che coniarono le parole ‘psichiatria’ e ‘antipsichiatria’, rispettivamente, sono stati presentati insieme attraverso due ritratti. Il titolo dell’articolo “Psichiatria e antipsichiatria” riprende quello del libro dello psichiatra Cooper il quale ufficialmente invento’, ma in realta’ re-invento’ o comunque ri-propose, la parola ‘antipsichiatria’. Come piu’ tardi fara’ Freud, dal quale il termine ‘psicoanalisi’, nella foto con i suoi sei principali collaboratori – questa osservazione viene fatta qui per la prima volta – anche nei due ritratti di Reil e Beyer si puo’ forse ravvisare il dito indice che punta verso il basso.
Secondo il sito web della Harvard University Press “fu durante il [suo] soggiorno a Monaco che l’enorme interesse e il sostegno di Loeb [James, parente di Harod, ndr] per le istituzioni mediche e psichiatriche divenne evidente. All’inizio del 1900 soggiornò per qualche tempo a Vienna con Sigmund Freud, che lo raccomandò a Emil Kraepelin a Monaco di Baviera. La sua associazione con Kraepelin ha portato alla fondazione della Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie a Monaco di Baviera. Questo istituto di ricerca tedesco per la psichiatria ha ricevuto la più grande beneficenza combinata da Loeb: un milione di marchi per stabilirlo, ulteriori doni fino alla sua morte e un milione di dollari alla sua morte.”
Un vecchio dibattito televisivo americano degli anni ’60 – che probabilmente in un altro periodo storico sarebbe apparso irrilevante o semplicemente curioso – e’ stato integralmente trascritto e analizzato anche per fotogrammi, dibattito che presenta con rara chiarezza alcuni dei punti salienti nel conflitto tra legge costituzionale, potere politico e psichiatria, entrando anche sul tema dell’infezione contagiosa, il cittadino infetto che “si crede Napoleone” e toccando temi quali l’inquinamento, la cannabis e l’LSD.
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PsyPolitics ha anche riscoperto e proposto – presentando ampi stralci – alcuni vecchi libri. Un testo riscoperto – dimenticato e assente dal dibattito pubblico – e’ stato il saggio utopico ‘Codice della Natura’ di Morelly del 1755, un testo che puo’ oggi essere visto come utopia proto-comunista e parte di un milieu culturale psichiatrizzante, vista la ricchezza di terminologia psicologica in questo caso spesso offensiva.
Nel suo “L’antico regime e la Rivoluzione” (1856), De Toqueville scrive (enfasi aggiunta): “Si ritiene generalmente che le teorie distruttive conosciute con il nome di socialismo siano di origine moderna. Questo è un errore. Queste teorie sono coeve ai primi economisti. Mentre alcuni di loro volevano usare il potere assoluto che volevano stabilire per cambiare le forme della società, altri proponevano di impiegarlo per rovinarne le basi fondamentali.
Leggete il Codice della Natura di Morelly – raccomandava De Toqueville – vi troverete, insieme alle dottrine economiste sull’onnipotenza e sui diritti sconfinati dello Stato, alcune di quelle teorie politiche che hanno terrorizzato la Francia degli ultimi anni, e la cui origine immaginiamo di aver visto in prima persona: comunità di proprietà, diritti del lavoro, eguaglianza assoluta, uniformità universale, regolarità meccanica dei movimenti individuali, regolamenti tirannici su tutte le materie e totale assorbimento dell’individuo nel corpo politico“.
Nell’abbozzo di costituzione presente nel ‘Codice della Natura’, nella parte sulle ‘leggi penali’ in una delle ultime pagine, si trova scritto che “chi avesse tentato, per cabala o altro, di abolire le sacre leggi, di introdurre la detestabile proprietà, dopo essere stato convinto e giudicato dal supremo senato, sarà rinchiuso a vita, come un pazzo furioso e nemico dell’umanità, in una grotta costruita, come è stato detto, legge edile XI, in luogo di pubbliche sepolture: il suo nome sarà cancellato per sempre dall’enumerazione dei cittadini”.
In questo testo proto-comunista e’ scritto esplicitamente: “sottomettetevi agli ordini e ai consigli di coloro ritenuti capaci di restaurare” le leggi della Natura. Quando le persone “acconsentiranno all’unanimità” a tali leggi di natura, leggi che ovviamente le persone non possono discutere ma devono solo accettare – secondo il “Codice della Natura” – il regime risultante si chiamerebbe “democrazia”.
L’origine del pensiero moderno di tipo rivoluzionario, socialista e comunista, e’ quindi sin dal principio estremamente verticale. Non orizzontale come invece riteputo in modo insistente e pressoche’ ubiquitario. Quindi, in questa luce, la verticalizzazione post-rivoluzionaria dei regimi politici che si rifanno al tipo di pensiero moderno socialista e comunista non dipende da utopie “orizzontali” che falliscono, che messe alla prova dei fatti o dell’applicazione concreta falliscono, come e’ stato invece ripetuto ad nauseam. Bensi’ dell’esito teorico esplicito dei principi e delle filosofie di fondo di tale pensiero rivoluzionario.
Ben quattordici articoli (‘Un soviet di tecnici… in America?”) sono stati scritti per analizzare questo testo fondamentale per capire la fase che stiamo attraversando dal 2020 e il contesto storico in cui venne scritto, incluso il fatto che la compagnia Kuhn Loeb & Co. che faceva capo alla famiglia di Loeb sia stata tra i principali finanziatori delle rivoluzioni russa del 1905 e bolscevica del 1917. Il testo, a mia conoscenza, non e’ mai stato tradotto in italiano quindi e’ risultato interamente nuovo al pubblico in Italia, per quanto commentato in lingua inglese, e gia’ in alcuni casi questo testo riscoperto su PsyPolitics e’ stato citato come conseguenza, entrando cosi’ nel dibattito pubblico per la prima volta.
Harold Loeb arrivava a preconizzare l’uso sistematico di “visioni mistiche” (testuale) legate alla “tensione estatica” in modo tale che cittadini spoliticizzati accettassero quanto accadeva all’esterno mentre attraverso queste visioni “riprodotte a volonta'” potevano conoscere o, come scrisse esplicitamente, “pensare di conoscere il significato della vita”.
Loeb sosteneva nel libro apertamente l’uso della psichiatria con funzione politica (enfasi aggiunta): “Come ultimo provvedimento il certificato energetico” – una misura che puo’ ricordare l’attuale sistema di “credito sociale” in Cina – “potrebbe essere annullato. Questa punizione dovrebbe rivelarsi efficace nella maggior parte dei casi. Qualora un individuo si dimostri ostinatamente recalcitrante per ragioni oscure, gli psichiatri proverebbero a risolvere il problema”.
Nel riferirsi all’atteggiamento degli statunitensi rispetto al capitalismo, usava la metafora della malattia e della negazione della malattia: “Gli americani, la loro fede nel capitalismo intatta, negano la malattia”. Il disprezzo della politica emerge con prepotenza: “L’unica funzione della politica convenzionale sarebbe quella di “spettacolo” per intrattenere il pubblico: “ricevere ospiti illustri, posare pietre angolari, fare discorsi sui diritti dell’uomo, sull’iniziativa americana, sulla giustizia. I suoi incarichi sarebbero elettivi, solleticando così l’ego di coloro a cui piace pensare di dirigere le cose. Pagliacci di spicco saranno, senza dubbio, eletti di frequente”. Sulla proprieta’: “L’uomo automaticamente attacca al suo ego elementi estranei e li chiama suoi”. Sulla democrazia: “Le alterazioni strutturali sono radicali ma semplici. In primo luogo, l’attuale tendenza a fondere le unità concorrenti in ciascun settore deve essere portata a compimento“. “I monopoli aziendali sarebbero il governo”. “Un sistema assolutamente antidemocratico!” Sui test sanitari: “Alcuni individui considerano l’esame sanitario periodico un’invasione dei loro diritti privati; ma tali invasioni non si risentono a lungo”. “È solo la diffidenza dei poveri, ai quali l’esperienza insegna a non aspettarsi alcun bene dall’ignoto, che li rende recalcitranti ai consigli medici”.“Con i medici che assumessero il ruolo intimo di consulenti familiari, i deficienti mentali verrebbero inevitabilmente riconosciuti. Se sospettati di tendenze pericolose, le loro abitudini verrebbero tenute sotto osservazione; quando necessario, le loro azioni contenute”. Sull’arte e le strettamente connesse psico-discipline: “L’uomo e il suo ambiente agiscono l’uno sull’altro. Entrambi sono alterati nel processo”. “Alcuni uomini lavorano sul mondo esterno. Il rimodellamento della crosta terrestre per renderla più congeniale alla vita umana e l’uso di materiali naturali per soddisfare i bisogni fisici sono funzioni degli uomini d’azione”. “Altri uomini rimodellano la natura umana. Il loro tentativo è di adattare l’uomo al suo ambiente e non viceversa. La trasmutazione della natura dell’uomo, lo sviluppo delle sue percezioni in modo che sia in grado di sintonizzarsi con quelle armonie interiori che danno valore alla vita, il digerire i fenomeni affinché invece della paura e del disgusto diano piacere“. “Per arte… intendo lo sviluppo di quelle facoltà mediante le quali l’uomo si adatta al suo ambiente”. Sulla necessita’ di lavorare sul dentro e non sul fuori: “L’energia umana, applicata alla ricerca di modi di vita che soddisfino, alla creazione di valori che elevino lo spirito, può migliorare la sorte dell’uomo sulla terra nella stessa sfera psichica interna, come il genio dell’uomo, diretto alla conquista del mondo materiale esterno, ha migliorato le condizioni della sua esistenza fisica”. “Una tecnocrazia cercherebbe di liberare quel grande surplus di energia vitale che ora si sta consumando, inutilmente, nel gioco degli affari, e reindirizzarlo verso canali inesplorati”. Sul disadattamento, auspicava un “lavoro di ricerca, diretto alla scoperta delle cause dei disadattamenti psichici“. Sulla tirannia: “A prima vista, la tirannia, a causa della tendenza umana ad ubriacarsi di potere, sembrerebbe una grave minaccia per la tecnocrazia. La nostra attuale costituzione è così preoccupata di difendersi da questa minaccia che l’azione esecutiva è fortemente ostacolata. In effetti, l’azione sarebbe quasi impossibile se ogni requisito legale fosse rispettato coscienziosamente. In una tecnocrazia non ci sarebbero controlli legali sulla tirannia”. Sui tabu’: “Ora che abbiamo imbrigliato il fulmine, frenato la peste e aggirato il diluvio, sembrerebbe ragionevole esaminare ancora una volta i tabù che originariamente erano destinati a propiziare una divinità terribile e capricciosa”.
Sull’ “Avvento della Tecnocrazia” (testuale) descritto in termini quasi messianici e sulla necessita’ di pianificare la rivoluzione, con relativa descrizione dei passi necessari da effettuare nella pianificazione della rivoluzione: “Probabilmente l’unico evento in grado di provocare un cambiamento così fondamentale sarebbe un grande collasso. Solo se l’attuale apparato di produzione e distribuzione dovesse definitivamente crollare, solo se la fame e il freddo dovessero spronare le menti della maggioranza della nazione a un’attività insolita, una rivoluzione in conflitto con quasi tutte le credenze attuali potrebbe prendere slancio“. “Dal momento che la rivoluzione non dovrebbe essere né desiderata né aspettata ora, e poiché la trasformazione dal capitalismo alla tecnocrazia è così drastica che alcune sue fasi saranno certamente considerate di natura rivoluzionaria, ci si può chiedere quali passi preliminari dovrebbero essere presi per prepararsi ai momenti cruciali”. “La rivoluzione, come dice Trotsky, può avvenire solo quando la classe al potere è sopravvissuta alla sua utilità e quindi è diventata marcia“. “Di conseguenza, il capitale è stato privato della sua funzione anche se la realizzazione di ciò potrebbe non filtrare immediatamente attraverso la coscienza di gruppo”.
Vita in una Tecnocrazia, di Harold Loeb. The Viking Press, New York 1933
‘Vita in una Tecnocrazia’ andrebbe tradotto e pubblicato in italiano, una proposta che ci si augura possa trovare un riscontro. Come ho avuto modo di scrivere, e’ ravvisabile nel testo una visione gnosticheggiante. A questo testo, e anche questa puo’ essere considerata a suo modo una scoperta, si puo’ a mio avviso far risalire l’idea che in anni piu’ recenti e’ stata formulata come ‘realismo capitalista’. Loeb scrisse nel 1933: “l’alternativa al capitalismo è così spaventosa da non poter essere nemmeno immaginata?”
Per quanto mi riguarda la ascoltai per la prima volta attraverso un documentario su Žižek al Brattle Theatre di Cambridge, Massachusetts circa quindici anni fa e poi dieci anni dopo in Gran Bretagna attraverso gli scritti di Mark Fisher – tra i teorizzatori importanti nel cosiddetto ‘comunismo acido’. Piu’ tardi un saggio utopico di per sé non originale a mio avviso ma che gia’ dal titolo riprende una idea sempre piu’ in voga oggi, ovvero Comunismo di Lusso Completamente Automatizzato (2018) di Bastani, testo che si avvicina piu’ volte ai tecnocrati degli anni ’20 e ’30 cosi’ come a Loeb in particolare senza tuttavia citarli esplicitamente.
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?
Su questa falsariga della lettura legata alla storia del movimento tecnocratico anche negli Stati Uniti tra le due guerre, in una intervista TV nel 2020 su “politica, linguaggio medico-psicologico e tecnocrazia” ribadivo quanto segue (enfasi aggiunta): “la tecnocrazia quindi il governo per così dire dei tecnici viene da lontano. Quindi nasce da, diciamo molte delle idee nascono all’inizio dell’ottocento con Saint-Simon. Poi la parola, nel 1919 un ingegnere americano pubblica anche un libro [o meglio un saggio, ndr], proprio Tecnocrazia, in cui viene data rilevanza per esempio all’importanza dell’automazione nella società e a un approccio di tipo proprio ingegneristico, di ingegneria sociale. Quindi non è inopportuno parlare di ingegneria sociale, questi erano ingegneri. Nel periodo tra le due guerre il movimento tecnocratico diventa molto importante anche negli Stati Uniti e quindi è un movimento in un certo senso anti-politico perché – ai tempi c’erano anche medici, c’erano proprio psichiatri, è una storia molto molto ben documentata diciamo – che si proponevano di, come dire, curare la società.”
Per chiarire come la combinazione di questi temi, del tutto inusuale fino al 2020, si stia affermando, basti guardare al titolo e alla descrizione di un nuovo corso dell’anno accademico 2021-2022 alla London School of Economics: Tecnocrazia, ingegneria sociale e politica nell’era delle guerre mondiali, 1914-1945. “Questo corso esplora il rapporto tra tecnocrazia, ingegneria sociale e politica nel periodo delle due guerre mondiali. La guerra industriale, i conflitti sociali e l’instabilità economica hanno portato scienziati ed esperti tecnici ad acquisire una forte influenza politica. L’emergere della tecnocrazia, tuttavia, ha significato più che trovare soluzioni “tecniche” ai problemi sociali ed economici. Era legato alla crisi fondamentale della democrazia parlamentare e alla comparsa di movimenti autoritari. Sia il regime fascista che quello socialista adottarono concetti tecnocratici per migliorare l’efficienza economica e controllare i conflitti sociali. Tuttavia, durante la Grande Depressione, i movimenti tecnocratici hanno guadagnato terreno anche nelle società democratiche, in particolare negli Stati Uniti durante il “New Deal”.
Entrambe le utopie sopramenzionate, il Codice della Natura del 1755 e Vita in una Tecnocrazia del 1933 – sino ad oggi assenti dal dibattito pubblico – sono stati trovati studiando le utopie, il primo in Utopianism, a very short introduction, OUP 2010 di Sargent e il secondo in Storia dell’Utopia, Edizioni Mediterranee 2002 di Servier.
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Ancora, su PsyPolitics si e’ parlato di un testo molto poco discusso per la sua importanza rispetto agli eventi attuali, soprattutto vista la trasformazione cyber-psichedelica del capitalismo, ovvero ‘Il Fenomeno Umano’ del prete gesuita De Chardin, del 1955, portandolo all’attenzione del pubblico italiano che segue il blog – per quanto l’articolo sia in inglese e non tradotto per adesso. Si e’ messa in evidenza anche la prefazione inglese al libro di Sir Julian Huxley, primo direttore UNESCO, fratello di Aldous Leonard Huxley e padre di Francis Huxley, questi due ultimi importanti nella storia degli allucinogeni in Occidente durante il secolo scorso. Francis Huxley e’ stato sino ad oggi semi-sconosciuto rispetto alla sua importanza, certamente in Italia ma in parte anche nel mondo anglofono. Il libro di De Chardin e’ stato trovato studiando Eric Voegelin e la rilevanza corrente di alcune sue considerazioni sul rapporto tra politica, scienza e l’eresia cristiana dello gnosticismo successivamente nelle sue possibili forme secolarizzate.
In ‘Tra due ere’ Brzezinski afferma: “Il nazionalismo personalizzo’ cosi’ tanto i sentimenti di comunita’, che la nazione divento’ un’estensione dell’ego”. Di cosa parlano oggi i promotori di allucinogeni per le masse? Come formulato a Londra 2019, i promotori di allucinogeni parlano proprio di “dissoluzione” o “morte dell’ego” psicoanalitico e quindi parlano come “globalisti”. Un evidente collegamento tra “rivoluzione individuale” della psiche o dello spririto e Rivoluzione Globalista politica.
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Infine, alcuni vecchi articoli sono stati ripubblicati. Dal sito de l’Occidentale, un articolo sulla Rivoluzione Ultima di Huxley legato al tema degli allucinogeni e alla loro dimensione politica e una recensione del film hollywoodiano Joker, intitolata “Benvenuti nell’era della psichiatria politica globale”. Anche questa del 2019 con uno pseudonimo, con taglio fortemente psico-politico e un richiamo conclusivo esplicito alla “Rivoluzione Globalista prossima ventura”. E dal blog della rivista mensile OK La salute prima di tutto – della Rizzoli Corriere della Sera, RCS – su temi quali la storia della cocaina in medicina o l’epidemia della diagnosi psichiatrica chiamata ADHD nel baseball statunitense.
Oltre alla recensione di Joker, il film Indagine di Petri del 1970 e’ stato recensito a mezzo secolo dall’uscita e si e’ proposta la categoria di cinema psico-politico per caratterizzare questo come altri film, per esempio della stagione del cinema politco italiano degli anni ’70.
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La sezione delle News, che meriterebbe una discussione a parte, ha permesso di porre all’attenzione l’emergente quadro di psichiatrizzazione della societa’ e della politica cosi’ come prefigurato a Londra nel 2019. I lettori di PsyPolitics sono invitati a provare a consultarla regolarmente a meta’ pagina.
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Articoli e temi apparsi su PsyPolitics hanno riscosso interesse sulla stampa nazionale italiana, su il Giornale.it in due occasioni ma anche su altri blog, si pensi solo al sito internazionale basato in Australia Foucault News, che ha ripreso articoli pubblicati da PsyPolitics – inclusi due prima dell’apertura formale a giugno 2020 – per otto volte in meno di due anni, e in TV con dueinterviste sul digitale terrestre della Toscana a 50Canale.
Riuscendo nei primi mesi di pubblicazione anche a mettere a segno due scoop giornalistici per l’Italia: la quotazione in borsa al Nasdaq della prima compagnia di allucinogeni quotata al mondo, Compass Pathways – nemmeno ilSole24Ore, quotidiano di Confindustria, diede la notizia – e il fatto che Zuckerberg, ufficialmente fondatore e proprietario del sito Facebook, abbia personalmente finanziato la riuscita campagna per la depenalizzazione praticamente di tutte le droghe, incluse quelle allucinogene, nello stato americano dell’ Oregon. A questo si aggiungeva la notizia clamorosa ma data con scarsissima enfasi sui media del referendum che nella capitale degli Stati Uniti d’America, Washington D.C., depenalizzava l’uso di piante e funghi allucinogeni. Notizie di grande rilievo ma ad oggi ancora poco circolate e conosciute.
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Sono troppi i ringraziamenti che dovrei fare, poiche’ nessun lavoro e’ mai meramente individuale. Chi ha interagito con me in questi anni ha piu’ o meno consapevolmente contribuito a questo lavoro e quindi a ciascuno va il mio piu’ sentito grazie.
Molto resta da fare e tanti temi di grande rilevanza in una societa’ sempre piu’ globalizzata e psichiatrizzata – entrambi fenomeni in cui il digitale gioca un ruolo chiave – attendono tempo e lavoro dedicati. Ad esempio temi quali il rapporto tra nascita della psichiatria e rivoluzioni politiche, oppure quello tra psicologia industriale, automazione e psichiatria di comunita’. Mentre negli anni ’70 in Italia si parlava della Costituzione che doveva entrare in fabbrica, adesso stiamo assistendo al processo inverso per il quale la fabbrica entra nella Costituzione, ovvero i processi sperimentati in fabbrica per il controllo dei lavoratori sono sempre piu’ applicati alla societa’ nel suo complesso arrivando ad aggirare e superare diritti e doveri sanciti nelle costituzioni scritte, fondamento dei moderni stati-nazione.
Ci sono anche rimasti diversi video ancora da trascrivere, incluso quello di Londra 2019, quello del seminario universitario online sul rapporto tra legge e tecniche anche mediche e psicologiche del maggio 2020, e la seconda intervista TV del 2020. Cosi’ come ci sono rimasti alcuni libri da recensire usciti durante l’anno passato. Il tema della follia e della salute mentale sta esplodendo anche in riferimento piu’ o meno diretto alla dimensione politica e le pubblicazioni relative, che talora lasciano a desiderare in quanto ad accuratezza o comprensione dei fenomeni descritti, iniziano ad essere cosi’ frequenti da far diventare difficile anche solo sapere delle piu’ importanti. Come gia’ accaduto, segnalazioni anche di libri da leggere ed eventualmente da recensire, saranno certamente le benvenute.
E’ possibile capire la caotica politica contemporanea attraverso lo studio della storia della psichiatria e delle psicodiscipline? La domanda, apparentemente forse assurda, a mio avviso ha una risposta affermativa. PsyPolitics cerca di rispondere a questa domanda. La tesi di fondo e’ che in una societa’ che viene sempre piu’ psichiatrizzata lo studio della storia delle psicodiscipline e’ infatti una delle chiavi di lettura fondamentali.
Individuare, articolare e discutere le radici profondamente politiche delle psicodiscipline resta una esigenza urgente in una fase di Rivoluzione Globalista dai risvolti sempre piu’ chiaramente tecnocratici e totalitari, una prospettiva che per prima e’ stata presentata proprio su PsyPolitics e a Londra nell’estate del 2019, quindi in assenza di pandemia virale.
La tendenza asintotica pare essere verso una “matrix” (matrice, termine usato anche da Huxely nell’utopia sotto forma di racconto del 1962 L’isola, osservazione che si fa qui per la prima volta) cyber-psichedelica, ovvero allucinogena e cibernetica – con digitale e virtuale – che si avvale delle infrastrutture digitali e delle tecnologie invasive e pervasive emerse negli anni precedenti il 2020, pronte e prepotentemente impostesi durante e dopo lo scoppio della pandemia globale.
C’e’ chi ha parlato anche in Italia di fine della globalizzazione ignorando come si sia invece passati alla ben piu’ radicale globalizzazione digitale.
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 – come sosteneva ad esempio il guru dell’LSD, lo psicologo Leary – 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 letteralmente allucinogena. I concetti di schiavitu’ e di liberta’ vengono cosi’ invertiti. L’unica liberta’ sarebbe quella collettiva in questo contesto e non piu’ quella dell’individuo autonomo.
Dal paradigma individualista in cui la liberta’ del cittadino nel mondo esterno – nei limiti della legge morale e della legge codificata – e’ il valore supremo, lo stesso capitalismo si sta trasformando adottando un paradigma collettivista in cui la liberta’ individuale e’ rappresentata come negativa in quanto rischiosa per sé e per gli altri (un leitmotivpsichiatrico) e l’unica vera liberta’ si troverebbe in sé stessi, dovendo quindi effettuare una “rivoluzione individuale”, e nel collettivo sempre piu’ digitalizzato.
Il cittadino non sarebbe piu’ neanche primariamente sovrano non solo sul proprio territorio ma persino sul proprio corpo, il quale essendo rappresentato come una cellula dell’organismo collettivo, diventerebbe in questo modo il corpo di un paziente parte di un corpo collettivo asociale. In questo contesto e’ da notare la sempre piu’ frequente rappresentazione sui media della societa’ come organismo, prima in senso metaforico e poi sempre piu’ letterale, quindi bisognosa non piu’ tanto di politiche anche economiche o fiscali quanto di “cure” (es. decreto “Cura Italia”) da parte di dottori e psico-esperti.
La societa’ che ampiamente si autoregolava – anche in economia ad esempio attraverso il sistema dei prezzi – verrebbe regolata sempre piu’ da un “sistema nervoso” digitale, dovendo ogni “cellula” ricevere input dal “cervello” di una ristrettissima cerchia di filosofi-scienziati forse in modo non troppo dissimile dalla Repubblica di Platone, da un soviet o da un Comitato Tecnico Scientifico.
PsyPolitics intende continuare nell’analisi dei prepotenti fenomeni politici oggi in corso.
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“Nel firmamento della beatitudine e della comprensione, come pipistrelli contro il tramonto, c’era un selvaggio incrociarsi di nozioni ricordate e postumi di sentimenti passati. Pensieri pipistrelli di Plotino e degli gnostici, dell’Uno e delle sue emanazioni, giù, giù nell’orrore più fitto. E poi sentimenti di rabbia e disgusto da pipistrello, mentre gli orrori si infittivano diventavano ricordi specifici di ciò che William Asquith Farnaby, essenzialmente inesistente, aveva visto e fatto, inflitto e sofferto.
Ma dietro e intorno e in qualche modo anche all’interno di quei tremolanti ricordi c’era il firmamento della beatitudine, della pace e della comprensione. Potrebbero esserci alcuni pipistrelli nel cielo al tramonto; ma restava il fatto che il terribile miracolo della creazione era stato capovolto. Da un sé preternaturalmente miserabile e delinquente era stato disfatto in mente pura, mente nel suo stato naturale, illimitata, indifferenziata, luminosamente beata, comprensione inconsapevole…
L’illuminazione interiore è stata inghiottita da un altro tipo di luce. La fontana delle forme, i globi colorati nelle loro disposizioni consapevoli e i reticoli volutamente mutevoli hanno dato luogo a una composizione statica di montanti e diagonali, di piani piatti e cilindri curvi, tutti scolpiti in un materiale che sembrava agata vivente, e tutti emergenti da una matrice di madreperla viva e pulsante.
Come un cieco appena guarito e di fronte per la prima volta al mistero della luce e del colore, guardava con stupore incomprensibile.”
Questo articolo si propone di introdurre i termini – e relativi concetti – di psicopolitica e psypolitics.
Come scritto in precedenza sul blog PsyPolitics, la psicologia politica applica le conoscenze acquisite attraverso la ricerca in psicologia alla comprensione dei fenomeni politici, quindi si puo’ affermare che psicologizzi la ricerca nell’ambito delle scienze politiche.
Al contrario, quando si parla di bio-politica (per esempio M. Foucault) o di psico-politica (termine di uso non comune e di incerta definizione) si tende a fare un’operazione in un certo senso opposta, ovvero si politicizzano i provvedimenti e le pratiche che fanno riferimento alla salute fisica e/o mentale della popolazione.
Nel primo caso, quello della psicologia politica, si usa la visuale psicologica per studiare i fenomeni politici, sopratutto in un ambito di studio e ricerca.
Nel secondo caso, quello della biopolitica, si usa la visuale politica per studiare i fenomeni relativi a provvedimenti e pratiche per la salute fisica e/o mentale della popolazione.
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Al giorno d’oggi, durante l’ultimo anno e mezzo, autori senza alcuna familiarità con il lavoro e le idee dell’autore francese Michel Foucault hanno iniziato a parlare – a causa della pandemia di coronavirus e soprattutto dei media e delle risposte dei governi a questa pandemia – di biopolitica. Un concetto che è stato menzionato da autori prima di Foucault ma che egli sviluppo’ nei suoi cicli di lezioni Bisogna difendere la società del 1975-76 e successivamente Nascita della biopolitica del 1978-79.
È importante sottolineare – e questo è notevole a mio avviso – che inizialmente durante la sua carriera accademica Foucault lavoro’ sulla psicologia e sulla psichiatria. In effetti, le sue primissime pubblicazioni furono Malattia mentale e personalita’ (Maladie mentale et Personnalité, 1954) e Follia e Sragione – Storia della follia nell’età classica (Folie et Déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961).
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In questo articolo – parte di un work-in-progress – si sostiene che per riferirsi in ambito biopolitico all’aspetto mentale e delle discipline cosiddette ‘psi’, in inglese il temine psypolitics e’ da preferire al precedentemente e sporadicamente usato psychopolitics. In italiano il termine psicopolitica appare sufficientemente adeguato.
I termini nuovi si possono prestare a problemi di svariato tipo, forse soprattutto in un periodo storico come quello attuale che vede il proliferare continuo e pluriquotidiano di nuovi termini anche in lingue diverse dalla propria – primariamente l’inglese. Uno degli effetti che talora termini nuovi possono generare e’ quello di non mostrare la genealogia dei concetti che si vorrebbero veicolare. Quindi sara’ importante rendere il piu’ esplicita possible l’origine dei concetti alla base di un nuovo termine e spigare in dettaglio come il temine proposto sia scelto.
In inglese il temine proposto e’ ‘psypolitics’ mentre in Italiano e’ ‘psicopolitica’.
Psypolitics e’ un termine che intende essere del tutto nuovo. Precedenti usi sporadici possono essere anche presi in considerazione in quanto ad analisi storica dell’uso di questa locuzione, per esempio sul Web, ad ogni modo non hanno influenzato la scelta e la proposta del termine. Psypolitics include in parte e intende superare il vecchio termine – psychopolitics, usato in diversi e disparati contesti – e certamente si rifa’ anche alla dimensione biopolitica cosi’ come per esempio sviluppata da Foucault.
In inglese il termine psycho ha una connotazione negativa, essendo legato alla psicopatia. Inoltre psycho, mentre corrisponde alla parte iniziale dei termini psychology e psychoanalysis (ma non psychanalysis) e anche psychotherapy e psychopharmacology, non corrisponde esattamente a termini quali psychiatry o anche il sempre piu’ rilevante psychedelic. Inoltre esiste gia’ nel mondo anglofono l’espressione ‘psy disciplines’ per delineare le varie discipline che si occupano a vario titolo della psiche. L’uso di psy – piu’ semplice e inclusivo di psycho e anche piu’ in linea con il diffuso prefisso bio di biopolitics – puo’ apparire preferibile.
Il termine in Italiano – psicopolitica – non e’ del tutto nuovo ma appare comunque la scelta migliore: psi-politica non suona bene, visto che psi non si usa come invece bio (per esempio c’e’ la bio-logia non la psi-logia) e il prefissoide psico in italiano non denota psicopatia (se sei escludono alcune recenti eccezioni, probabilmente mutuate dall’uso in inglese) come invece il temine psycho in inglese (si pensi anche soltanto al film Psycho di Hitchcock del 1960 o al romanzo American Psycho di Ellis del 1991). Naturalmente non corrisponde perfettamente con termini quali psichiatria o psichedelico, corrispondendo invece con psicologia, psicoanalisi (ma non psicanalisi), psicofarmacologia e psicoterapia.
Mentre in passato si e’ usato il termine biopolitica per includere sia gli aspetti bio che in parte quelli psico, oggi appare opportuno per svariate ragioni usare un temine dedicato all’aspetto mentale e delle discipline pertinenti.
C’e’ chi ha parlato – in relazione a un aspetto forse piu’ generale ma sicuramente meno tecnico – di politiche dello spirito o del pneuma, ma questo per quanto sia un aspetto correlato alla psiche non e’ legato alla dimensione tecnica delle psicodiscipline. Le psicodiscipline sono talvolta presentate, soprattutto da chi propugna una loro espansione a tutta la societa’ – oggi molto in voga – in contrapposizione alla tecnica, ma questa appare come una posizione difficile da sostenere e in un certo senso sconfinante nella dimensione spirituale. Le psicodiscipline – incluse le relative pratiche professionali come ad esempio le psicoterapie – sono tecniche.
Questo articolo sostiene dunque la necessita’ di lavorare a una definizione e articolazione dello studio delle politiche della psiche e delle psicodiscipline, un nuovo ambito disciplinare per il quale qui si propongono i termini ‘psypolitics’ in inglese e ‘psicopolitica’ in italiano.
E’ interessante notare come diversi autori abbiano in precedenza scritto sia di psychopolitics (es. Greenblatt negli Stati Uniti) sia di psicopolitica (es. De Marchi in Italia), addirittura come se fossero i primi ad aver sviluppato questi concetti, senza tuttavia che tali proponimenti, anche da parte di personaggi molto in vista sotto il profilo accademico o medico, abbiano portato a ulteriori sviluppi di una disciplina. E’ possible che il tema della psicopolitica sia cosi’ delicato e sensibile al punto di far preferire di non affrontarlo in modo sistematico o esplicito, per esempio in ambito universitario?
In questa ottica sara’ anche necessario effettuare uno studio genealogico, filologico e storico sia dei termini sia dei concetti precedentemente usati quali ‘psychopolitics’ in inglese e ‘psicopolitica’ in Italiano.
Il temine biopolitica fu usato dallo scienziato politico, statistico, geografo e politico svedese Rudolf Kjellén. Egli uso’ anche il termine geopolitica ed e’ considerato tra i padri fondatori della disciplina che porta questo nome. In Le grandi potenze di oggi (1905) introdusse il termine biopolitica nella sua opera e piu’ tardi il suo Lo Stato come forma di vita (1916) contribui’ allo sviluppo e diffusione del termine: nelle sue intenzioni doveva delinare una nuova disciplina che lui “battezzava” (sic) con il nome di biopolitica.
Il primo uso a cui si puo’ risalire del termine psicopolitica fu del giurista tedesco esperto di diritto internazionale Heinrich Rogge in La psicopolitica e il problema del leader (Psychopolitik und Führerproblem, 1925). La prominenza di Rogge e’ testimoniata anche dalle recensioni che almeno dal 1934 al 1937 i suoi scritti su Hitler e sulla prospettiva della pace in Europa ottennero sulla rivista Foreign Affairs, dello statunitense Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
