Page 9 – PsyPolitics

The economics of ‘ego death’ (2020)

Psychodynamic energy sources and the cyber-psychedelic transformation of 21st century capitalism

by Federico Soldani – 24th Oct 2020

Does the ongoing massive digital transformation of the economy carry major implications for the human mind?

The now obvious cyber transformation is increasingly associated, according to the ‘CyPsy’ hypothesis on the mind formulated in these pages, with the so far underrecognized and understudied psychedelic turn in 21st century capitalism.

Of course, the most obvious implication would be about possible psychological effects on citizens / consumers turned patients of such epoch defining post-industrial shift.

However, there is another, more fundamental aspect that is usually not dealt with: which is how the digital economy, in order to optimize profits, takes advantage of the human mind as we conceive it, hence transforming the mind deeply, purposefully as well as de facto, for reasons related to its own cybernetic functioning.

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‘Ego dissolution’ in cyber-psychedelic capitalism

Among the many different perspectives from which such major transformation of capitalism can be observed and analyzed, here it is taken the vantage point of the mind as conceived in psychoanalysis, primarily by Sigmund Freud.

Attention is focused on the effects of “ego dissolution” or “ego death,” a concept which is an essential part of the current rhetoric of mass hallucinogens and so-called Psychedelic Renaissance in the context of the deep transformations associated with cyber-psychedelic capitalism.

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What is the psychoanalytical ego?

Characteristics of the ego, according to Katz, Goldstein and Dershowitz in Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Law (1967), are: [1] consciousness; [2] sense perception; [3] the perception and expression of affect; [4] thought; [5] control of motor action; [6] memory; [7] language; [8] defense mechanisms and defense activity in general; [9] control, regulation, binding of instinctual energy; [10] the integrative and harmonizing function; [11] reality testing; and [12] the capacity to inhibit or suspend the operation of any of these functions and to regress to a primitive level of functioning. “Thought processes of the ego vary from logical, realistic, problem-solving to unrealistic, nonverbal daydreaming.”

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“From atoms to bits”

As the economy shifts “from atoms to bits”, as MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte famously proclaimed in his Being Digital (1995), especially in the presently accelerated context of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the economy and the price system that is meant to transmit economic information efficiently become increasingly digitalized and there is even discussion of digital currencies, usually referred to as cryptocurrencies. As we move “from atoms to bits”, so-called financialization of the economy might increase its relevance as well.

Digital technologies by being invasive and pervasive capture to an unprecedented extent characteristics of our mind and behavior, personality, preferences, emotions and emotional reactions, etc. All these characteristics are captured as so-called big data and predictions are made accordingly and profits produced out of such data and predictions.

Physical movement as well as interactions with others in society, especially if direct and non mediated by digital technology, are increasingly unnecessary in a digital economy in which we rely on the knowledge of the surveillance apparatus of the digital panopticon and in which so-called “social distancing” (an oxymoron) is encouraged. Functions of our psychoanalytical ego such as control of motor action, thought, memory, language, sense perception, perception and expression of affect, integrative and harmonizing function, as well as reality testing are becoming less necessary over time.

In addition to digitalization capturing the mind for instance via big data and with the concomitant reduced need for physical mobility in the current automation revolution, during the past two decades, disciplines such as neuro-economics and neuro-marketing started digging in the consumer’s mind trying to understand behavior including unconscious characteristics captured through experiments, observational big data, and even studies using neuro-imaging.

At the same time, other characteristics of the psychoanalytical ego, such as defense mechanisms and defense activity in general, as well as control, regulation, binding of instinctual energy, and capacity to inhibit or suspend the operation of any of these [ego] functions and to regress to a primitive level of functioning become obstacles to the digital economy by inhibiting or delaying the main source of energy of the psyche which resides in the id.

Id which works automatically based on the pleasure principle and not, as the ego would do instead, on the reality principle.

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Cathexis, anti-cathexis, and 21st century “black gold”

As previously highlighted in these pages, Katz, Goldstein, and Dershowitz noted in their 1967 text how “from the economic standpoint psychoanalysis supposes that the mental representatives of the instincts have a charge (cathexis) of the definite quantities of energy, and that it is the purpose of the mental apparatus to hinder any damming-up of these energies and to keep as low as possible the total amount of the excitations with which it is loaded. The course of mental processes is automatically regulated by the ‘pleasure-unpleasure principle’; and unpleasure is thus in some way related to an increase of excitation and pleasure to a decrease. In the course of development the original pleasure principle undergoes a modification with reference to the external world, giving place to the “reality principle,” in accordance with which the mental apparatus learns to postpone the pleasure of satisfaction and to tolerate temporary feelings of unpleasure.“

Energy in the psyche is generated by the libido and love of aggression released through biological means called drives.

Cathexis and anticathexis are processes that control the id’s energy. Cathexis refers to the id’s dispersal of energy. Anticathexis or countercathexis refers to the energy used by the ego to bind the primitive impulses of the id, an example being repression.

As the id does not distinguish between reality and fantasy, it may act in ways that are unrealistic or not socially acceptable.

Similar to a steam engine, the libido’s cathexis builds up until it finds alternative outlets; this can lead to sublimation, reaction formation, or the construction of sometimes disabling psychopathological symptoms.

In delusions, the hypercathexis or over-charging of ideas previously dismissed as odd or eccentric produce such psychopathology.

As 21st century economy goes “from atoms to bits” and is increasingly dealing directly with the human mind via digital technologies and not anymore via society and its institutions, energy sources of the psyche become increasingly relevant as such in the post-industrial context, including the “economy” of such energy sources, as opposed to energy sources of the industrial age, which during the 20th century was eminently petroleum, oil. Oil has been traditionally referred to as “black gold.”

Is then the psychoanalytical unconscious the new “black gold” of 21st century cyber-psychedelic capitalism? And are the ego and its functions in the way between such energy sources and capitalism digital profits?

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Plato, Hegel, Freud, Keynes, Huxley, Brzezinski…

Similar to Plato‘s conception of the soul encompassing appetite, reason, and temper, Freud‘s model of the mind (his second topography, 1933) included id, ego, and super-ego.

The functions of the conscious ego are those associated with culture, traditions, languages, history, and human institutions such as religious, community, local, and crucially political and legal institutions. Psychoanalytical ego functions are essentially related with filtering out the energy of the id, as well as with the very concept of civilization, which took centuries of human cultural and institutional development. Such development took very different forms worldwide.

Indeed it was Hegel, in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), who talked about “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.”

As written in a previous article about Huxley’s Ultimate Revolution (2019) – of note, Huxley was connected to the Bloomsbury Group – “hallucinogenic substances that profoundly alter consciousness, thought, emotions, perceptions that inform us about both internal and surrounding reality, would be … a way towards enlightenment on the deeper and lower reality of matter. They would make us aware of the more animal, instinctive, individual reality, unfiltered by all mental functions in continuous interaction with the natural, social, familial, historical and cultural external environment of which each of us is the result.”

As highlighted elsewhere in these pages, “to govern globally, that is, on multiple territories and peoples (or imperially, an empire being the government over several territories and peoples) it is easier to act on what unites us all rather than on differences.” Biology, emotions and the psychoanalytical id appear then as most appropriate and energy efficient means for the purposes of a global digital capitalism.

According to Brzezinski, in his 1969-1970 book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which is about globalization, especially of the digital type which he called technetronic – a book full of psychological and psychoanalytical language – “nationalism so personalized community feelings, that the nation became an extension of the ego.” Ego dissolution and death, if we follow Brzezinski’s reasoning, would lead to going beyond the nation-state as it developed during the industrial age and as a result of the American and French revolutions, hence it would lead towards globalization.

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Psychoanalysis, back in fashion?

Psychoanalysis has been falling out of fashion since the 80s, which is at the time of the triumph of the phase of capitalism usually referred to as ‘neo-liberalism.’

Psychoanalysis however, founded by Sigmund Freud in Vienna, ended up being extremely influential in the Anglo-American world, as mentioned in another article, for instance in England in the Bloomsbury Group, which included the great 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, England.

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“Freudian theory of the love of money”

One of the major economists of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes was a key member of the Bloomsbury Group. Keynes read all of Freud’s works and his economic ideas were influenced in turn. In The Nation and Athenaeum he referred to Freud as “one of the great disturbing, innovative geniuses of our age.” See for instance, Winslow in his paper ‘Keynes and Freud: Psychoanalysis and Keynes’s Account of the “Animal Spirits” of Capitalism’, 1986. Winslow highlighted how Keynes seems to treat the money-motives as “furtive Freudian cloaks” for other “deeper and blinder” “vulgar passions” hidden beneath the surface (see A Treatise on Money, 1930).

According to Keynes “the essential characteristic of capitalism” is “the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine.” Keynes emphasized the role of the irrational in economic life and talked about “the Freudian theory of the love of money.”

Freud compared the id to a horse and the ego to a rider, with the energy of the horse in the end dominating. In The ego and the id (1923), Freud wrote: “The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. […] The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions […] in its relation to the id it is like a person on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with their own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces.”

Plato instead in the Phaedrus compared passions to winged horses, with a human charioteer “one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble.”

In what I call cyber-psychedelic capitalism, such dependence of capitalism on its essential characteristic, the Keynesian “money-loving instincts” or the “Freudian theory of the love of money” in Keynes words or, we could add, Plato’s “largest part in each person’s soul” “by nature most insatiable for money”, is increasingly direct and not mediated either by factors in the external world, including community, society, institutions and “intermediate bodies”, by law or politics, or by the mediating and filtering factor in the internal world, which in psychoanalytic terms is called “ego.”

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Ego-ism. Or id-ism?

Such psychoanalytical ego is increasingly presented in the predominant narrative in conjunction with egoism and the effects of mass egoism in the industrial age, for instance in terms of pollution of the environment; such egoism can indeed be seen as the id overriding the ego. The id overrides the ego, and as a result the ego is blamed when we talk of egoism. At one point an almost imperceptible shift happens, when the ego is not blamed anymore as a poor filter for the id, but as such.

Ego dissolution or death would obtain exactly the opposite of the initial intended purpose, which was to tame the id. We are blaming the ego as a poor dominator of the id, and by dissolving the ego and inviting the ego to die we let the id freer than it was before. Rather than ego-ism, in this light, the problem of the capitalist, industrial age might instead be called id-ism.

Plato talked about the concupiscent part of the soul that loves gain or money, the equivalent of the Freudian id. Plato also described this part of the soul effectively as unconscious and even talked about such component emerging during sleep in dreams with unacceptable content. Both of these issues are highlighted by Swiss psychiatrist Pavesi in his book Poco meno di un angelo (2016, Little less than an angel).

In the Republic, Plato talked about the content of dreams, when the rational component of the soul is asleep, describing what in the 20th century was called the unconscious and he even made reference to what we identify today as the Freudian “Oedipus complex”:

“Those that are awakened in sleep, when the rest of the soul – the rational, gentle, and ruling part – slumbers. Then the beastly and savage part, full of food and drink, casts off sleep and seeks to find a way to gratify itself. You know that there is nothing it won’t dare to do at such a time, free of all control by shame or reason. It doesn’t shrink from trying to have sex with mother, as it supposes, or with anyone else at will, whether another man, god, or beast. It will commit any foul murder, and there is no food it refuses to eat. In a word, it omits no act of folly or shamelessness. […] Our dreams make it clear that there is a dangerous, wild, and lawless form of desire in everyone, even in those of us who seem to be entirely moderate or measured.”

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“And ought not the rational principle, which is wise, and has the care of the whole soul, to rule, and the passionate or spirited principle to be the subject and ally?

Certainly.

And, as we were saying, the united influence of music and gymnastic will bring them into accord, nerving and sustaining the reason with noble words and lessons, and moderating and soothing and civilizing the wildness of passion by harmony and rhythm?

Quite true, he said.

And these two, thus nurtured and educated, and having learned truly to know their own functions, will rule over the concupiscent, which in each of us is the largest part of the soul and by nature most insatiable of gain; over this they will keep guard, lest, waxing great and strong with the fulness of bodily pleasures, as they are termed, the concupiscent soul, no longer confined to her own sphere, should attempt to enslave and rule those who are not her natural-born subjects, and overturn the whole life of man?

Very true, he said.”

Plato, Republic, Book IV

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(In the photo, from Wikipedia – accessed 24/10/2020 – Keynes (right) and the US representative Harry Dexter White at the inaugural meeting of the International Monetary Fund‘s Board of Governors in Savannah, Georgia in 1946)

“Semplicemente un simbolo di solidarietà nazionale, il primo passo prima d’indossare un’uniforme”. Orwell su civili e maschere antigas (2020)

di Federico Soldani – 11 Ottobre 2020

English

Il 25 giugno 1940 era in corso la Seconda Guerra Mondiale.

Eric Arthur Blair, meglio conosciuto come George Orwell, scrisse nei suoi diari un commento sui civili che indossavano maschere antigas durante la guerra. Si temeva che i raid aerei della Germania nazionalsocialista potessero fare uso di gas letale (alcune foto sotto, altre qui).

Pratica di evacuazione di una scuola a Kingston, Londra, dopo che una bomboletta di gas lacrimogeno è stata scaricata il 9 giugno 1941 (Parker / Fox Photos / Getty Images)

L’anno successivo Orwell iniziò a lavorare per la BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) come autore e conduttore, per la propaganda del servizio orientale per il subcontinente indiano, presso cui lavorò fino al 1943. All’epoca parlò di “due anni sprecati” in una lettera a Philip Rahv il 9 dicembre.

\George Orwell, fotografato al microfono della BBC nel 1943

Sua moglie Eileen O’Shaughnessy, una psicologa infantile (Master of Arts in Educational Psychology presso UCL, University College London), lavorava già all’epoca per il dipartimento della censura, a seconda della fonte o per il Ministero dell’informazione (MoI) o per il War Office di Whitehall, Londra (Orwell conferma questa seconda opzione in una lettera a Leonard Moore del 6 ottobre 1939; Diaries, ed. Peter Davison 2009).

Eric Blair / George Orwell si uni’ a BBC Eastern Service nel 1941
Il terzo da sinistra è TS Eliot con George Orwell dietro di lui.

Ecco l’estratto dai diari di Orwell in cui ebbe modo di riflettere sull’effettiva utilità delle maschere antigas rispetto al loro significato sociale, nazionale e simbolico, nonché sull’efficacia delle notizie di guerra sulla popolazione civile.

Registrazione di “Voice” in studio per la BBC Eastern Service
George Woodcock, Mulk Raj Anand, George Orwell, William Empson, Herbert Read e Edmund Blunden

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Diari di guerra di George Orwell, 25.6.40 (grassetto aggiunto)

Ho visto in uno dei giornali di ieri che le maschere antigas vengono distribuite in America, anche se le persone devono pagarle. Le maschere antigas sono probabilmente inutili per la popolazione civile in Inghilterra e quasi certamente anche in America. La loro distribuzione è semplicemente un simbolo di solidarietà nazionale, il primo passo prima d’indossare un’uniforme.

Non appena è scoppiata la guerra, portare o meno una maschera antigas ha assunto implicazioni sociali e politiche.

Costa meridionale dell’Inghilterra, 1940 circa (Agenzia fotografica generale / Getty Images)

Nei primi giorni le persone come me che si rifiutavano di portarne una venivano fissate per strada e generalmente si pensava che i non portatori fossero “di sinistra”.

Poi l’abitudine si ridusse e si presumeva che una persona che portava una maschera antigas fosse del tipo estremamente cauto, il tipo del contribuente suburbano. Con le cattive notizie l’abitudine è tornata e penso che ora il 20% le porti. Ma vieni ancora un po’ fissato se ne porti una senza essere in uniforme.

Fino a quando non si sono verificate le grandi incursioni e si è capito che i tedeschi in realtà non usano il gas, la misura in cui vengono portate con sé le maschere è probabilmente un buon indice dell’impressione che le notizie di guerra stanno facendo sul pubblico.

Un’esercitazione col gas per civili, utilizzando lacrimogeni, Kingston-On-Thames nel 1941 (Keystone / Getty Images)

Esercitazione col gas durante la seconda guerra mondiale a Southend il 29 marzo 1941 (Eric Harlow / Keystone / Getty Images)

‘CyPsy’ mind? Cyber super-ego and psychedelic id. Or digital surveillance, mass hallucinogens, and the new ‘black gold’ of the unconscious (2020)

by Federico Soldani – 17th Oct 2020

In this article, the hypothesis called CyPsy about the current transformation of the contemporary mind by capitalism is succinctly presented for the first time with this name and in its own right.

The basic idea was introduced for the first time in an online seminar in May this year.

The hypothesis about the current transformation of the mind by capitalism, here referred to as CyPsy mind, from the words cyber and psychedelic, is developed in some detail and further explained.

The association of these two words comes from the cyberdelic subculture, which I prefer to call for clarity, in a longer form, cyber-psychedelic.

Such subculture, of which former Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary became a guru, is about associating hallucinogens and digital technologies in various ways conceptually as well as practically (see, for instance, Leary’s 1990 From Psychedelics to Cybernetics, lecture tour or the Lecture at Sonoma State University in 1992 From LSD to Virtual Reality).

Leary went from the “turn on, tune in, drop out” psychedelic motto of the 60s to the cybernetic motto of the 90s “turn on, boot up, jack in” and famously proclaimed that the “PC is the LSD of the 1990s.”

When inviting young people to drop out in the 60s, including dropping out of politics, Leary said “don’t politic, don’t vote, these are old men’s games.” Of note, the average age of current 2020 U.S. presidential candidates Trump and Biden is above 75 years, two white men, including one of the oldest long-time politicians in Washington, for an electorate, the U.S. one, which is much younger, diverse, and famously seeks novelties.

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Sigmund Freud, *Entwurf einer Psychologie* (Project for a Scientific Psychology), manuscript of 1895. Sigmund Freud Collection, Library of Congress

Freud’s tripartite model of the human mind: id, ego, and super-ego

During the last part of his life, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, developed a tripartite conception of the mind, moving from the dichotomy conscious-unconscious to a model including three elements: [1] id or es, [2] ego, and [3] super-ego.

Psychoanalytical concepts about the mind, primarily Freudian and Jungian, have been extraordinarily influential in the Anglo-American world during the 20th century, see for instance the Bloomsbury Group in England (more here) and U.S. psychiatry and neurosciences.

“The mental apparatus” – Freud wrote – “is composed of an id which is the repository of the instinctual impulses, of an ego which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which has been modified by the influence of the external world, and of a superego which develops out of the id, dominates the ego, and represents the inhibitions of instinct that are characteristic of man.”

Contrary to the id, associated with passions, the ego represents reason and common sense; in Plato’s model of the soul what is called logistikon. Both the ego and reason go to sleep at night, when the unconscious id is left free in dreams, the normal man night-time equivalent of experiencing psychosis or delusions / hallucinations or madness during a time in which consciousness is disconnected from the external world.

The super-ego‘s function is one of internal surveillance and punishment.

The id, by being unconscious, can be seen from the point of view of the conscious ego as subject to automatic processes.

Sigmund Freud’s graph with second topography (Id, Ego and Super-Ego), published in 1933 in his “Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse”, Kapitel 31 (New Introductury Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, chapter 31)

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The ‘CyPsy’ hypothesis on the current transformation of the mind

In the CyPsy hypothesis on the mind here introduced, as the mind is currently transformed by cyber-psychedelic capitalism:

[A] the super-ego becomes largely externalized onto the surveillance digital system;

[B] the ego is dissolved via [1] technology in the digital collective, [2] drugs / pharmaceuticals (i.e., hallucinogens), and [3] modifications of cenesthesia related to a reduced need for human physical mobility (e.g., Japan’s hikikomori);

[C] the unconscious id becomes free of internal constraints, only to be regulated by the external substitution of the superego, which is the digital panopticon of surveillance capitalism making profits.

The internalized father-like law of the super-ego becomes external and digital and the ego is dissolved, which is the component that interacts with the external world.

This way the judiciary, either via codified or judicial law, which historically deals with external and objectified acts – not as much with thoughts, emotions or potential acts – based on the founding principles of Roman law and in the modern world on Motensquieu’s constitutional principles and balanced separation of powers in the external world, becomes increasingly unnecessary for social control or to make the consequences of human actions predictable.

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Economy of the psychoanalytical mind

In my view, it is revealing to read the classic text ‘Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Law’ published in 1967 and authored by the legal scholars Katz (Yale), Goldstein (Yale), and Dershowitz (Harvard).

Dershowitz has recently received public attention on TV and digital media as a legal consultant to the 45th U.S. President Donald J. Trump during the 2019-2020 impeachment trial. He has been involved in public exchanges this year with psychiatrists claiming that he and the President presented a contagious “shared psychosis,” among other psychological insults directed toward the President and himself. Dershowitz, one of U.S. most prominent legal scholars, complained in 2020 that such language was indicative of American citizens having become unable to discuss democratically about political divergences and complained about such “psychiatrization” of politics.

Katz, Goldstein, and Dershowitz noted in their 1967 text how “from the economic standpoint psychoanalysis supposes that the mental representatives of the instincts have a charge (cathexis) of the definite quantities of energy, and that it is the purpose of the mental apparatus to hinder any damming-up of these energies and to keep as low as possible the total amount of the excitations with which it is loaded. The course of mental processes is automatically regulated by the ‘pleasure-unpleasure principle’; and unpleasure is thus in some way related to an increase of excitation and pleasure to a decrease. In the course of development the original pleasure principle undergoes a modification with reference to the external world, giving place to the “reality principle,” in accordance with which the mental apparatus learns to postpone the pleasure of satisfaction and to tolerate temporary feelings of unpleasure.“

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Plato vs. Freud, models of the mind and of reality

Freud’s tripartite model of the human mind (id, ego, and super-ego) was in part similar to and overlapping with Plato’s conception of the soul (appetite, reason and temper).

With a few differences, including a fundamental difference about whether reality was the one perceived by the senses, Freud’s reality principle (the ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly as opposed to acting on the pleasure or pleasure-pain principle), or whether such reality was illusory, Plato’s Cave allegory, and only the world of ideas in the hyperuranion was indeed the ultimate reality.

Interestingly, Jungian psychology emphasizes, just like the current rhetoric of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance movement, the concept of ego-dissolution or ego death, which might be seen this way as embracing a conception of reality more in line with Plato than Freud. A man who had close interactions with both Jung and Leary was prominent Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, of whom we have already written in these pages.

The very concept of reality as the external world perceived by the senses is currently being challenged by neuroscientists who are changing the very definition of hallucinations. From the classic, textbook definition of hallucinations as “perception with no external stimulus / object,” still valid in psychiatry today, to the new idea of a control disfunction in our perceptions, which opens up the way to the disintegration of reality as we commonly conceive it at present.

See for instance 2019 Scientific American piece The Neuroscience of Reality. Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike, by Anil K. Seth of the University of Sussex, as opposed to 1977 Scientific American piece Hallucinations. These false perceptions, which can occur in any of the senses, turn out to be much alike from one person to another. Apparently they have their roots in excitations of the central nervous system, by Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA.

From the stable autonomous standard of ‘objective external’ reality (more democratic) to the stretchable, scientifically characterized, hence hierarchical standard of ‘control’ to define what reality ultimately is (less democratic).

A book has been recently published by a prominent neuroscientist in California and tellingly entitled The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes.

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Plato, then Jung, Murray… and Leary

Timothy Leary in The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964) (audiobook here), talks about the human eye as a “neurological camera”. As if evolution in the forest and the cave only gave us imperfect and quite primitive means to perceive the reality of the external world. This appears in line with Plato’s theory that we are trapped by our senses and that only by going beyond them we could liberate ourselves from the senses linking us to the cave of the external world and finally appreciate the ultimate reality, the one of pure ideas in what Plato called the hyperuranion.

“You will leave behind your ego, your beloved personality” – Leary said in the Psychedelic Experience – “the goal of this trip is ecstasy, to move outside of the boundaries of normal perception and consciousness into the far reaches of your nervous system” […] “beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.” [..] “A few who we call mystics, saints, or Buddhas have made this experience endure.” […] “All the dangers which you have feared are unnecessary productions of your own mind.” […] “With your ego left behind you, your brain can’t go wrong.” […] “In order for your consciousness to flow beyond the confines of the normal body ego, it is necessary to undo the bonds which chain you to the external world, to dissolve the imprints your neurological camera has been carrying around. In other words, it is necessary to eliminate five major obstacles to a peaceful dying of the ego: anxiety, desire, anger, doubt, and inertia.”

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Psychologist Leary inside, psychiatrist Bogdanov outside. Or chemical mysticism and technological harmony

With conceptions such as Leary’s, we ought to modify the internal world and put the ego peacefully to sleep permanently, which means with the unconscious id dominating what remains of the mind in a permanent sleep-like or dream-like state, possibly facilitated by hallucinogens.

The outside world must be left not to moral, social, legal or political means anymore but to an externalized super-ego via digital machines and algorithms, as psychiatrist and, along with Lenin, Bolshevism founder Alexander Bogdanov prefigured in his tektology, a science of general organization that was used for the USSR 5-year economic planning and is considered a precursor of systems theory and cybernetics, the basis of the current automation revolution now extended to the whole of society through the so-called Internet of Things.

According to Leary, who founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom, politics was not worth being interested in, as mentioned above, and was supposed to concern politicians only, not ordinary citizens.

Both law and politics would not appear to have a role in cyber-psychedelic capitalism.

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Bentham, Freud and Foucault: ‘psychological pathology’ and the ‘panopticon’. The asylum model expands to the world

Many of the ideas on which Freud based his creation, psychoanalysis, were indeed earlier expressed by English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, including: [1] pleasure and pain as the basis of all human behaviour; [2] determinism dominating psychological phenomena; [3] human impulses and motivations are overt as well as hidden; [4] hidden desires and motivations, especially of a sexual nature, are converted in other, more acceptable ones; and [5] in addition to the expression “psychological pathology” Bentham coined the concept and term of “psychological dynamics”.

The inventor of the panopticon, a type of prison in which minimal control was needed and in which the prisoner internalized the possibility of being constantly under surveillance, Bentham adapted the panopticon from the original prison project to the asylum for the mentally insane.

It is interesting to note how Bentham, who coined the expression “psychological pathology” and thought that all human behaviour was motivated by the person’s revealed or hidden “psychological dynamics”, in turn crucially based on “psychological pathology” was also the inventor of the idea of the panopticon. An association (Bentham being the inventor of both “psychological pathology” and of the panopticon) that in today’s psychiatricized surveillance capitalism is worth further study and reflection. To my knowledge, Bentham’s ideation of both concepts is noted here for the first time in relation to the current phenomena of surveillance capitalism and the psychiatrization of society.

Michel Foucault, who started his academic career by authoring Maladie mentale et Personnalité (1954) and later his Folie et Déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), in his famous book ‘Surveiller et Punir, Naissance de la Prison’ (1975) (translated in English as Discipline and Punish, the Birth of Prison, as apparently there was no word to translate properly the concept of ‘surveiller’, however one has been found recently for a Harvard professor’s book Surveillance Capitalism, almost half a century later) talked about Bentham’s panopticon and considered it conceptually as well as a metaphor for a certain manner of social control adopted in modern urbanized and industrialized societies.

Today’s society has been compared by many authors in recent years to a sort of digital panopticon.

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The new ‘black gold’ of the 21st century: digital profits from unconscious energy sources

In order to get to the new ‘black gold’, a fundamental energy source for the digital economy according to the CyPsy hypothesis here presented, capitalism must get rid of our civilized Freudian psychoanalytical ego, which remains in the way between digital profits and the sheer energy of our biological unconscious id.

Characteristics of the ego, according to Katz, Goldstein and Dershowitz (1967), are: [1] consciousness; [2] sense perception; [3] the perception and expression of affect; [4] thought; [5] control of motor action; [6] memory; [7] language; [8] defense mechanisms and defense activity in general; [9] control, regulation, binding of instinctual energy; [10] the integrative and harmonizing function; [11] reality testing; and [12] the capacity to inhibit or suspend the operation of any of these functions and to regress to a primitive level of functioning. “Thought processes of the ego vary from logical, realistic, problem-solving to unrealistic, nonverbal daydreaming.”

The new ‘black gold’ of the twenty-first century digital economy might be seen therefore as residing in our id or es, our lower, animal, instinctual component of the so-called drives, impulses and passions, sex and aggression.

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The false opposition of the ‘super-ego’ and ‘id’ narratives, and the common goal of ‘ego’ dissolution

Even in our current context of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and associated public measures taken by politics and publicized on the media, we find ourselves between two narratives, one that wants to survey and punish in a super-ego-like manner, Bogdanov style, not by chance using digital tracking technologies and claiming there is too much autonomy and individual freedom in the outside world (presented as too dangerous, complex and interconnected to leave to individual freedom), and the other one demanding total freedom, increasingly about the internal world, Leary style, including new freedoms such as so-called ‘freedom of consciousness’ or ‘decriminalization of nature’ via hallucinogens in an id-like manner.

Our conscious selves, or psychoanalytical egos, are stuck in the middle, presented with a false choice between two equally radical modalities working together for the same goal, inviting the ego to commit voluntary suicide for the greater good of the “planet” and of the “human race” as a whole in the name of the necessity for a mass ego-dissolution or ego-death, whether Jungian or more directly inspired by oriental philosophies.

In reality, a dissolution necessary, according to the CyPsy hypothesis on the mind here briefly presented, for 21st century capitalism digital profits.

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“What seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement” – Aldous Huxley, “Downward Transcendence” (1952), later included in the posthumous collection of writings on psychedelic substances Moksha (1977)

“Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” – William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Huxley on Proust and psychology (2020)

Psychological reality vs. realism

by Federico Soldani – 15th Oct 2020

In one of his very first published essays, today part of Complete Essays, Volume I: 1920-1925 (Ivan R. Dee Publisher, Chicago, 2000), entitled ‘Proust: The Eighteenth-Century Method’ and published in the literary magazine ‘The Athenaeum’ on the 8th of August 1919 in London, author Aldous Huxley addressed the topic of psychology straight away.

The editor of The Athenaeum was John MIddleton Murry. Under his editorship several members of the Bloomsbury Group contributed to the magazine. During the 1920s, many of them became Freudian psychoanalysts.

Murry in 1923 founded the literary magazine The Adelphi, which in 1927 became The New Adelphi under the editorship of Richard Rees, later the literary executor of George Orwell.

Here are the relevant passages in which Huxley highlighted the shift in French literature from psychological reality to psychological realism.

Some of the concepts expressed in his first published essay in the collection might be important in today’s debate about the shifting concept of reality, the psychologization of political and everyday language, and the so-called psychedelic renaissance, especially since the word psychedelic to characterize hallucinogens was developed in a rhymes exchange, several decades later, between Huxley and the psychiatrist Osmond, who coined the word ‘psychedelic.’

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‘Proust: The Eighteenth-Century Method,’ by Aldous Huxley, The Athenaeum (1919) (emphasis added)

“In the second volume of his history of the French novel, Mr. Saintsbury let fall the remark that “psychological realism is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit, or, perhaps, able to understand.”

Psychological reality, as opposed to psychological realism, was what the eighteenth-century delineators of character aimed at. There is something extraordinarily satisfying and convincing about a good piece of their analysis. One thinks with admiration of the firmness of outlying the bare precision of Alfieri’s self-portrait, or of Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, so subtle and yet so simply and economically drawn. They produced their effects by a process of abstraction from the multifarious and generally rather confused facts of psychology.

The “clever ones of the last two generations” have occupied themselves for the most part in exactly recording these muddled facts as they are actually observable. To them this psychological realism has seemed nearer the truth than the earlier abstractions and distillations of the real brute facts. But, as Mr. Saintsbury suggests, it may be that artistic truth and convincingness of character are arrived at more certainly by the other method.

The invention and development of the modern science of psychology has made us regard as important and interesting a multitude of small odds and ends of thought, emotion and sensation which seemed to our ancestors almost negligible. They did not insist on the phenomena because they were interested primarily in what they regarded as the reality behind them. They did not record little facts about their heroes’ sensations or fleeting velleities of thought; they rationalized and generalized the chaotic complex of psychological life into the unity of character. […]

M. Proust belongs in his method to the older school. He does not give us psychology in his crude, undigested state. He rationalizes and distills and peptonizes his data, serving up finally, for the consumption of his readers, a finished product of exquisite clarity.

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

by Federico Soldani – 13th Oct 2020

In two previous articles on these pages, two points of contact between Trump and some of his worst critics were highlighted: [1] remote psychiatric diagnosis, from a distance, to address political divergence and societal problems, including digital diagnosis for citizens as well as [2] de facto using TV and digital media such as Twitter as a reality show with the effect of teaching psychological language applied to politics globally, a terminology I have proposed to call ‘ideopathological lexicon’ or ‘psyspeak’ (here the first proposal, 3rd Sept 2019).

Both instances can be seen as causing anti-democratic and even more radical anti-political effects and promoting globally a culture of technocracy, which is the substitution of technical to political solutions that involves the redundancy of political debate, by spreading psyspeak and related concepts as politically valid means and by spreading the culture of diagnosis and its language to address political as well as societal problems.

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As an example, in October 2019 in one of the oldest and most prominent U.S. magazines, the Atlantic, formerly Atlantic Monthly, citizens were encouraged to read DSM-5, the “bible” of mental and behavioral disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, and become as a result political diagnosticians:

“Understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.

Nevertheless, how the mental-health community goes about categorizing those characteristics and traits can provide helpful guidance to laypeople by structuring our thinking about them […]

One scholarly paper has suggested that accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him [ed. Trump] might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.”

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In this article on PsyPolitics a third similarity is highlighted between Trump and some of his worst critics, which is [3] the promotion of hallucinogenic substances for the masses.

The co-founder of the so-called Extinction Rebellion movement, has recently called for an apparently incomprehensible “mass psychedelic disobedience.” The other co-founder of the movement – they are both British – founded this year the political party called Beyond Politics.

CBD and vaping shop in Dalton-in-Furness, Northern England 2019

At present, the FDA under the current Trump administration is working on several hallucinogenic drugs, such as esketamine for depression (first ever hallucinogen approved by FDA, in March 2019, for a psychiatric condition; of note, FDA Commissioner Gottlieb announced his stepping down on the day after such approval).

As already discussed in an article (in Italian) about hallucinogens and Evola – an ideologue of the fascist period recently quoted by Steve Bannon, himself Trump’s “ideological guru,” according to a 2017 New York Times article – in August 2020, the FDA even approved this hallucinogen for the treatment of those who have expressed suicidal thoughts and are at high risk.

This is happening in the current context of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance movement (linked article in Italian, more on terminology here). Hallucinogenic substances such as cannabis / THC and related cannabis products with milder psychotropic effects, such as CBD – which according to the New York Times is already “everywhere” – but also substances with no market yet, are actively and aggressively promoted for any possible medical or non medical uses, in so-called micro doses or in light versions as well as to seek their traditional hallucinogenic effects.

A result of the experience with hallucinogens, according to its proponents, would be “ego dissolution” or “ego death.”

The pro tempore U.S. President Trump himself recently called for the Veterans Administration to buy “a lot” of intranasal esketamine to prevent suicides among veterans.

In the FDA pipeline there are now magic mushrooms / psilocybin and MDMA / ecstasy, the rave party drug, awaiting fast review to be approved for medical purposes.

Along with diagnosis based on existing facts and outside of a clinical context and with the media spectacle spreading psyspeak, on one more account Trump and some of his worst critics might find a point of contact: mass hallucinogens.

Cyberdelic, or cyber-psychedelic, subculture is emerging as a common ground.

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“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” – Albert Hofmann, scientist, “father” of LSD, ‘Psychedelia Britannica’ 1997

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

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Article modified 14th Oct 2020

(Photos by the author. First photo above in the article is from the Extinction Rebellion Wikipedia page in English, accessed 13th Oct 2020, Extinction Rebellion München auf der Fridays-for-Future-Demo in München, 2019-09-20)

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

by Federico Soldani – 11th Oct 2020

Italiano

On the 25th of June 1940 World War II was ongoing.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, wrote in his diaries a comment about civilians carrying gas masks during the war. There was fear that National Socialist Germany air raids could make use of lethal gas (some photos below, more here).

Practice evacuation of a school in Kingston, Greater London, after a canister of tear gas was discharged on June 9, 1941. (Parker/Fox Photos/Getty Images)

During the following year Orwell started working for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) as Talks Producer and broadcaster, Eastern Service propaganda for the Indian subcontinent, and worked there until 1943. At the time he talked about “two wasted years” in a letter to Philip Rahv on December 9th.

George Orwell, photographed at a BBC microphone in 1943

His wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a child psychologist (Master of Arts in Educational Psychology at UCL, University College London), was already working at the time for the Censorship Department, depending on the source either for the Ministry of Information (MoI) or the War Office in Whitehall, London (Orwell confirms this second option in a letter to Leonard Moore dated 6 October 1939; Diaries, ed. Peter Davison 2009).

Eric Blair/George Orwell joined the BBC Eastern Service in 1941
Third from the left is TS Eliot with George Orwell standing behind him.

Here is the excerpt from Orwell’s diaries in which he reflected on the actual usefulness of the gas masks vs. their social, national and symbolic meaning, as well as on how effective the war news were on the civilian population.

Recording ‘Voice’ in studio for the BBC Eastern Service
George Woodcock,Mulk Raj Anand,George Orwell,William Empson, Herbert Read & Edmund Blunden

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George Orwell’s war diaries, 25.6.40 (emphasis added)

I saw in one of yesterdays’ papers that gas masks are being issued in America, though people have to pay for them. Gas masks are probably useless to the civilian population in England and almost certainly so in America. The issue of them is simply a symbol of national solidarity, the first step towards wearing a uniform.

As soon as war started, the carrying or not carrying of a gas mask assumed social and political implications.

South coast of England, circa 1940. (General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

In the first few days people like myself who refused to carry one were stared at and it was generally assumed that the non-carriers were “left.”

Then the habit wore off, and the assumption was that a person who carried a gas mask was of the ultra-cautious type, the suburban rate-payer type. With the bad news the habit has revived and I should think 20 per cent now carry them. But you are still a little stared at if you carry one without being in uniform.

Until the big raids have happened and it is grasped that the Germans don’t, in fact, use gas, the extent to which masks are carried will probably be a pretty good index of the impression the war news is making on the public.

A gas exercise for civilians, using tear gas, Kingston-On-Thames in 1941. (Keystone/Getty Images)

World War II gas drill in Southend on March 29, 1941. (Eric Harlow/Keystone/Getty Images)

Federico Soldani: intervista TV su politica, linguaggio medico-psicologico e tecnocrazia (2020)

Intervista TV in diretta a Federico Soldani su politica, linguaggio medico-psicologico e tecnocrazia – di Francesco Ippolito – Il Segno dei Tempi, 50 Canale – Venerdi’ 2 ottobre 2020

Libertà cyber-psichedelica? (2020)

“La libertà è schiavitù” – George Orwell

di Federico Soldani – 8 ottobre 2020

La retorica predominante che si sta sempre piu’ affermando e’ molto coerente su un punto: fuori ci sarebbe troppa liberta’, il mondo sarebbe troppo pericoloso, complesso e interconnesso. Il battito d’ali di una farfalla qui, insegna la teoria del caos, potrebbe scatenare uragani dalla parte opposta del globo. Figurarsi dunque gli effetti dell’azione umana nel suo complesso.

Dentro invece ce ne sarebbe troppo poca di liberta’, avremmo troppi freni inibitori interiori imposti dalla civilizzazione e che invece andrebbero lasciati liberi, attraverso l’ormai quasi onnipresente discorso della “dissoluzione dell’ego”.

Persino il Santo Padre sembra parlare frequentemente in termini non solo spirituali cattolici ma spesso psicoanalitici, proprio in riferimento all’ “ego”.

Il discorso generale e’ assai problematico, poiche’ si vorrebbe insistere sulla importanza della liberta’ interiore proprio in un contesto storico che coarta la liberta’ esteriore.

E’ stupefacente vedere come la retorica del capitalismo si sia ribaltata nel giro di pochi anni: dalla liberta’ valore supremo alla liberta’ come caos e rischio mortale.

Il mondo esterno sarebbe dunque troppo pericoloso, complesso, interconnesso per un cervello e dei sensi, quelli umani, che si sono sviluppati per il mondo della foresta e della caverna e non per una societa’ iper-tecnologica, sovrappopolata e affollata, con virus e pandemie, rischio nucleare, inquinamento e l’inarrestabile riscaldamento del pianeta.

Quindi le persone in base a questa retorica andrebbero quantomeno fermate fisicamente, ammesso e non concesso che il digitale non sia inquinante, ça va sans dire, e che i “virus” virtuali siano meno pericolosi di quelli biologici.

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La trasmissione “Forum Internum” della BBC tramite la sua nobile conduttrice, la baronessa Kennedy, ci informa che senza liberta’ interiore quella esteriore e’ solo di facciata, discorso a prima vista ragionevole.

Se non che si colloca nel piu’ ampio contesto storico in cui per esempio i rivenditori online di allucinogeni, invocano la liberta’ di coscienza (nel senso inglese di ‘consciousness’, ovvero lo stato cosciente, non di ‘conscience’, ovvero di coscienza morale) e anche una non meglio precisata “liberta’ cerebrale”.

Gli accounts online di questi rivenditori, che aggirano le leggi nazionali basate sulle costituzioni tramite il Web, non vengono certo chiusi dai colossi di Internet i quali anzi finanziano le campagne per la legalizzazione (ufficialmente i coniugi Zuckerberg hanno appena donato mezzo milione di dollari alla causa) o come dicono loro decriminalizzazione degli allucinogeni, al contrario degli account di cittadini che non rinunciano a fare politica e che vengono censurati.

La liberta’ esterna quindi, quella fatta prima di tutto di materia, di atomi e molecole, quella che percepiamo e viviamo attraverso i cinque sensi e’ sempre piu’ rappresentata come il caos, un rischio, una follia, un non senso.

Quella interiore invece, alcuni la presentano come prerequisito alla esteriore, per esempio Forum Internum della BBC, senza pero’ mai invocare anche quella per cosi’ dire classica, ovvero la liberta’ di agire nel proprio ambiente entro i limiti della legge morale e della legge codificata.

La liberta’ interiore sarebbe quindi la nuova frontiera, non pero’ per aumentare quella classica nel mondo degli atomi, ma per muoversi in modo permanente in una sola direzione energeticamente efficiente, quindi come uno scivolo, quella digitale dei bit.

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Nel discorso cyber-delico o cyber-psichedelico, del quale si e’ gia’ parlato su queste pagine a nostra conoscenza per primi o tra i primi in Italia (l’immagine in alto presa da qui, paragona l’apparenza esterna della V.R, realta’ virtuale, alla sedia tranquillizzante ideata dal fondatore della psichiatria statunitense Benjamin Rush) ovvero nel discorso del digitale e degli allucinogeni, si invoca la necessita’ di fare viaggi da fermi, quindi con “trip” allucinogeni, viaggi per l’appunto, e con il virtuale.

Il cittadino ormai divenuto spettatore quando non addirittura un paziente, quindi passivo, puo’ ancora esperire mondi per altro potenzialmente del tutto programmabili sulla rete / Web, su Internet, tramite la realta’ virtuale.

Il computer e il telefonino sono gia’ prime forme di realita’ virtuale, mentre adesso si sta passando alla realta’ aumentata, cosiddetta, che gia’ si trova “di default” sui sistemi operativi di Windows, chiamata Mixed Reality, e richiede un casco connesso al computer o al proprio device.

Essendo il cittadino pieno di bias cognitivi (errori sistematici di pensiero), centinaia di bias in base alla nuova retorica (una affermazione non scientifica, visto il tempo che occorre per studiarne anche solo uno o pochi di questi errori sistematici e per comprenderne le implicazioni, si vedano Tversky e Kahneman), si deve lasciare il mondo esterno alla cosiddetta intelligenza artificiale, mentre quella umana e’ sempre piu’ rappresentata come idiozia. Idiozia umana, intelligenza artificiale. La retorica del “circondati da idioti”.

Nel discorso cyber-psichedelico inoltre si invoca a gran voce proprio la dissoluzione dell’ego psicoanalitico.

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Secondo una mia ipotesi di lavoro presentata per la prima volta in un seminario a maggio 2020 si potrebbe vedere la mente, cosi’ come teorizzata da Freud nella ultima parte della sua vita, ovvero tripartita (ego, super-ego, id o es), cosi’ trasformata dai cambiamenti in corso.

Il super-ego, la legge interiore che sorveglia e punisce, si fa esterno e digitale.

Mentre l’id o es biologico diventa la nuova fonte di energia della economia digitale.

L’ego sarebbe dunque, filtrando l’es o id, un tappo al rilascio della nuova energia.

Il nuovo oro nero del ventunesimo secolo dell’economia digitale e’ dunque il nostro es o id, la nostra componente piu’ bassa, animale, istintuale, delle cosiddette pulsioni, degli impulsi e delle passioni, del sesso e dell’aggressivita’.

L’ego rappresenta la parte che integra i cinque sensi, quindi che si mette in relazione con il mondo esterno e ne permette la manipolazione, una caratteristica precipua della civilta’ greca, europea e poi occidentale. Ego che rappresenta l’autonomia, la liberta’ del singolo di agire nel mondo esterno, la dignita’ e la capacita’ di raziocinio autonomo, che filtra esperienze, impulsi e decisioni, e’ rappresentata dalla retorica corrente come la parte che deve essere dissolta o che deve morire. In inglese “ego dissolution” o “ego death”.

L’ego da’ unita’, integra la persona e filtra il mondo esterno cosi’ come gli impulsi dell’es o id. Questa unita’ e’ stata rappresentata come la legge romana o come il monoteismo, mentre dovremmo secondo la retorica cyber-psichedelica, tornare a uno stato pre-diritto romano e politeista, stato che a livello individuale somiglia alle voci che in uno stato psicotico si sentono quando non si distinguono piu’ i propri pensieri come per l’appunto propri e si scambiano per voci esterne.

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I modi per dissolvere questo ego sarebbero diversi, a mio avviso principalmente tre: [1] digitale, [2] “allettamento” e [3] sostanze chimiche che disorganizzano l’integrita’ psichica, primariamente gli allucinogeni rivenduti come psichedelici, enteogeni, in “micro-dosi” o in versioni “light”, attraverso terapie mediche o psicoterapeutiche, o attraverso prodotti correlati che servano a far passare l’idea degli allucinogeni di massa (per adesso inaccettabile), per esempio prodotti della cannabis come il CBD, che non siano direttamente l’allucinogeno THC.

Dissolvere l’ego dunque con il digitale: lusingarlo prima di tutto, attraendolo nel digitale con la trappola del narcisismo, i cosiddetti social e i selfie, etc. quindi disarticolarlo dal mondo reale e dai rapporti sociali reali e non mediati dal digitale. Il digitale supera la distinzione tra individualismo e collettivismo (si veda la cosiddetta Ideologia Californiana, misto di libertarianismo e marxismo) poiche’ l’estremo isolamento dal mondo esterno per mezzo del digitale implica una immersione completa nel collettivo digitale, in cui le macchine e gli algoritmi coordinano senza bisogno dello sforzo del singolo, dei corpi intermedi e della legge interiorizzata, morale o codificata.

Non dimentichiamo inoltre che la parte automatica della mente e del cervello e’ primariamente quella bassa, dei riflessi, piu’ primitiva, non o sub cosciente, e anche quella emotiva. Quindi in un mondo automatizzato, della cibernetica e dell’Internet delle Cose, e’ questa componente prevalentemente automatica quella che per sua natura meglio si puo’ integrare nel discorso del collettivismo digitale.

Il bisogno di muoversi sempre meno grazie al digitale e all’automazione, che aiuterebbero contro virus e inquinamento, e che per adesso si svolgono per esempio tramite il pulmino di Amazon e tra poco coi droni, gia’ sperimentati in U.S.A. allo scopo, porta a forme di “allettamento”, si vedano ad esempio gli Hikikomori in Giappone. Queste forme di “allettamento” di massa modificano tra le altre cose la cenestesi, ovvero la percezione che abbiamo degli organi interni e dello stato di benessere generale, strettamente connessi proprio con il senso di se’ e la integrita’ e non molteplicita’ di questo.

Infine la marea allucinogena che sta arrivando, attraverso la produzione industriale per le masse di sostanze, in modo per adesso surrettizio e via via piu’ esplicito, serve alla dissoluzione dell’ego per le masse. Dissoluzione di cui si parla in modo aperto e di cui hanno anche scritto autori come Huxley, Evola e piu’ di recente la pletora pubblicistica in materia.

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Non e’ vero come dicono alcuni che la globalizzazione sia finita, siamo invece passati alla ben piu’ radicale globalizzazione digitale. Chi parla di fine della globalizzazione infatti si guarda bene dall’accennare al discorso digitale.

“Il nazionalismo personalizzo’ cosi’ tanto i sentimenti di comunita’, che la nazione divento’ un’estensione dell’ego” – Zbigniew Brzezinski (“Tra due ere: il ruolo dell’America nell’eta’ tecnetronica”, 1969-1970)

Articolo modificato il 15 ottobre 2020

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

Harvard psychologist Murray about Hitler

by Federico Soldani

Henry Murray was a doctor and biochemist who became a prominent psychologist at Harvard. He had a complex and interesting personal biography worth reading about, including close contacts with Jung, Leary and the Unabomber.

According to Moreno: “Far from being outliers, Leary and Alpert’s initial work with psilocybin operated under the full approval of department elders like Henry Murray, considered the father of personality theory and the senior psychologist for the OSS during World War II (“Acid Dreams,” Lee and Shlain, 1985). Murray wrote an assessment of Adolf Hitler that accurately predicted his suicide.”

In Murray’s biography by Robinson entitled “Love’s Story Told” (Harvard University Press, 1992), it is interesting to note how the rhetoric used by Murray about Hitler in 1937 closely resembles the rhetoric used in 2020 about Trump.

In both instances, the use of psychological images instead of political argument in relation to political figures is striking.

Murray toured Germany with his family during the summer of 1937 and wrote home of having had a “close view” of Hitler at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth.

“He is an unimpressive, harassed man – wrote Murray – who seems to me to be beyond his depths. He is under the constant care of a Munich psychiatrist of the old school.

Symptoms: severe depression & nightmares (insomnia) – probably of persecution. To think that the peace of Europe hangs on the electro-chemical system in that cranium!.“

Immediately after this passage, Robinson continues the biography by telling us that Murray returned home that fall, in part to hear Jung deliver the Terry lectures at Yale.

Photo: https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/henry-murray/

Evola sugli allucinogeni (2020)

“Cavalcare la Tigre”?

di Federico Soldani

Evola (all’anagrafe Giulio Cesare Andrea, detto Julius, nobile da parte di padre) fu un pensatore prominente nel periodo fascista in Italia, con un passato da artista astrattista e un significativo periodo nel movimento Dada di Tristan Tzara (nelle foto un suo quadro astratto e “Paesaggio Interiore, Illuminazione”, entrambi del 1919, un altro dei numerosi paesaggi interiori, del 1918-1920, e due copertine dalle opere pubblicate a Zurigo in Svizzera nel 1920).

In questi anni si e’ parlato di lui forse soprattutto a causa di Steve Bannon, il manager della prima campagna elettorale e, secondo il New York Times, “ideologo guru” del 45mo Presidente degli Stati Uniti d’America, Donald J. Trump. Bannon infatti fece riferimento a Evola nel 2014 durante una conferenza in Vaticano.

Il New York Times in un articolo del 2017 su Bannon evidenzio’ “la visione di Evola di un nuovo ordine che distrugge la borghesia, che ha chiamato la civiltà solare.”

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Sotto l’amministrazione Trump e’ stato approvata dalla FDA statunitense nel 2019, in corrispondenza con il piu’ ampio cosiddetto “rinascimento psichedelico” in corso oggi, la prima sostanza allucinogena per una indicazione psichiatrica, ovvero la ketamina per la depressione, sostanza ampiamente usata come allucinogeno ricreativo (enantiomero S, brevettato dalla Johnson and Johnson come esketamina per la somministrazione intranasale).

Nell’agosto 2020 la FDA ha approvato questo allucinogeno persino per il trattamento di chi abbia espresso idee di suicidio e sia ad alto rischio.

La FDA ha in corso di rapida approvazione al momento anche la psilocibina, principio attivo di diversi cosiddetti funghi magici, cosi’ come l’MDMA / ecstasy, la droga da discoteca, parte delle sostanze anche dette in inglese ‘club drugs‘.

Lo stesso Presidente Trump invito’ la Veterans Administration, il servizio sanitario interamente pubblico per militari, dopo l’approvazione da parte dell’FDA a comprare grandi quantita’ di ketamina in modo da poter trattare adeguatamente, a suo modo di vedere, i veterani.

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Puo’ dunque essere interessante leggere a distanza di oltre mezzo secolo cio’ che Evola, questo ideologo del periodo fascista e post-bellico italiano, ebbe a scrivere sulle droghe e in particolare sugli allucinogeni nel libro del 1961 Cavalcare la Tigre in una “Parentesi sulle droghe” che venne riveduta in edizioni successive (il grassetto nel testo e’ aggiunto).

Evola, che studio’ a fondo le tradizioni orientali e scrisse molto in merito, usa qui il detto orientale “cavalcare la tigre”, tigre che rappresenterebbe qui il mondo moderno.

Secondo Evola, coloro che si sentono legati al mondo di quella che lui identificava come tradizione, per non farsi travolgere dai processi inarrestabili del mondo moderno (si veda anche il suo precedente libro Rivolta contro il mondo moderno del 1934) dovrebbe cavalcare questa forza per cercare poi di reindirizzarne l’energia nella direzione voluta.

Questa puo’ essere a mio avviso una chiave di lettura interessante per comprendere il processo rivoluzionario globalista in corso da parte di forze politiche che dichiaratamente sembrano opporsi ai processi globalisti e che fanno capo agli esecutivi di Trump e Johnson. Nei fatti tali esecutivi appaiono come grandi promotori della agenda cyber-psichedelica, a mio avviso il cuore della Rivoluzione Globalista, ovvero della digitalizzazione e della diffusione di sostanze allucinogene a partire dalla cannabis e dai prodotti di questa per le masse.

~~~

Qui e’ riportato un brano da una delle versioni piu’ recenti del testo di Evola (si veda ad esempio la VI edizione corretta delle Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma 2000) ed e’ anche incluso un passaggio presente nella prima edizione del 1961 (tra parentesi quadre) ma espunto dalle successive.

In questo passaggio successivamente espunto, Evola ritiene che le droghe siano un sintomo e non una causa della crisi individuale di chi fa uso di sostanze psicotrope, parla del “primitivismo delle misure legislative repressive piu’ o meno drastiche” (sic) e sostiene che in base allo stesso principio si dovrebbe allora “sopprimere gran parte di cio’ che compone l’esistenza moderna e su cui si basa anche una sviluppatissima e aggressiva industria“.

Nonostante dica che siano valenze puramente dissolutive e regressive a prevalere in strati sempre più vasti delle nuove generazioni che usano queste sostanze psicotrope, il pensiero di Evola non appare dunque in contrasto sotto questo profilo con movimenti prepotentemente in corso oggi nella Gran Bretagna di Johnson e negli Stati Uniti di Trump tra cui ad esempio “Decrimininalizzare la Natura – Restaurare le nostre radici” per la decriminalizzazione degli allucinogeni.

Allucinogeni presentati oggi sotto i piu’ rassicuranti nomi di psichedelici o anche di enteogeni e talora ‘re-branded’ come terapie mediche o per coadiuvare la sedute di psicoterapia.

Da notare come nella retorica corrente non piu’ tanto di legalizzazione si parli, ovvero non piu’ di portare le droghe allucinogene, incluse quelle senza ancora un mercato la cui diffusione sia quindi da promuovere attivamente, sotto l’ombrello della legge ma oltre, fuori da questa, appunto de-criminalizzando e promuovendo sui media di massa e digitali. La questione terminologica e concettuale sulle sostanze allucinogene e’ gia’ stata affrontata su queste pagine (piu’ in dettaglio qui e in parte anche qui).

Nel brano seguente Evola fa un breve cenno ad Aldous Huxley e alla esperienza di questi con la mescalina, sostanza presente in cactus americani quali il peyote (di cui parlo’ in Le Porte della Percezione). Huxley e’ un autore del quale abbiamo gia’ discusso in particolare perche’ il termine ‘psichedelico’, per denotare gli allucinogeni, fu ideato in uno scambio di rime tra lo scrittore inglese trapiantato a Hollywood in California, su Mulholland Highway, e lo psichiatra inglese Osmond che lavoro’ a lungo negli Stati Uniti.

~~~

Parentesi sulle droghe, da ‘Cavalcare la Tigre’, di Julius Evola (grassetto aggiunto)

Paesaggio Interiore, Illuminazione (1919)

Si può capire che per tal via, di là dal campo della musica e della danza si sia condotti verso un dominio assai più vasto e problematico, il quale abbraccia molti altri mezzi aventi un uso sempre più vasto nelle nuove generazioni. Quando quella beat generation nord-americana, a cui abbiamo già fatto allusione, mise insieme l’alcool, l’orgasmo del sesso e le droghe come ingredienti essenziali pel suo senso della vita, essa associò radicalisticamente tecniche che in realtà hanno un fondo comune – quello or ora indicato.

Non è il caso di soffermarsi troppo su tale dominio. A parte ciò che nel seguente capitolo diremo sul sesso, dato l’accenno già fatto, qui aggiungeremo solo qualche considerazione sul mezzo che, fra tutti quelli usati in alcuni settori del mondo contemporaneo, ha più visibilmente la finalità di una evasione estatica, cioè la droga.

J. Evola, Arte Astratta, Collection DADA Zurich 1920

La diffusione crescente delle droghe fra la gioventù di oggi è un fenomeno assai significativo.

Uno specialista, il dottor Laennec, ebbe a scrivere: «Nei nostri paesi la più diffusa categoria dei tossicomani è rappresentata dai nevropatici e dai psicopatici, pei quali la droga costituisce non un lusso ma l’alimento divenuto vitale, la risposta all’angoscia… La tossicomania allora appare come un sintomo addittivo della sindrome nevrotica del soggetto, un sintomo fra gli altri, una difesa ulteriore, ben presto la sola e vera difesa». In una certa misura, queste considerazioni possono venire generalizzate, ossia estese a assai più vaste cerchia di persone che non sono nevrotiche nel senso proprio, clinico, del termine; si tratta soprattutto di giovani che hanno percepito più o meno distintamente il vuoto dell’esistenza moderna e delle routines della civiltà attuale e che cercano una evasione. L’impulso può essere contagioso, l’uso della droga può estendersi a individui nei quali non esisteva questa causa originaria, questo punto di partenza, e nei riguardi dei quali si può solo parlare di un vizio deprecabile; iniziatisi alla droga per imitazione o voga, costoro soggiacciono alla seduzione degli stati propiziati dalla droga, che spessissimo portano a rovina la loro già debole personalità.

Con le droghe si ripete, in parte, la situazione già indicata per la musica sincopata. Sono stati spesso trasposti sul piano profano e «fisico» dei mezzi che in origine furono anche usati come coadiuvanti per aperture sul sovrasensibile, nel campo delle iniziazioni o di esperienze simili a quelle delle iniziazioni. Come le danze a musica sincopata moderne derivano dalle danze negre estatiche, così diverse delle droghe oggi usate e variamente elaborate dalla farmacopea corrispondono a droghe che in popolazioni primitive venivano usate non di rado per un fine «sacro», seguendo antiche tradizioni. Ciò vale, del resto, già pel tabacco; fra gli Indiani d’America forti estratti di tabacco vennero usati nella preparazione dei neofiti che dovevano ritirarsi per un certo periodo dalla vita profana per ottenere «segni» e visioni. Anche per l’alcool, entro certi limiti, può dirsi cosa analoga; si sa della tradizione circa le «bevande sacre», così come dell’uso dell’alcool nel dionisismo e in correnti ad esso affini; per esempio, il taoismo antico non interdiceva le bevande alcooliche, che anzi considerava come «estratti di vita» propiziatori di una ebrezza che, come quella della danza, può condurre verso una specie di «stato di grazia magica», cercato dai cosidetti «uomini reali». Gli estratti della coca, il mescal, il peyotl e altri stupefacenti facevano e spesso fanno tuttora parte del rituale di società segrete dell’America centrale o meridionale.

[…]

[In fatto di “equazione personale”, a chi per preoccupazione di igiene sociale combatte con zelo gli stupefacenti vedendovi una causa della rovina morale degli individui da essi intossicati, si dovrebbe ricordare quel che e’ stato generalmente riconosciuto dai patologi e dai neurologi, ossia che nella grandissima maggioranza dei casi gravi l’uso della droga e’ meno la causa che non il sintomo di una alterazione profonda, di uno stato di crisi, di una nevrosi, o simili, del soggetto (fra le tante, sono esplicite queste affermazioni di uno specialista, il dr. Laennec: “Nei nostri paesi la piu’ diffusa categoria dei tossicomani e’ rappresentata dai nevropatici e dai psicopatici, pei quali la droga costituisce non un lusso, ma l’alimento diventato vitale, la risposta all’angoscia… La tossicomania allora appare come un sintomo additivo della sindrome nevrotica del soggetto, un sintomo fra gli altri, una difesa ulteriore, ben presto la sola e vera difesa). In altri termini, e’ una preesistente situazione psichica o esistenziale negativa, “coperta” o patente, a spingere all’uso delle droghe come ad una effimera soluzione. Da qui l’inefficacia, in casi del genere, delle terapie disintossicatrici semplicistiche, cioe’ esteriori, trascuranti il fatto psichico primario; da qui, anche, il primitivismo delle misure legislative repressive piu’ o meno drastiche. Privata delle droghe, la persona in questione, non ha per nulla risolto il suo problema; ricorrera’ ad altri mezzi per venire piu’ o meno allo stesso punto, oppure crollera’. D’altra parte, se per legge si dovesse escludere tutto cio’ che all’uomo e alla donna moderni vale come uno “stupefacente’ in senso generico e che serve in modo piu’ blando agli stessi fini di una evasione presentata come “distrazione” o simili […], occorrerebbe sopprimere gran parte di cio’ che compone l’esistenza moderna e su cui si basa anche una sviluppatissima e aggressiva industria.]

Paesaggio Interiore ore 10,30 (1918 -1920)

Comunque, sono l’«equazione personale» e la zona specifica su cui vanno ad agire droghe e stupefacenti (qui potendosi includere anche l’alcool) a condurre il singolo verso l’estraniamento, verso una apertura passiva a stati che gli danno l’illusione di una superiore libertà, di una ebrezza e di una sconosciuta intensità delle sensazioni, ma che in realtà hanno un carattere dissolutivo e che in nessun modo lo «portano oltre». Per attendersi da simili esperienze un diverso esito, si dovrebbe disporre di un eccezionale grado di attività spirituale, e l’atteggiamento dovrebbe essere l’opposto di quello di chi le cerca e ne ha bisogno per sfuggire a tensioni, a traumatizzazioni, a nevrosi, al sentimento del vuoto e dell’assurdo.

Si è accennato alla tecnica della polimetria ritmica africana: una forza è arrestata di continuo in una stasi, con lo scopo di liberare una forza d’ordine diverso. Nell’estatismo inferiore dei primitivi ciò apre la via all’invasamento da parte di poteri scuri. Dicevamo che nel nostro caso questa forza diversa dovrebbe essere prodotta dalla risposta dell’«essere» (del Sé) allo stimolo. La situazione creata dall’azione delle droghe e dello stesso alcool non è diversa. Ma una reazione del genere quasi mai si verifica; l’azione della sostanza è troppo forte, brusca, impreveduta e esterna a che essa non sia semplicemente subita e, quindi, a che il processo possa impegnare l’«essere». È come se una potente corrente s’immettesse di fatto nella coscienza e così la persona potesse solo avvertire il mutamento di stato già avvenuto, senza richiedere il suo assenso: e nel nuovo stato si è sommersi, da esso si è «agiti». È così che l’effetto reale, anche se non avvertito, è un tramortimento, una lesione del Sé, malgrado ogni impressione di una vita esaltata e di beatitudini o voluttà trascendenti.

[…]

La copertina della edizione tedesca (1933) del pamphlet anti-cristiano Imperialismo Pagano, 1928

Qui sarà bene aggiungere qualche dettaglio. In genere, le droghe vengono distinte in quattro categorie: gli euforici, gli inebrianti, gli allucinogeni, i narcotici. Le prime due categorie non presentano, per noi, nessun particolare interesse: più o meno come l’uso del tabacco e degli alcoolici, il quale non ha rilevanza, a meno che divenga un «vizio», ossia che non porti ad un condizionamento.

La terza categoria comprende droghe le quali provocano stati in cui vengono sperimentate visioni varie e quasi altri mondi dei sensi e dello spirito. Questi effetti, in un loro aspetto, sono stati chiamati anche «psichedelici», per l’assunzione che nelle visioni vengano proiettati e divengono palesi dei contenuti riposti della propria psiche profonda, però non riconosciuti come tali. Così i medici hanno perfino provato a usare droghe come la mescalina, per una esplorazione psichica analoga a quella della psicanalisi.

Quando tutto si riduce alla proiezione di un sottosuolo della psiche, nemmeno esperienze del genere possono presentare un interesse per il tipo di uomo che abbiamo in vista. A parte pericolosi contenuti di sensazione e da paradiso artificiale, si tratta di fantasmagorie illusorie che non portano oltre, anche se non si deve escludere che talvolta ad agire non siano soltanto i contenuti della propria sub-coscienza ma anche influenze oscure le quali, trovando la via aperta, si manifestano visionariamente; non è nemmeno detto che ad esse, e non al semplice sottosuolo represso della psiche individuale, non siano da riportarsi certi impulsi che possono prorompere in margine a questi stati (e ve ne sono che hanno spinto compulsivamente perfino ad atti delittuosi).

Un uso utile di tali droghe presupporrebbe una preliminare «catarsi», ossia la neutralizzazione proprio del sottosuolo inconscio individuale che si attiva; allora le imagini e le impressioni potrebbero aver riferimento ad una realtà spirituale sovraordinata anziché ridursi ad un’orgia visionaria soggettiva. Si può rilevare che nei casi in cui questo uso superiore delle droghe è stato considerato, sono stati previsti non solo periodi di preparazione e di purificazione del soggetto, ma anche di contemplazione, ad esempio anche di simboli destinati a guidare adeguatamente il processo.

Talvolta sono state anche previste «consacrazioni», a scopo protettivo. Ci è stato riferito che nell’America centro-meridionale l’uso del peyotl è stato associato, in certe comunità di indigeni, alle figure scolpite in rilievo di certe rovine di antichi templi, le quali solo negli stati propiziati dalla droga «parlavano», rivelavano il loro significato in termini di illuminazioni spirituali.

L’importanza dell’orientamento individuale appare in modo chiaro dagli effetti assolutamente diversi della mescalina in due scrittori contemporanei, A. Huxley e lo Zaehner, che hanno fatto esperimenti con la droga.

E da rilevare che per allucinogeni, come l’oppio e, in parte, l’hashish (vedi cannabis, ndr), quell’assunzione attiva dell’esperienza di cui si è detto dianzi e che dal nostro punto di vista costituisce l’essenziale, è in genere da escludere.

Resta la categoria dei narcotici e di sostanze usate anche nell’anestesia totale, l’effetto normale dei quali è la semplice sospensione completa della coscienza. Essa corrisponde ad un distacco che escluderebbe tutte le forme intermedie «psichedeliche» insieme agli insidiosi contenuti estatici e voluttuosi, dunque ad uno spazio vuoto ove, se la coscienza sussistesse, avrebbe per centro il puro Io rendendo possibili aperture su una realtà superiore. Ma a questo vantaggio si contrappongono le estreme difficoltà di un addestramento capace di garantire quel sussistere della coscienza distaccata.

In genere, si deve tener presente che lo stesso uso delle droghe per un fine spirituale, ossia per cogliere baleni di una trascendenza, ha il suo prezzo.

Come è che le droghe producano certi effetti psichici (non concordanti e non uniformi), ciò dal punto di vista scientifico moderno non è stato ancora accertato. Si vuole che alcune di esse, come già l’LSD, agiscano distruttivamente su date cellule del cerebro. Comunque, un punto è certo: un uso non eccezionale delle droghe (alle quali dovrebbe poi sostituirsi il potere di giungere a stati analoghi con i propri mezzi) porta ad una certa disorganizzazione psichica. Così quando la via che si è scelta si basasse sulla massima unificazione di tutte le facoltà psichiche, questo effetto deve esser tenuto presente e soppesato.

E’ probabile che al lettore comune tutto quest’ordine di idee riesca ostico, mancandogli punti di riferimento personali per orientarsi. Ma, di nuovo, è stato lo sviluppo stesso dell’argomento a imporci anche questo breve sconfinamento. Infatti solo facendo entrare in linea di conto le accennate possibilità, per inusitate che esse siano, v’è modo di fissare adeguatamente delle antitesi necessarie, di riconoscere il punto in cui i processi di evocazione dell’elementare nel mondo d’oggi si trovano del tutto bloccati, per quel che riguarda certe loro possibili valenze positive, mentre sono quelle puramente dissolutive e regressive a prevalere in strati sempre più vasti delle nuove generazioni.

Learning, dopamine, and digital addiction (2020)

by Federico Soldani

In a few days there will be a lot of attention globally around the scientist/s who will receive the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Everyone has been talking about the biology and medicine of RNA viruses this year for obvious reasons. However, one aspect of the changes we are experiencing at present, that is not commonly seen in relation to medicine, is the massive and sudden movement of human activities, including the economy, into the digital world (from atoms to bits, to use a famous metaphor by MIT Medial Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte) in the context of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

The global addiction to digital technology, at present mainly via so-called smart-phones, is neurobiologically related to how our brains learn by means of the dopamine system.

One scientist in particular, Wolfram Schultz of the University of Cambridge has clarified brilliantly over the past few decades how the reward system works and how addictions and related behaviors can be explained in turn.

From the Wikipedia page in English (accessed October 3rd 2020): “The reward system is a group of neural structures responsible for incentive salience (i.e., motivation and “wanting”, desire, or craving for a reward), associative learning (primarily positive reinforcement and classical conditioning), and positively-valenced emotions, particularly ones which involve pleasure as a core component (e.g., joy, euphoria and ecstasy).”

When we discover anything that is better than expected (e.g., we could think of a caveman finding a source of water where he thought there was none) the dopamine neurons responsible for learning start firing more rapidly and as a consequence elevate the associated experience in the hierarchy of values, hierarchy which is located in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain.

Conversely, when an experience is worse than expected (e.g., the previous source of water dried up), the same dopamine neurons fire less rapidly attributing such experience a lower status in the hierarchy of values located in the pre-frontal cortex.

An increasingly large part of humanity is nowadays spending more time connected online than sleeping and there are phenomena such as the Hikikomori (see “Japan’s lost generation of digital age hermits“ and “Japan’s modern-day hermits: The world of hikikomori”).

Citizens worldwide are clicking on their computer mouses or on the screens of their computer phones or similar devices, in a way perhaps not too dissimilar from the experimental rats jumping on the lever dispensing addictive drugs or a direct electrical stimulus producing something similar to pleasure.

As previously discussed on these pages, chemically altered mental states and addiction more broadly were indeed Viktor Frankl’s main topics, when teaching at Harvard University in 1961. He was openly criticizing the experimental use of LSD proposed by Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary. Frankl made reference to the animals used by Olds and Milner in California for their self-stimulation experiments: those rats learned to jump on a lever, thereby closing an electric circuit and providing themselves with “feelings of orgasm or other forms of satisfaction,” becoming addicted, and jumping on the lever “up to 50,000 times a day.”

In today’s increasingly promoted cyber-psychedelic view of the world and lifestyle, the addictive element that substances such as the hallucinogen LSD might be lacking, in part at least since for instance other hallucinogens such as cannabis / THC have clearly documented addictive properties, might be found in the digital component of the equation.

Such hallucinogenic substances are not only promoted for their classic use, but now in so-called “micro-doses” as well, for instance LSD or psilocybin / “magic mushrooms” are promoted as substances helpful to increase creativity and are becoming popular in Hollywood and in the Silicon Valley, but in London as well, for daily use.

The relation of the dopamine reward system to living online, hence digitalization, digital addiction and consequent behaviors appears, if possible, now more relevant than ever as we find ourselves “between two ages,” to use Brzezinski’s expression coined at the end of the 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.”

Una visita a casa Freud (2010)

di Federico Soldani

(Pubblicato originariamente nel maggio 2010 per il blog RCS – Rizzoli Corriere della Sera – OK La Salute Prima di Tutto. Link originale non più disponibile, qui la lista degli articoli su archive.org)

Trovandomi qualche giorno a Londra per lavoro ho colto l’occasione per visitare 20 Maresfield Gardens, la casa dove Sigmund Freud, fondatore della psicoanalisi, si trasferi’ con la famiglia nel 1938.

L’annessione dell’Austria alla Germania nazista aveva costretto un ottantaduenne Freud a lasciare con grande riluttanza la casa di una vita a Vienna, in Berggasse 19: le teorie freudiane venivano apertamente osteggiate dal regime e per una famiglia ebrea non era piu’ sicuro restare a Vienna. Il trasferimento non fu affatto facile e venne reso possibile dall’aiuto decisivo di una allieva francese, la Principessa Marie Bonaparte, ma molti dei mobili dello studio, incluso il leggendario lettino adornato da un coloratissimo tappeto iraniano sul quale i pazienti si facevano psicoanalizzare, cosi’ come la gran parte dei pezzi della ricca collezione archeologica di Freud riuscirono ad arrivare in Gran Bretagna.

Maresfield Gardens e’ una via suggestiva, parte di una zona residenziale verde e tranquilla del quartiere di Hampstead a Londra, nella quale oggi si trovano parcheggiate auto di lusso. Nella casa che fu della famiglia Freud e che e’ diventata un museo visse fino ai primi anni ‘80 la figlia minore di Sigmund, Anna, anch’essa psicoanalista. I curatori del museo sono riusciti a preservare l’atmosfera domestica di una casa ancora vissuta.

Anna Freud fu l’unica dei sei figli a seguire le orme paterne, approfondendo la teoria psicoanalitica dell’infanzia e i meccanismi di difesa dell’io (ego), meccanismi che ancora oggi devono essere studiati ad esempio per l’esame che da’ accesso alla professione medica negli Stati Uniti. Elementi come questo testimoniano il ruolo dominante che le teorie psicoanalitiche esercitarono fino agli anni ‘70 nell’ambito della psichiatria statunitense.

Al piano terra, adiacente al giardino, si trova lo studio di Sigmund Freud, rimasto esattamente come era nel 1939 alla morte del celebre medico. Il visitatore resta colpito dalla straordinaria collezione di quasi duemila statuette ed oggetti antichi presente nello studio, soprattutto pezzi egizi, greci e romani, ma anche orientali.

Freud stesso disse di avere letto piu’ di archeologia che di psicologia e di fatto la sua creazione, la psicoanalisi, puo’ essere intesa con un parallelismo come una esplorazione archeologica della psiche.

L’analista, alla maniera dell’archeologo, cerca di trovare nel racconto di eventi individuali passati le tracce delle origini dei fenomeni psicopatologici. “Lo psicoanalista – disse Freud a uno dei suoi pazienti, influenzato dalla lettura delle imprese di Heinrich Schliemann, scopritore dei resti della citta’ di Troia – come l’archeologo nei suoi scavi deve scoprire strato dopo strato la psiche del paziente prima di poter arrivare ai piu’ profondi e preziosi tesori”.

(1 – continua)

Foto: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freud_Museum_London_2.jpg

Psychedelics. Or hallucinogens? (2020)

A “downward transcendence”

by Federico Soldani

Psychedelics are usually referred to as hallucinogens in medicine, including in the new ICD-11 of the World Health Organization, the International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision, that will come into effect in 2022.

Hallucinogens include molecules such as mescaline from cactuses such as peyote, LSD, psilocybin from so-called “magic mushrooms”, and DMT, among others. Historically hallucinogenic substances have also been referred to as phantastica (by Louis Lewin), psychotomimetics or, more recently, entheogens.

Cannabis and related products tend to be included, as well as substances such as the dissociative drug ketamine (and its S enantiomer, esketamine, approved in March 2019 by the U.S. FDA for depression) or the empathogen / enactogen MDMA / ecstasy.

Other terms used for hallucinogens in the past are schizophrenogenic (causing schizophrenia-like symptoms), mysticomimetic, psychodysleptic.

Several of these substances are also referred to as “club drugs.”

According to Harvard scientist Richard Evans Schultes, considered a father of modern ethnobotany and one of those who coined around 1979 the term entheogen (from Greek entheos, full of the god, inspired, possessed), the name hallucinogen was to be preferred to the scientifically unsound psychedelic (Hallucinogenic Plants, 1976):

“Narcotics that induce hallucinations – wrote Schultes – are variously called hallucinogens (hallucination generators), psychotomimetics (psychosis mimickers) , psychotaraxics (mind disturbers), and psychedelics (mind manifesters). No one term fully satisfies scientists, but hallucinogens comes closest. Psychedelic is most widely used in the United States, but it combines two Greek roots incorrectly, is biologically unsound, and has acquired popular meanings beyond the drugs or their effects.”

Schultes and Albert Hofmann, fathers of modern ethnobotany and LSD, respectively, entitled their co-authored classic texts Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use (1979), later revised in Plants Of The Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers (1992), and The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (1980).

The term psychedelic, now being promoted even in medical-scientific journals (an example here), was not developed in the scientific literature but, surprisingly enough, as a game of rhymes.

~~~

In a 1981 piece in the New York Times by William Safire, among other sources, it is described how the term psychedelic came into existence (emphasis added):

“In his book, “Predicting the Past,” Dr. Humphrey Osmond, a British-born scientist now working at Bryce Hospital, Tuscaloosa, Ala., recounts his creation of the word in the spring of 1956. In a paper for the New York Academy of Medicine on mescaline and LSD, he first thought of “psychotonimetic,” “psychotogen” and “deleriant,” but they suggested mimicry of psychoses, and that was not precisely what he had in mind.

He sent a draft of the paper to his friend Aldous Huxley, the author and psychic experimenter, and asked for a suitable word. “By return post came a beautiful word,” recalls Dr. Osmond, “… ‘phanerothyme.’ Its roots are phaneroin, a Greek word meaning ‘to reveal,’ and thumos, ‘the soul.’ “Huxley included a little rhyme: “To make this mundane world sublime / Take half a gram of phanerothyme.”

The suggested word did not transport Dr. Osmond. “I had at hand a little Latin dictionary for medical use that had some Greek words in it. It seemed to me that ‘psyche’ should be part of the word. The ‘thumos’ may not be revealed, but the psyche is certainly altered. I wanted a neutral word that would suggest transcendence in some splendid way. I found ‘delis’ – ‘to reveal.’ I put the pair together and came up with ‘psychedelic.’“

He then wrote back to Huxley with his concoction and included an answering rhyme: “To fall in Hell or soar angelic / You’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.“

~~~

So the term psychedelic started out as a divertissement, an exchange of rhymes between psychiatrist Dr. Osmond and writer Aldous Leonard Huxley. Of note, Aldous’ nephew Francis, an anthropologist, worked with Osmond experimenting LSD medical uses, and was the director of studies for a decade for the famous psychiatrist R. D. Laing in London; a book about Francis Huxley is upcoming.

The term psychedelic served the purpose, according to its author Humphrey Osmond, of not reminding that such substances induced psychoses or other disordered mental states (e.g., psychoto-mimetic – simulating psychoses; hallucinogen – for hallucinations; deliriant – for delirium).

Psychedelic was intended to be a “neutral” term, that would “suggests transcendence in some splendid way” at the same time.

~~~

It is interesting in this respect to read what the other author involved in the rhyme exchange, Aldous Huxley, explained in “Downward Transcendence” (1952), later included in a posthumous collection of writings on psychedelic substances (1977) entitled like one of the essays: Moksha (Sanskrit for “illumination” / “enlightenment” / “liberation”).

From the introduction: “In an epilogue to The Devils of Loudun, his historical account of mass hysteria and exorcism in a 17th-century French convent, Huxley drew on the ideas of Philippe de Felice in Foules en Delire, Ecstases Collectives, that there were three kinds of self-transcendence: downward, upward, and horizontal. Drug-taking, elemental sexuality, and herd poisoning were avenues toward the first category.”

~~~

Huxley was adamant, in the years before the word psychedelic came into existence, about the fact that primarily such substances induce a “downward transcendence” (emphasis added):

“In every case, of course – wrote Huxley in this essay – what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement.

The self-transcendence is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal….

To what extent, and in what circumstances, it is possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence?

At first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being.

So long as we are confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the various not-selves with which we are associated— the organic not-self, the subconscious not-self, the collective not-self of the psychic medium in which all our thinking and feeling have their existence, and the immanent and transcendent not-self of the Spirit. Any escape, even by a descending road, out of insulated selfhood makes possible at least a momentary awareness of the not-self on every level, including the highest.

William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, gives instances of “anaesthetic revelations” (note: Benjamin Blood coined the term “anaesthetic revelation” in 1874) following the inhalation of laughing gas.

Similar theophanies are sometimes experienced by alcoholics, and there are probably moments in the course of intoxication by almost any drug, when awareness of a not-self superior to the disintegrating ego becomes briefly possible.

But these occasional flashes of revelation are bought at an enormous price.

For the drug-taker, the moment of spiritual awareness (if it comes at all) gives place very soon to subhuman stupor, frenzy or hallucination, followed by dismal hang-overs and, in the long run, by a permanent and fatal impairment of bodily health and mental power.

Very occasionally a single “anaesthetic revelation” may act, like any other theophany, to incite its recipient to an effort of self-transformation and upward self-transcendence.

But the fact that such a thing sometimes happens can never justify the employment of chemical methods of self-transcendence.

This is a descending road and most of those who take it will come to a state of degradation, where periods of subhuman ecstasy alternate with periods of conscious selfhood so wretched that any escape, even if it be into the slow suicide of drug addiction, will seem preferable to being a person.“

Trump, spectacle and psyspeak (2020)

by Federico Soldani

Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America, has not agreed to be interviewed for a mental health assessment to be publicly disclosed thus far, with the exception of a relatively limited cognitive MoCA test by his physician who was allowed public disclosure.

Trump has been “diagnosed” with an unspecified number of mental labels, from formal, to metaphorical, to informal ones on the media, including so-called social media, over the years, probably too many to count. Among those: narcissist, pathological narcissist, sociopath, anxious, obsessive, compulsive, paranoid, conspiracy theorist, angry, autistic, etc.

Such unprecedented spread of psyspeak has surely helped the public becoming more versed to attribute diagnostic labels and to use psyspeak as a new cool language for politics and beyond.

The same is happening to other public figures. What is the diagnosis of Trump? Malignant narcissism? Paranoid personality? Autism? And what is the diagnosis of Greta, the climate change enfant prodige? Asperger’s? Again, autism?

President Trump has even proclaimed annually a World Autism Awareness Day in line with the United Nations.

The above questions are nowadays common among citizens worldwide, citizens who are largely viewing such public spectacle via mass media and new digital media such as Twitter, which has practically become a new institutional presidential communication channel.

The phenomenon of mass psyspeak learning includes citizens usually uninterested in politics; indeed such spectacle looks like entertainment, a so-called reality TV show, increasingly taking place on the Web.

As it happens, Trump has been the protagonist for years of one of the most popular reality TV shows, the Apprentice. Reportedly, though he denied this via Twitter (ça va sans dire), there were news about him joking of a possible future the Apprentice: White House show.

~~~

One of Trump’s critics from the so-called ‘Duty to Warn’ movement, who appears in a video with others, is former American Psychological Association President, Philip Zimbardo (in the photo above, 1971), author half a century ago of the Stanford Prison Experiment and of the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007).

Zimbardo worked two decades ago on TV programs such as BBC “Five Steps to Tyranny.” (2001, full documentary here).

In the episode ‘Crimes of Obedience,’ of his own reality TV show called “The Human Zoo” (2000), group power erupts and “nice people begin behaving like fascists.”

Zimbardo advocated for reality TV as a means for teaching psychology to the public: to “promote a positive view of psychology as a discipline committed to improving the quality of our lives as individuals and as a society. My whole life is about giving psychology away to the public.”

In an article of the Stanford Report entitled ‘Psychologist puts the ‘real’ into reality TV’, “Zimbardo sees reality TV as a logical format for teaching psychology. “The reason reality TV is so popular is because to observe human behavior is fascinating,” he observed. “I spend my whole life doing this.”

~~~

Could Trump’s daily worldwide spectacle and consequent “viral” spread of psyspeak help on an unprecedented scale with teaching psychology globally?

L’epidemia di ADHD nel baseball (2009)

di Federico Soldani

(Pubblicato originariamente nel dicembre 2009 per il blog RCS – Rizzoli Corriere della Sera – OK La Salute Prima di Tutto. Link originale non più disponibile)

In questi giorni negli Stati Uniti si torna a parlare dell’epidemia di disturbo da deficit di attenzione e iperattività (abbreviato in inglese come ADHD, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) tra i giocatori della serie A del baseball, la Major League statunitense (nella foto lo stadio Fenway Park, Boston). Una vera e propria epidemia che ha visto il numero di giocatori “malati” salire anche quest’anno e quasi del 300% dal 2006 (solo 28 giocatori) al 2009 (108 giocatori), con il salto più consistente nel 2007. Per incredibile che possa sembrare, circa il 10% tra i giocatori professionisti di uno sport in cui l’attenzione è essenziale per vincere ha ricevuto negli ultimi anni una diagnosi psichiatrica di ADHD. Un dato che potrebbe addirittura avviare un’inchiesta del Congresso.

Come si spiega questo fenomeno apparentemente bizzarro? Quando una dignosi psichiatrica aumenta fortemente in un certo gruppo o popolazione ci sono diverse spiegazioni possibili. Tra queste l’aumento delle cause del disturbo, la maggiore consapevolezza di malattia, il ridotto stigma (riprovazione sociale), il migliorato accesso ai servizi sanitari, il cambiamento dei criteri per la diagnosi o più semplicemente quella che si può definire “moda diagnostica” (si parla di più di un certo disturbo tra gli specialisti e viene preferita quella diagnosi anziché altre simili o confinanti).

Spiegazioni che però non giustificano l’entità e la rapidità dell’epidemia di ADHD tra i giocatori della Major League.

La lettura della notizia mi ha fatto tornare alla mente la reazione che ebbi la prima volta che da studente sentii parlare dell’ADHD, diversi anni fa. La diagnosi include problemi cognitivi di attenzione accompagnati dalla tendenza all’iperattività, interessa soprattutto infanzia e adolescenza e prevede tra le possibilità di cura l’uso di farmaci stimolanti quali le amfetamine (nomi commerciali Adderall, Ritalin, ecc.).

Una terapia controintuitiva: come è possibile, pensai, che non si diano dei sedativi ma il loro esatto contrario, degli stimolanti? Inoltre, come è possibile che, diversamente da depressione o disturbo bipolare, non si conoscano descrizioni storiche (non giustificate da una malattia quale una grave infezione cerebrale), dell’800 e prima ancora, di questo problema psichiatrico chiamato oggi ADHD?

Pensai si trattasse, più che di una malattia per la quale serve una cura, piuttosto di una condizione di scompenso dovuta alle troppe domande e agli stimoli eccessivi che arrivano ai ragazzi dal mondo esterno e a cui si fa fronte con una sorta di doping della vita quotidiana, gli psicostimolanti, anziché fare prevenzione rallentando i ritmi di vita. Stiamo forse curando i sani per aumentarne la performance? Allora l’idea mi parve talmente eterodossa da non meritare ulteriore riflessione.

Sotto questa etichetta, ADHD, possono rientrare casi tra loro molto eterogenei. L’epidemia di ADHD nel baseball americano però ci mostra come il disturbo non si possa spiegare in termini puramente medici ma necessiti di una spiegazione anche sul piano sociale. In altre parole svela che la diagnosi psichiatrica, in casi come questo, non è una diagnosi puramente medico-biologica. Sarebbe altrettanto facile per i giocatori di baseball ricevere una diagnosi di infarto del miocardio o di linfoma di Hodgkin?

Nel 2006 amfetamine e stimolanti sono stati inseriti nella lista delle sostanze vietate dalla Major League del baseball statunitense e l’unico modo lecito che hanno i giocatori per farne uso è diventato l’esenzione su base “terapeutica”.