I want to expand on what I discussed yesterday with Benjamin about the trauma model of mental disorders because the topic is a universal taboo, including in the racialist community, to the point that catastrophes like those of William Pierce and Don Black’s children are incomprehensible. (My working hypothesis is that, had they been treated well as children, they would have followed in their parents’ footsteps instead of betraying their ideals.)
It all has to do with the omnipresent taboo, and I’d like to illustrate it with the first reading I ever did of a mental health professional who, unlike bio-reductionist psychiatry, which is pseudoscientific, was one of the pioneers in talking about parents who schizophrenized their children.
Theodore Lidz
It was 1983 when I was broke precisely because of the abuse I had suffered at home the previous decade. At the famous Gandhi Bookstore in Mexico City, I read the interview with Dr Theodore Lidz in the book Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, edited by Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill. Back then, there were no comfortable armchairs like those found in Barnes & Noble bookstores, and I had to read that long interview standing up because the subject fascinated me. It was the first time in my life I had read someone who came close to what I believed had happened in my family.
Seven years later, I managed to buy a copy of Boyers and Orrill’s book, translated into Spanish by Alianza Editorial of Madrid, which was the same edition I had read at the Gandhi Bookstore. Since I don’t have the original English version, I can’t quote a passage from the interview with Lidz verbatim, but I can restate its content.
When the interviewer asked if Lidz was surprised that books on schizophrenia, like those by Ronald Laing, had become popular among young people (this is a 1971 book and reflected the mood of the 1960s), Lidz replied that he was surprised that Laing wrote for the general public and not for a professional audience. What struck me as I reread that interview yesterday was that Lidz added that it wasn’t the public’s business to know what happens in these families, even though Laing might have altered the details to make his cases anonymous. Lidz added that, in his work on cases of schizogenic parents—that is, those who drive their children mad—he wasn’t able to publish the reports of most of the families because some of the parents were quite well-known, and even with pseudonyms, they could have been recognised. He added that some of the cases ran to 50 to 80 typewritten pages, ‘truly precious documents’, but that they couldn’t be published.
This struck me greatly because in my Letter to Mom Medusa, I cite a case in which Lidz violated what he said above: the case of Mrs Newcomb (a pseudonym) and her extremely passive husband, who helped me so much in understanding my parents.
On the next page I reread yesterday, Lidz, with whom I spoke on the phone in the 1990s when he was already quite old, surprised me again because he wrote that he didn’t believe the schizogenic parents had done anything wrong; that they hadn’t meant to harm the child, and that this contrasted with what Laing wrote, for whom the parents’ intentions were often malicious. Lidz added, and here I retranslate it again from my Spanish copy into English, that ‘parents do the best they can—they can’t be different from what they are’.
This goes against the thesis of my autobiographical books, where I say that my father could have chosen the good: not to be influenced by the lies his wife told about me, but rather should have communicated with me in my adolescence (cf. both the final pages of Hojas Susurrantes and the first chapter of ¿Me Ayudarás?).
It’s been forty-two years since I first read the very lucid interview with Lidz standing in the Gandhi Bookstore, an interview that was a turning point in the research I did on my parents. It’s only natural that after so many years, my thinking has matured, largely due to the work of Alice Miller: the first psychologist in history who, unlike her predecessors (like Lidz), unequivocally took the side of the victimized child. (Despite what Lidz said, Laing didn’t completely side with the victim either, as we see in the middle chapter of my Hojas Susurrantes.)
In the previous thread, Benjamin complained that the racial right couldn’t care less about the issue, to which I responded that the German woman who received the mantle after Alice Miller died said that blaming parents is the most potent taboo in the human psyche. I’m posting this entry because, I see now, the taboo was present even in the works of my admired mentors, whom I read decades ago. The abysmal difference between them and us is that, in siding with the victim, we don’t care about what Lidz and company feared: that the public would realise which families the clinical material refers to, those ‘truly precious documents’ he didn’t dare publish (and which would have done enormous good for our cause had they been published!).
Do you now understand the new literary genre that people like John Modrow, Benjamin and I want to inaugurate? By siding a hundred per cent with the victim, not only do we not care about people recognising the abusive families, but we write using their real names!
Only revenge heals the wounded soul, even though we’re talking about literary revenge.
2 replies on “Lidz”
Thank you for this. I’ve read both main authors (Lidz more than Laing). I hate that, as you say, they were still such cowards over the issue, albeit not as bad as the modern breed. I enjoyed the work on fathers in Lidz’ The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders, and his work with Fleck and Cornelison on the family.
To be fair, despite all the Christian pseudoscience, occasional trust in biopsychiatry, and otherwise kooky perspectives, at least M. Scott Peck seemed to recognise the parents openly as evil, as by his scientific definition of the term (close to an autistic malignant narcissism), and sided very much with the victims, perhaps in most cases in the book (bar one, which disappointed me – the case of a co-habiting man with a sadistic wife).
I still like Schatzmann for his work on David Schreber. He certainly seemed to side with the patient in Soul-Murder. It’s the shame it’s not more common. I like reading Miller myself, but I find her extreme liberalism and incorrect Hitler thesis examples always impede my flow when I’m going over it again. Autobiographies are the best learning resource. I hope more books like ours’ and Modrow’s appear personally. With enough on the market the issue can’t be ignored the same way any more, not by these blind, head in the sand researchers (especially John Read et al.).
On page 110-113 of Madness and Genetic Determinism (a tome which otherwise quite comprehensively demolishes genetic determinist arguments for mental illness, including psychosis) Patrick D. Hahn writes of “the myth of the schizophrenogenic mother”, disparagingly, and in full damage control mode, odd for a scientist, much as – as with the original ‘debunkers’ so often name-dropped by anyone bringing up this position – he doesn’t provide any evidence supporting his case. He also quotes Dr. Fromm-Reichmann writing that “very little is known of the father of schizophrenic children”.
I would imagine that is the case, if that’s even true also, because very little is asked on the subject of the fathers of schizophrenic children, and very little investigated. Hahn has added to this problem. Why is he tentatively researching child abuse aetiologies for psychosis at all if he is unwilling to accept home-life testaments such as mine? Why is he even in this job? It makes no damn sense to me. I wrote a diary post about it (shared on my ‘bfts2025’ site, I think it’s 17th July 2023). These researchers are such cowards. I treat them mentally at times the same way I would treat active subversives. They set our cause back by decades.
Cowards is the exact word!
I remember a researcher who began reviewing what the psychiatric literature said about ‘schizophrenogenic mothers’ (a term that I abbreviate as ‘schizogenic’). He was shocked that every treatise he reviewed included the statement that this hypothesis has been ruled out, but that not a single psychiatric textbook included a footnote or endnote pointing out scientific studies that ruled out such a hypothesis! (It would be easy to do so: if we are right, there should be fewer schizophrenic adolescents in Israeli kibbutzs because they live in a community far from their parents.) But psychiatry textbooks simply talk about the ‘myth’ of mothers like mine, violating the academic etiquette of pointing out sources that support such a claim.
In other words it is, as I said, a flat statement (‘the myth of the schizophrenogenic mother’), and they get away with it precisely because the taboo against touching parents is so universal that sometimes even proponents of the trauma model are intimidated!
That’s why I take my work so seriously. Although I’ve read the Schatzmann book you mention, as far as I remember, he doesn’t generalise to other cases—millions of children, adolescents, and young adults whose parents blew their minds out. That’s why I like Lloyd deMause’s psychohistorical meta-perspective even though, like Miller, he suffered from a liberalism that today’s racialists would rightly find more than offensive.
It’s precisely because of the great limitations of all these precursors of ours that I want to ‘inaugurate’ a new literary genre that lacks these flaws.