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Category: Autobiography

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Autobiography Daybreak Publishing

Sample chapter

Below is my translation of pages 144-156 of my five-chapter book Hojas Susurrantes. The first chapter has already been translated into English and appears as a separate book, which can be obtained here. As soon as I finish the translation of this second chapter of Hojas Susurrantes, it will also be available as a separate book.

I confess that I still need to proofread once more the translated text below. I will do so after I finish translating the rest of that chapter, entitled “How to Murder Your Child’s Soul”.

I will not be posting another section of my book on this site. The translation below is merely a sample to encourage interested readers to obtain a printed copy once the translation is complete.

 

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Abusive Parents and Psychiatrists:
A Felonious Association

I believe we should ban all psychiatric relationships between adults and children and call child psychiatry by its correct and true name: psychiatric rape.

—Thomas Szasz [1]

Since the terrible events of my adolescence, I had been left with the idea that Dr Amara was simply incompetent in his profession. More than twenty years would pass before I read the critics of psychiatry and psychotherapy. The biggest surprise I encountered when reading these authors was the discovery that, since its inception, psychiatry has sided with parents in conflicts with their children; and it has sided with them regardless of the sanity of the children or the dysfunction of the parents in question.

This means that Amara was not incompetent in his profession. He behaved as psychiatrists have been behaving for a long time.

In the 17th century, the admission regulations for children of families in two French asylums stipulated: ‘Children of artisans and other poor inhabitants of Paris up to the age of twenty-five, who used their parents badly or who refused to work through laziness, or, in the case of girls, who were debauched or in evident danger of being debauched, should be shut up, the boys in the Bicêtre, the girls in the Salpêtrière. This action was to be taken on the complaint of the parents’. [2]

Similarly, in the 18th century, parents could appeal directly to the king to have a rebellious child imprisoned in the Bastille by means of a lettre de cachet.[3] Before the French Revolution, conditions in these asylums were so poor that half of the inmates died each year from malnutrition, cold and disease. Note that both the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière committed perfectly sane, though rebellious, adolescents for not wanting to work—‘laziness’—or for having premarital relations—‘debauched’. The same stratagem appeared in North America in the 19th century. In 1865, the Boston Times Messenger described the McLean Hospital asylum as a ‘Bastille for the incarceration of some persons obnoxious to their relatives’. [4]

These incredible commitment clauses could be understood if we view psychiatry from a perspective we are not accustomed to: not as it presents itself, an objective science, but as a mercenary profession that, since its origins, has allied itself with the highest bidder. And the highest bidders have not only been parents, but also husbands. In 1851, for example, the admissions regulation in the state of Illinois in the United States stipulated that, ‘Married women… may be entered or detained in the hospital at the request of the husband of the woman… without evidence of insanity required in other cases’. [5]

In our times, psychiatry has become a large pharmaceutical industry that operates within the realities of the market and the laws of supply and demand. The keyword is demand. When family problems arise it is the parents, and only the parents, who have the financial means to pay professionals. Therefore, from their origins, it has been convenient for these professionals to view family problems as medical problems. The cause of this self-deception, as one paediatrician observed, is that ‘teens are Big Business for psychiatrists’. [6]

Between 1980 and 1987, the number of children and adolescents temporarily admitted to American psychiatric hospitals rose by 43 per cent. Social researchers such as Ira Schwartz found that these internments were not due to mental disorders, but rather because the children were at war with their parents.[7] The profession called psychiatry is not geared toward defending these adolescents against their parents. Doing so would put psychiatrists at odds with their natural source of income. In some private psychiatric hospitals in the United States, high-ranking psychiatrists have pocketed between $600,000 and $900,000 annually. Paul Fink, president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the 1980s, stated bluntly: ‘It is the task of APA to protect the earning power of psychiatrists’.[8]

That psychiatrists have played the role of advocates for parents, husbands, and the status quo is seen with extraordinary clarity by studying how doctors diagnosed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In 1728, Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote that it was a ‘vile practice’ and a ‘clandestine inquisition’ to ‘send wives to Mad Houses for any whim or displeasure’.[9] Defoe was the first writer I know of who compared psychiatry to the Inquisition. In 1851, when slavery was legal in the United States, Dr Samuel Cartwright discovered that slaves who ran away from their masters suffered from drapetomania (from the Greek word drapetes, which conveys the idea of flight): a mental illness exclusive to blacks who had ‘a delusional desire to flee from their owners’. His discovery was published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. Other blacks suffered from dysthesia ethiopica, whose symptom was ‘inattentiveness to private property’. It was believed that a sane Negro was one who behaved docilely toward his master. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry and one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence, also discovered several nervous illnesses. He called one of them anarchia and defined it as a brain disease of those dissatisfied with the new American system.[10] Rush invented the Tranquilizing Chair, a device that immobilized his patients for half a day or an entire day. He was also one of the pioneers in conceiving of alcoholism as a biomedical entity. Today, Rush’s portrait still adorns the official logo of the American Psychiatric Association.[11]

In 19th-century Europe, things were no better. As was known since the time of Defoe, men had been using psychiatry to subdue their wives. Those who failed to fulfil the role assigned by society were labelled folie lucide in France (literally ‘lucid madness’) and moral insanity in England and its equivalent in Switzerland and Germany. Many were committed to psychiatric hospitals at the initiative of their husbands, fathers or brothers. In fact, in the 19th century women were the primary target of organized psychiatry, just as children were in the final decades of the 20th century and at the dawn of the 21st.

In 1820, Elizabeth Packard was hospitalized by her husband for freely lecturing on the Bible based on her own reflections. This woman survived her confinement, described what she saw in the asylum and, like Defoe, compared psychiatry to the Inquisition. Jeffrey Masson brought to light other testimonies from women who managed to escape from hospitals and exposed both their relatives and the psychiatrists. Hersilie Rouy, hospitalized at the Salpêtrière due to a dispute with her brother, testified in a book published in 1883: ‘For fourteen years I have lived under an incarceration that cut me off from the real world, took away my civil rights, deprived me of my name, took away everything I owned, destroyed my entire existence without even being able to say why’.[12] It is worth mentioning that the famous physician Jean Martin Charcot, who is credited with researching hysteria in women, was running the Salpêtrière when Hersilie was imprisoned.

A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière. The painting, one of the best-known in the history of medicine, shows the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot giving a clinical demonstration with patient Marie Wittman to a group of postgraduate students.

From the writings of Masson and Szasz we can deduce that since those times, not only has there been a conspiracy between psychiatrists and controlling family members, but also another conspiracy between psychiatrists and the State. For example, when, after escaping and publishing her book, Hersilie appealed to the French Ministry of Justice, it sided with the psychiatrists: ‘But our doctor, who knows more about this than we do, is convinced that she is insane, and we bow to his infallible science’.[13] Hersilie’s was not the only 19th-century case unearthed by Masson, but the pattern of events is similar: young, perfectly sane women diagnosed with ‘moral insanity’ despite the doctors’ acknowledgment that there was nothing wrong with their intellect (which is why they called it folie lucide). This ‘infallible science’, according to the French Ministry of Justice’s pronouncement, hospitalized many sane people.

A parenthesis. I’m not using these examples to promote feminism or criticize the practice of black slavery in North America. I believe in patriarchy, but not in a patriarchy based on a pseudoscience that claims that liberated women of the 19th century suffered from an illness that should be treated by doctors (something analogous to today’s pseudoscientific claim that children who are distracted in school have an illness that should be treated with drugs). I could say something similar about black fugitives. They should have been deported to Africa; doctors shouldn’t have invented fake diseases.

Another curious psychiatric label for upper-class single women who had suitors from lower social strata—and here I can’t help but think of the plot of the movie Titanic—was nymphomania.[14] There were cases in which these women were committed in their prime, only to be released as old women to a nursing home. Below I quote part of a letter from Dr Massini to Dr Binswanger to commit Julie La Roche to a Swiss asylum:

In mid-January she ran off from there, supposedly with her brother, but in fact with the adventurer von Smirnoff, and suddenly appeared in Basel, presenting him as her fiancé. Here of course the relationship was not approved…

All of this leads me to conclude that Miss La Roche, who is otherwise a thoroughly lovable girl, is heading toward ‘moral insanity’, which makes medical supervision advisable… She will surely attempt to escape, perhaps at least pretend to commit suicide. It will therefore be necessary to put her in charge of incorruptible guards who will watch over her very closely… I do not believe that Mr. La Roche ever mistreated his daughter, though he may well have reprimanded her harshly.[15]

One might think that these are relics of a bygone medical past, having nothing to do with our civilized times. But this last line from Massini reminds me of Amara: to declare with all his authority my parents’ innocence in the face of my accusations and, furthermore, to have suggested I should be committed—just what Massini did with Julie La Roche. This woman’s accusation had been the following:

My father abused me in a terrible manner… after he had thrown a sharp object at my head with such force that my face was covered with blood, to which a deep wound testified. There are witnesses to all these events.

One day in Saarburg, where we returned after our marriage [with von Smirnoff], and where I had to remain in bed, we were surprised by the police and then by my father. Though sick, I was dragged off through storm and rain by Mr. La Roche [her father]. My marriage certificate, everything was in vain. With court transportation, I was taken to Kreuzlingen, which is a private insane asylum (as can be ascertained by looking it up in any directory). There, on the first day, I was diagnosed as melancholic and insane.[16]

Like Hersilie, Julie managed to escape and left us her testimony, originally published in the Swiss newspaper Thurgauer Tagblatt. And also, as in the case of Hersilie, the doctors united to confront the accusation. Julie was never vindicated by society. The newspaper where her accusation appeared had to publish a shameful retraction asserting that Julie did, indeed, suffer from moral insanity.[17]

Masson comments that if any insanity existed, it came from the father and the psychiatrists, not from the girl. Public opinion among Swiss citizens, or French in Hersilie’s case, deferred to the family institution represented by the father as well as the medical establishment and the State.

19th-century labels were not always invented to stigmatize second-class citizens like women: sometimes they were invented to avoid stigma among the privileged classes. When a daughter from a good family stole and was arrested, a psychiatrist was asked to diagnose her as suffering from kleptomania: an illness whose symptom was an uncontrollable compulsion to steal.[18] Thus, the law was circumvented and the daughter was able to return home. But just like stigmatizing labels, it is evident how the authorities openly colluded with psychiatrists to avoid, or provoke, social sanctions.

These diagnoses—‘drapetomania’ and ‘dysthesia ethiopica’ for blacks, ‘moral insanity’ and ‘nymphomania’ for women—may seem laughable to us. Values have changed so much that the essentially political nature of labels and the role of psychiatrists as agents of the system are clearly visible.

However, although with more obscure, technical, and difficult-to-detect labels, the situation today remains essentially the same. Labelling a child ‘hyperactive’ or an adolescent ‘schizoid’ only mystifies realities that can be expressed in the vernacular: naughty child, withdrawn teen. Furthermore, as in the case of societies where blacks and women were discriminated, these pseudo-diagnoses obscure the political actions that are desired to be taken. I say pseudodiagnoses because no doctor has ever been able to see under a microscope the deteriorated nervous tissue of a hyperactive child or a teenager labelled as schizoid. The new illnesses are as chimerical as the old ones: they exist only in the minds of ideologues whom people call psychiatrists but who are actually advocates for parents who wish to take control measures with their offspring.

Leaving aside genuinely pathological cases, it can be said that in past centuries and today, the hidden objective of psychiatry is control, especially of rebellious members of society: black fugitives and liberated women of yesteryear, or the young population today. That this policy persisted in the 20th century is confirmed by the statements of Francis Braceland, president of the American Psychiatric Association during the hippie movement of the 1960s. Braceland declared:

It is a feature of some illnesses that people do not have insight into the fact that they are sick. In short, sometimes it is necessary to protect them for a while from themselves… If a man brings his daughter to me from California because she is in manifest danger of falling into vice or in some way disgracing herself, he doesn’t expect me to let her loose in my hometown for that same thing to happen.[19]

It couldn’t be clearer. Note how psychiatrists haven’t changed since the 17th century, when they sent these daughters ‘in evident danger of being debauched’ to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. Needless to say, the behaviour of these adolescents, both in the 17th and 20th centuries, was rebellion, not a mental disorder. Activists like Phyllis Chesler have written books of feminist philosophy on the subject, such as Women and Madness. Once again, I believe in patriarchy and I’m not against disciplining a spoiled teenager. But there’s a great danger in inventing pseudoscientific conditions that the medical profession must treat against the will of the ‘patient’ as if these behaviours were ‘diseases’.

Let us now look at psychiatry in even more recent times. In the brochure Schizophrenia, published in 1998 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists of England and the National Council on Schizophrenia of that country, we can read: ‘How do families react if a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister develops schizophrenia and becomes odd and unpredictable? They may regard the change in behaviour as rebellious, perverse and unacceptable without at first realising that it is due to mental illness’.[20]

The brochure doesn’t ask how the parents appear to the teenager. It doesn’t ask, for example, ‘Is your mother so intrusive that she treats you like a child? Is she tyrannical, possessive, and constantly bullying you, and that’s why when you distance yourself from her, you seem strange and unpredictable?’ Psychiatrists wouldn’t write a pamphlet for young people who couldn’t afford to pay them. Those who wrote the pamphlet, the official psychiatric associations in England, had ears exclusively for the parents. It doesn’t even occur to them that the young man’s version of events exists or that his rebellion could be justified. The pamphlet’s equation: rebel / perverse / unacceptable = schizophrenic reminds me that during Brezhnev’s government, the rebellion of political dissidents, a perversity unacceptable to the Russian authorities, was officially considered schizophrenia. There were many such cases, and they are well documented, but I’ll refer to just one.

In 1968, the year of the student revolts and shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Natalia Gorbanevskaya protested against the invasion in Moscow’s Red Square. She was arrested in August of that year and sent to a psychiatric hospital called the Serbsky Institute. The chairman of the commission, Professor Morozov, diagnosed Natalia as suffering from ‘a chronic mental illness, type of schizophrenia’. The commission concluded that Natalia showed changes in her reasoning process and in her critical and emotional faculties. It was concluded that Natalia had participated in the Red Square demonstration in a state of mental illness and was hospitalized.[21] Even before Brezhnev, Nikita Khrushchev had stated in Pravda: ‘Crime implies a deviation from generally approved standards of conduct, and its cause is often mental disorder… It is evident that the mental state of those who call for opposition to communism is not normal’.[22]

Rebellious women have fared no better in the West. As Chesler wrote a few decades ago, statistics continued to show that women were labelled psychiatrically more frequently than men; they were given far more antidepressants and sometimes continued to be hospitalized by their husbands or relatives. I myself heard of a wealthy Opus Dei family in Monterrey, Mexico that at the beginning of the new century used psychiatry to hospitalize a daughter when she divorced—an inconceivable sin for those in Opus Dei—to run off with a rocker. According to what Alejandro Fonseca, the rocker, told me personally when I interviewed him in Monterrey in August 2004, his partner remained imprisoned by her family. The fact that the West has criticized what Soviet psychiatry did to Natalia while similar measures are taken with women in our hemisphere is a double standard.

But returning to the English pamphlet. Its target readership was the general population of the United Kingdom. According to American and European psychiatric manuals, the five symptoms of schizophrenia are: (1) hallucinations, (2) delusions, (3) disorganized thinking, (4) extremely disorganized behaviour, and (5) catatonic behaviour: two of the five symptoms are required for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. However, the UK pamphlet reads something similar to what the Serbsky Institute commission did to Natalia: that the family of the (pseudo) schizophrenic ‘may see the change in behaviour as rebellious’ without understanding ‘that it is due to an illness’. In other words: in practice, and quite independently of disturbed behaviour, adolescent rebellion can be an illness: schizophrenia. Women’s liberation in the 19th century could be seen as an illness: moral insanity. The black slave’s desire to escape was an illness: drapetomania. All of these ‘illnesses’ have required medical intervention, which frequently ends in imprisonment without legal trial. In this regard, in another part of the same pamphlet we read: ‘People with schizophrenia do not always realise they are ill and may refuse treatment when they badly need it. In these circumstances, the Mental Health Act in England and Wales [enacted in 1983] and similar legal arrangements in other countries, permit compulsory admission to hospital’. [23]

Please note that this is a pamphlet published in 1998, and that I obtained it during a sort of social service during my Open University course of 1999. As I said above, psychiatric positions have not changed since the days of American slavery or European sexism; only social values have. Psychiatrists have always behaved, and continue to behave, as agents of the current status quo: whether they are landowners in the American South, fathers who abhor their daughters’ plebeian affairs, or controlling mothers who tolerate no independence in their children.

Another kind of evidence of the alliance between parents and psychiatrists comes from someone who left the profession of psychoanalysis and whom I have quoted in previous pages: Jeffrey Masson. In Final Analysis, one of the books I most treasure because it opened my eyes to understand what Amara did to me, Masson tells us:

“When a child manifests gross pathology…” These words startled me into consciousness. They were enunciated, for emphasis, very slowly, and in a booming voice. There could be no doubt about it, the department chairman was a fine orator. He had acted on the stage. His voice, his urban wit, his friendliness, his poise and his great knowledge of literature were all admirable. He laughed a great deal. He liked to make jokes. You had to like him.

But you did not have to like what he said. And I did not. What was it to “manifest gross pathology”? In this case, an eight-year-old boy was the “identified” patient. The word “identified” was a popular and venerable psychiatric term. He had been “identified” as the patient by his mother and father, simply because he was not doing well at school, he had few friends, and he was a “problem” at home. How was this, I wondered at the time, “gross pathology”? Where was I? I was at grand rounds. [24]

The grand rounds were the visits to a psychiatric hospital in Toronto during Masson’s psychoanalytic training. Masson is the only analyst in the world who has dared to expose, in several books, ‘the indoctrination process’ of this ‘semi-secret society’ that is the training of psychoanalysts. During the meetings, the hospital staff would gather and a senior psychiatrist would present the case of one of the hospitalized patients which, Masson observed, was humiliating for the latter. ‘It soon became apparent that every presentation of therapy was only good as the intellect and heart of the presenter. You did not, you could not, learn about the patient, but you learned plenty about the presenter… So here was a department chairman talking about still another “patient”, Jill, nineteen, “who was admitted to the hospital with a schizophrenic psychotic decompensation”.’ [25]

The director of the department that presented these cases was a respected psychiatrist who believed in the appropriateness of electroshock therapy. Masson continues:

How did we know, for example, that somebody was “sick”? It was simple: they were brought to the hospital. The chairman made it clear that a person who had been “identified” as a patient by the family, was, in fact, disturbed in a psychiatric way. People apparently did not err when it came to making these kinds of home diagnoses. Thus, he told us, speaking of the “maladjusted” (a medical term?) child, that we should accept “that the ‘identified’ patient is ‘sicker’ than the others. A study by S. Wolff (in the British Journal of Psychiatry) lends support to the family’s identification of its most disturbed member as the ‘sick one’…” To me, this was suspiciously convenient for the psychiatrist. What gave the psychiatric community this power? [26]

Who gives them special powers over children and adolescents? Society and its laws, of course; the State, the culture itself!

In 1995, a study published by American psychiatrists concluded that family members are just as capable as professionals of ‘identifying’ behaviour that requires involuntary hospitalization.[27] Another piece of evidence of a conspiracy between parents and psychiatrists is suggested by the fact that the official psychiatric organization in the US, the American Psychiatric Association, has entered into open collaboration with one of the most despicable organizations in North America: NAMI. Many members of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill are parents who wish to take repressive measures against their children. Their stance has been so extreme that it has gone so far as to justify lobotomy and harass psychiatrists who do not practice the bio-reductionist faith.[28]

It is important to be aware that this alliance between tyrannical parents and psychiatrists is a very old story, and one that continues unchallenged in our societies. In my own case, when I complained to my father in 1991 that he and my mother had ignored the accusations in my Letter to mom Medusa, that they had ‘ignored it, took no action on it’, he responded in writing: ‘We didn’t shelve anything down; we paid your psychiatrist and saw others. Everyone, including Amara, accepted that we were right’ (emphasis in the original by underlining).

Why are psychiatrists able to ‘accept’ that the parents who have horrendously abused a child ‘are right’? Why do they always blame the child and exonerate the adult? In the Letter I delved into my parents’ minds but not into what might have gone on in the mind of the doctor who acted as their representative. Now, twelve years after writing it, I think I’m ready to analyse analysts, even if that task will take me the rest of this book.

 

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[1] Videotaped speech by Thomas Szasz at the headquarters of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights in Los Angeles, California (February 28, 2004).

[2] Quoted in Thomas Szasz: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 14.

[3] Ibid., pp. 48f.

[4] Ibid., p. 308.

[5] Quoted in Thomas Szasz: Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (Praeger, 2001), p. 90.

[6] Robert Mendelssohn, quoted in Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry, p. 298.

[7] Joe Sharkey: Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental System Gone Crazy (St. Martin’s Press), 1994, pp. 12 & 98.

[8] Paul Fink, quoted in Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry, p. 360. I read about these million-dollar earnings in Sharkey: Bedlam, p. 202.

[9] Daniel Defoe, quoted in Thomas Szasz: Esquizofrenia (México: Ediciones Coyoacán, 2002), p. 133. The text in which Defoe spoke out against the psychiatry of his time is titled “Demand for Public Control of Madhouses”.

[10] Quoted in Sharkey: Bedlam, p. 182.

[11] Whitaker summarizes Benjamin Rush’s psychiatric work in the first two chapters of Mad in America.

[12] Quoted in Jeffrey Masson: Against Therapy (HarperCollins), 1999, p. 57. The alliance between parents and psychiatrists is particularly discussed in chapters 1, 5, and 6.

[13] Ibid., p. 22.

[14] Roger Gomm: “Reversing Deviance” in Tom Heller (ed.): Mental Health Matters (The Open University, 1996), p. 80.

[15] Masson, Against Therapy: pp. 70f.

[16] Ibid., 72f.

[17] Ibid., p. 76.

[18] Gomm: Mental health matters, p. 80.

[19] Quoted in Szasz: The Manufacture of Madness, pp. 46f.

[20] Schizophrenia (National Schizophrenia Fellowship & Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1998), p. 12.

[21] Víctor Miguel Lozano: “la psiquiatría y la psicocirugía como instrumentos de represión” in Alternativas, pp. 207 ff.

[22] Cited in Paul Johnson: Tiempos Modernos (Ediciones B, 2000), p. 834.

[23] Schizophrenia (pamphlet, op. cit.), p. 9.

[24] Jeffrey Masson, Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 48f.

[25] Ibid., pp. 50f.

[26] Ibid., p. 51.

[27] J. R. Husted and A. Nehemkis: “Civil Commitment Viewed from Three Perspectives: Professional, Family, and Police” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (1995; 23, 4), pp. 533–546.

[28] Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry, pp. 425f. NAMI also tried to boycott Loren Mosher’s humanitarian project: a kind-hearted psychiatrist with his inpatients.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

3rd edition

by Benjamin

Editor’s note: This is one of the new segments from the third edition of Ben’s autobiographical book (for context, see here):

 

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In time, my Mum ceased trying to defend me. Perhaps she changed her mind and began to doubt herself. More likely, she gave up in nervous strain under the force of Dad’s charming dishonesty and intellectual manipulations of the dialogues. I know around thispoint she had to start taking antidepressants herself, and, though she had put many complaints in to the doctors over their written words and their professional treatment of her, none were ever listened to. Part of me wonders if she turned a blind eye to my suffering in the house, desperate for her own sanity that it was not true.

Either way, despite the strain of defending me, my mother betrayed me in the end by this cowardly abandonment of her duty towards me, much I do see how tough it would have been for her. These days she has gone back to her familiar patter of, “oh, his life has always been good, nothing ever happened” and “I simply don’t remember those days you mention”, if an outsider inquires after my home life, or if I turn to her and demand she account for Dad. Perhaps it is easier on her to exist in complete denial. Either way, it drives me to intolerable rage, knowing that there was a time once when she did stand up for me, only to have her spirit crushed out of her again by the cold, dispassion of idiotic medical staff. I pity her very much, but I cannot forgive her. She was my only hope.

For her part, the young therapist did not seem to mind so much that I was not in the family meetings. She noted down my “hostile and aggressive” manner, and continued with Dad, ladling pejorative labels on me, and mischaracterizing my “poor” behaviour, with me never there to defend myself, or to correct Dad’s second-hand reportage each week. The sessions continued weekly for over six months. Why on earth did she think I might be upset?! Was she stupid?! If she didn’t have the natural compassion to take my side as her patient and sole charge, why was she even working in psychological healthcare?! I cursed the day I had ever been put forward for them. By now though, the constant shaming I was subjected to, and the faulty opinion-making was beginning to take its toll, and my mind was indeed starting to come apart, my ego shattered, and my sense of cognitive calm fracturing at the edges. I felt divorced from the world, hanging in the cold, dim edges, like in fog, teetering on the abyss of something vast and deep. Most days I would cover this over, but the heightened anxiety was persistent, and, eventually, one day, I just cracked

Sitting again on the chair by my computer desk, in the middle of a dull, clouded afternoon, during a light rain storm outside, once more I took a strange fascination in my healing, much-abused right arm. Long-accustomed as I was to bending down and biting away at the area when in my lower moods, this time I approached from a far odder, more mechanical angle. To this day, I cannot remember what might have stressed me, if anything, worryingly. I think in general my life around that point was more than enough, even without anything specific to obliterate my mental wellbeing.

I had just finished eating my lunch for the day, an oven bake pepperoni pizza of the kind I had begun to consume on a regular basis for ease of preparation, and still had a sharp kitchen knife on my plate; one suitable for severing the crusts of my pizza, as well as a standard fork, and a teaspoon I had been using to gently separate the melted cheese (which I had never been much of a fan of long-term) from the base. Upon finishing my meal, something drew me again to my arm, not feeling any great distress, but somehow preoccupied, as if enticed.

Taking the relatively-sharp kitchen knife, I pushed down until the flesh popped, and carved deeply into my forearm skin, feeling little pain, perhaps on account of the severed nerve endings from long before, or maybe just from my daze itself, continuing in long grooves to shape out a rectangular ‘box’ around the outsides of my main healing area. When I had finished my ‘masking work’, blood trickling a little down my arm as it always did, I began to partition the flesh inside into cubes, cutting the little squares of epidermis into neat blocks, like a piece of raw tofu, but still attached to my lower dermis layers, and to the muscle underneath. No one came to disturb me that day, and so I worked slowly, for what felt like well over an hour, delineating the rectangle’s contents into neat parcels of meat, all in a line.

Once I had finished this task, I took the point of the knife again, and slit the hypodermis under my closest blocks away from the muscle layer, releasing little globs of subcutaneous fat – a grisly process where much pressure and repetition was required, and where I was obliged now and again to stop so I could snap down and suck up any excess blood. Eventually, the skin still sticking to the muscle in various places, I was able to stick my teaspoon under the excised flaps, and lever each cube up and off my arm, sometimes with a terrible tugging, and a fresh new splatter of blood.

Eventually, I was left with another wide hole in my arm – not desperately deep, but dark and bloody, in an expanse of ravaged veins, and ripped hair follicles, and otherwise the white strands of mangled flesh and fat – and beyond that, a heap of around forty small, soft, pinky-coloured guerdons, each just under 1cm x 1cm, sat on my plate in a pool of blood and clear-yellow bodily fluids.

With my fork, I proceeded to pick up each morsel of severed skin, and, in grisly auto-cannibalistic fashion, popped them one by one into my mouth, chewing for a long time on the gristle of each lump, like a mixture of pork rinds and stale bubble gum, and sucking the sweet, wet, sickly flavour out of the pieces of my own arm. Cooling blood trickled down past my chin. I don’t think I was thinking anything at all.

True, I had bitten my arm before, many times, but never had I stooped to actually consuming my own body, preferring instead to merely leave bite wounds or otherwise allow the skin to fall away unaddressed, and thankfully, this particularly gory and disturbing incident was never to be repeated.

When my mother did come in later and discover me, I cannot remember what was said. I can guess my parents’ reactions would have been total horror, an alien sensation. All I do remember is that I was taken down to the local surgery for an examination, and from there swiftly to Broomfield Hospital again, almost a second home to me by now, and of a similar surgical quality. Sitting in a waiting room to be examined by the doctors, it was as if in a surreal film. “So, why is the patient with us today?” I heard one of the ward staff say to another. “Oh, he cut off and ate a bit of his arm, apparently” was the seemingly unconcerned reply. Perhaps they too found it hard to register.

In the end, I was dressed, and sent home again (without psychological evaluation), and further notes made for my case-file, but, bizarrely, despite the severity of this hideous personal action, nothing was ever said of it to me in aftermath, and I do not remember my then psychiatrist ever taking any particular interest. There are a great many ‘blips’ like this in my record; times I would have thought pertinent to make at least brief mention of, if not to scrutinize intently. I can only assume they too would like somehow to brush them under the rug, surely some niggling opposition to their ‘it’s a brain disease so just take your meds and you’ll be fine’ argument. As it stands today, my prior history of extreme autophagia is never mentioned by any new psychiatrists I come into contact with, and certainly not by any of their day-to-day care workers. It’s as if they’ve purged it from my history, and like none of this ever happened. I find that a great, telling, frustration.

Categories
Autobiography Literature

Bibliophile

Hatnote of September 14:

These days (weeks?) I’ll be drying the dozens of soaked books, page by page, with paper towels. I won’t have time to post many entries. My library takes priority because it allows me to write.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Der Bücherwurm is an oil-on-canvas painting by the German painter and poet Carl Spitzweg.

This is an update to my article from earlier this month, “Books”.

Today, I took a taxi to retrieve my flood-damaged books, which were packed in five boxes.

As I said nine days ago, what is really valuable about these books are my countless footnotes. Since I am debating with the authors, they are like intellectual diaries. That is why I plan, to the extent of my modest means (I have already purchased special brushes to remove the mould, a fan, and a heavy-duty dryer), to rescue what I can from the wet books.

It will be an arduous task that will take weeks… This afternoon, for example, I can’t do anything because the sky is already cloudy, and it was rainy. Tomorrow I will start: in this season it very rarely rains in the mornings and the sun is healthy.

It pains me that I won’t be able to recover the glossy paper books, usually the ones with illustrations, because the pages have stuck together; and the home remedies on YouTube no longer work because my books were wet for several weeks (the guy who keeps them at home is a bit deranged and didn’t warn me when a downpour flooded the room with my boxes). I spoke to an institution that is capable of separating those stuck pages, but the cost of that process, with special liquids and chemicals, is so prohibitive that only a multimillionaire could afford it.

The rest is salvageable, but the water managed to erase many of my notes.

Something that alarms me about the new generations of noble Aryans who are conscious of their race is that they do not seem to value books, but rather focus on purely physical activities. Given that the darkest hour of the West is due to the Jewish infection—I am referring to Christianity—which was transmitted by the written word, to defeat that idea requires another written idea (see what Messala said to Sextus). As the Spanish saying goes, Para que la cuña apriete tiene que ser del mismo palo (For the wedge to tighten it has to be of the same suit), i.e., if you want to defeat the Jew and his ideas, you better become a scholar, a bookworm.

On the one hand, I understand these very young Aryans, because most respected human knowledge has nothing to do with 14/88, as LK rightly observed on this site today about people like Stephen Hawking. But keeping the books I have been accumulating for decades is vital because the notes are testimony to a spiritual odyssey. And if I ever have an heir living in my town to whom I can pass on the mantle, he would keep those old books for their biographical value (just as, say, those who preserve the work of William Pierce keep his personal library).

Although I am not a fan of Carl Sagan, I would like to end this post with this clip from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

Consumption, 16

Editor’s 2 cents:

In chapter 14, we read that the father said the following to his son:

“I don’t know what you have to complain about, Benjamin; you’ve never suffered!” He has repeated this mantra several other times over the years. It was the final nail in the coffin.

This sentence perfectly portrays what a “schizogenic” father is: he who “schizophrenises” his son. The father’s repeated statement—which reminds me of what my mother used to say to me after my parents and a psychoanalyst crucified me at seventeen (and I could no longer pursue a career)—not only denotes a colossal lack of empathy towards his son, but also a complete reversal of the facts (in real life Ben suffered a maddening hell)!

Anyone who wants to understand why narcissistic parents are capable of these maddening inversions of reality could watch Richard Grannon’s videos on narcissism. However, Grannon, like other YouTubers, focuses on adults who have a narcissistic partner. In my opinion, all these channels are cowardly because the adult can easily cut off the narcissistic partner. On the other hand, as Alice Miller tells us, the child doesn’t have that option! He (or she) has to stay at home and put up with the schizogenic behaviour of the narcissistic parent (who, due to his infinite sin of pride, is unable to see the beam in his eye) until the abusive behaviour blows the child’s mind, as happened to Benjamin.

I am currently in a serious predicament because, after my siblings sold our parents’ mansion, my financial situation has become precarious. Even so, I believe I must continue translating my work on this subject although of course, instead of using Benjamin’s life as the basis for my explanation, I use my own.

Categories
Autobiography

Consumption, 15

My father and mother have never accepted their responsibility for the trauma they caused me in childhood and adolescence. I don’t think they ever will. They are too proud by far to accept the truth of gross personal error. What my father did and what my mother did not do. As only consolation for what has been a hellish life, I look back with warm reminiscences on that one instance – that tiny spark of hopeful joy – where she did come to my defence in the sharing of truth, sad only that she, in turn was abused by cold professionals on account of their hubris, and arrogance, and industry gaslighting, the fundamental – unfalsifiable – tenets of bio-reductionist psychiatry, a pseudoscience of ignorance and blind dogmatism. I have covered the evils of psychiatry more comprehensively in my other books, though, so I will not repeat myself here.

Beyond all the pain and heartbreak, I still love my parents. When read by them, I hope this book will go some way towards redeveloping our relationship together before their deaths. They raised me as only they could, damaged themselves from their childhoods in 1940s Ireland, where I am aware my father was psychologically brutalised daily by the sadism of his harsh Christian Brothers schoolmasters and further tormented by his emotionally neglectful mother and a crowd of elderly aunts (as my grandfather was often away at sea for long stretches, and fighting in the Second World War), for whom nothing he ever accomplished or achieved academically was ever good enough, and where my mother and her large family lived in constant fear of hunger and deprivation, coupled to a terror of her father, and his endless shouting and rows with her mother, and (I think) some physical violence. The great hurt has been passed down through generations, from parents to children and then to their children. It is understandable, at least. It is a shame I cannot write their own stories yet, as they deserve to be heard.

I wrote this book as official self-therapy, in final resolution, to unlock the repressed sadnesses I have never been able to recount otherwise and to come to terms with myself and with my family, to heal. To know myself again. It has been a painful journey, but I hope some small understanding can be gained from these lines. Mental illness is an expression of family trauma, not brain abnormalities, chemical imbalances, or genetic defects. For this reason, its aetiology is sadly taboo in our society. After all, the Christian commandments to honour our fathers and mothers have long saturated Western thought, shared by parental introjection down many centuries, subconsciously shaping our morality and credulity and inspiring our decision-making. To hold them to account instead is to transgress this unwritten assumption. One can see why the psychiatrists and their industry act as gatekeepers and parental defenders, in cahoots with abusive parents over any genuine healing treatment of their victims. To admit otherwise would destroy the claimed legitimacy of their profession.

However, maybe now more will be inspired by this document to share their home lives, and our society, finally, after more than three hundred years of exposure to this punitive and fallacious pseudomedical torture, will begin in turn to knit together again and recover. It is at least a hope. We all owe ourselves that. In general now, given this main autobiographical account (among an expanding group of others), it has become clear that psychotic patients are not born but made.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Benjamin’s book can be obtained here.

Categories
Autobiography

Consumption, 13

Book II
Chapter 8

One morning, I walked into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for myself. Just a piece of cucumber; I ate sparingly in those days to compensate for the nagging desire for food stimulated by the Olanzapine, where no meal was ever filling enough, and where my metabolism was negatively affected, leading to more tiredness atop the already exacerbated lethargy on account of the emotional dulling and cognitive impairment that accompanies psychotropic antipsychotic drug use. My parents were already awake. My father stood with his back to me as if dressed for work, chatting to my mother, laughing about something. As I came in, I caught the tail end of his words, “…and it’s a shame he’s not creative either. What could I do with him? It’s clear he’s a bit of an idiot, haha. Not much going on.”

I quickly realised, to my horror, that he was talking about me. My mother was silent, listening politely. Her opinion was hard to gather from her, although I had seen her nod as he spoke. As I heard his words, a withering shame took hold of me, and I made my presence known to them, tears forming at his betrayal, “Dad! I heard you! How can you say that?!” to which my Dad turned suddenly, embarrassed to be caught out. He stared open-mouthed at me, mumbling “Oh” but not giving me the desired answer.

By this point, tears were streaming from me, and I was sobbing audibly and very upset. As if the recent weeks (and longer) had not been awful enough, this was the final straw. Instead of comforting me, my mother stood there watching, saying, “Oh, come on now, Benjamin, he didn’t mean it…” to which all I could say, through painful sobs, was, “No, Mum, he did! He knew what he was saying there!” She repeated her platitudes to me, and Dad started to speak also, adding that he was “only talking, don’t take it seriously”, but by then, I was in an awful state. All the years of hurt welled up in me; all the times he had said as much to my face when she was annoyed or just in an idle comment as if it was an obvious statement. He had mocked my abilities and my very person on hundreds of occasions. And to think recently, only a day or two before, when I had asked Mum what Dad thought of me, she had said, “he loves you very much, and he’s very proud of you and your creations. He particularly likes your drawings at the moment.” I was torn now, unsure how to process the blatant mixed messages beyond being very upset. This wasn’t love; this was an abuse of my mind in a regular stream of matter-of-fact put-downs and snappy below-the-belt remarks.

My thoughts were overpowered with grief and rage, and before I could help myself, my eyes glazed over, and my head started to dip down. And then, quick as a flash, I grabbed out at my right arm with my mouth and proceeded to bite my teeth firmly onto the skin, still crying, tugging at a healed area, trying to prise more flesh off in that familiar agonising pain.

Dad was relatively quick to notice this, although my mother was shocked. “No… Benjamin!” he called, “No! No! Don’t do that! Stop doing that!” He reached out for me, in my feral daze, and started to try and pull my clenched jaws off my arm. But I was locked tight and tearing. Blood was beginning to form now around the creases of my mouth as I continued to pull away at the skin (and self-biting is a strenuous process), as Dad, taking my head in both his hands, tried to lever me off the wound, in some strain. He could not do it, though; so tight was my mouth lodged, trickling gore.

He proceeded to hit me on my upper arm, again and again, trying to dislodge me from my grisly exercise of pain and anguish, and at this, under his blows, I came away from my arm and, howling in nineteen years of pent up rage at him for effortlessly breaking me, a piecemeal homicide of words alone, I flew at him, and we exchanged a flurry of blows there on his floor by the kitchen door. He backed up against the dining table, swiping at my face and upper torso with hard slaps, knocking my head sideways, and I punched out at his shoulder with my bleeding right arm. He snarled now at me in rough exhales, his teeth clenched.

After more long seconds of pitiless violence, I drew back from him, the tears still exploding from my eyes, and returned to my arm, lunging at it again, more desperate in the first place to wound myself than to defend from him after all, despite his out of control desire to fight with me. I leaned back crouched down, cowering before him like a wounded child, pathetic given my height, fearful then and in misery, just wishing he could see me and see that I was hurt and that forever he would stop his incessant jibes, breaking my heart. That he would recognise his own wounded son there pathetic before him. With a final desperate pull, I tore a big piece of rubbery skin off my arm, dragging it up with a ripping yank, blood splattering all over my mouth and in flecks onto the floor and the dining chair next to me, and sucked up a mouthful of hot blood with it, and raised my head again to his height, his blows still impacting me, and spat the chewed off piece of flesh into his face, impacting him on the cheek, with my blood – the same as coursed in his veins – splattered over his eyes.

There was a long pause. He stared at me then, drawn back, a haggard statue before me, motionless. I gazed into his deep blue-grey eyes with orange cores, as blue as the winter waves, and saw the look on his face, a piercing, harrowing expression of mournful incomprehension, the saddest sight. I realised then that he could never understand me. The image of his face then has locked with me all these years. He breathed heavily and said nothing.

The piece of torn flesh was still lying on the floor as I left the room sombrely, exhausted by tears, blood trickling all down my arm and over my hand and palm, falling in droplets to the floor all across the living room, through the hall, and into my bedroom. As I entered my room, I slammed my hand against the white emulsion-painted wood of the door, leaving a bloody handprint gathered in blobs at the bottom, like wet paint, dripping down the gleaming surface. And then I sat down on my futon bed, calling fiercely to my mother not to disturb me, and, with my fingertip dipped in my blood, scratched a poem quickly onto some sheets of A4, my mind racing, but my heart dimmed, all soul destroyed. It was not the first poem I had written in my blood, but it was the most bitter and abject in sheer misery. I titled it “Flush”, like a panic-stricken bird driven from its hidden safety into the air, or just like excrement to be disposed of, very much like I viewed myself.

Flush

Nineteen long years on the cutting-room floor
I told you there were tears, and you got bored
There’s blood in my gullet
And my fingers scrape a hole
And outside in the hallway you’re still polishing the cold
[…]

After finishing my poem, I tossed the papers aside and emerged from my room. An ambulance was not involved, as I resisted official treatment, telling my mother not to contact anyone, which I think she held to. I would not let her dress my wounds either, and simply snatched a fresh pink towel and held it under me until the flow ceased, making sure this time that I cleaned my blood off the floor myself.

Much later, I approached my Dad’s chair. His words to me were simple as I spoke to him, with him sat there staring into space still, no more expression of discomfort and sadness on his face, or indeed of anything at all. “Dad…” I told him, looking for some reconciliation perhaps, or at least to judge his thoughts, to know where I stood. His reply was immediate and cold. “F**k off.”

Never again after this did my Dad physically push me about or hit me, but as if this intense altercation had meant nothing to him, soon – and as always, for he cannot change – the belittling insults continued. Broken and in clinging disappointment, I hoped only that Family Therapy might assist me, and I looked forward to it, counting down the days until I could finally share all of this and be listened to.

Categories
Autobiography Painting

Cézanne

After the fifth instalment of selected quotes from Benjamin’s book, I had planned to comment on Brendan Simms’ biography about Hitler. That way, I would be interspersing a post about the four words—which includes stopping abusing children—with another post about the fourteen words.

But since I am also a victim of abusive parents and a psychiatrist my mother hired to finish destroying me, reading Consumption makes me dwell on my past, especially since these days I have been suffering from what I wrote on the first day of the month in “Selfish heirs.” In many ways, my past was as handicapping as Benjamin’s. For example, it is unclear what will become of me when I run out of money from the sale of my parents’ house, divided among six heirs.

On the one hand, it is true that someone like “Bran the Broken”, whom (in my appropriation, not in the novel) his beloved father threw off the tower and who, with his broken spine, can no longer lead a normal life, can see his biographical past and even History from a paranormal perspective that normies, who lack that retrocognitive gift, can’t.

But on the other hand, material needs remain imperative. Even in the HBO adaptation of Martin’s novels—directed by a couple of Jews who in many ways betray the author—it can be seen that Bran enters the mind of his pet wolf to have the illusion of eating when, in reality, he is not feeding himself. These astral journeys can be harmful in that, in real life, Bran must feed himself, as his travelling companion Jojen warns him. The novel is even more sinister than the HBO series because it seems to suggest that, already in the cave and learning the magic of the three-eyed raven, Jojen allowed himself to be sacrificed so that Bran could eat a paste that was made from his body thanks to the culinary arts of the children of the forest…

I can say something similar about my countless journeys into inner space. Like Van Gogh and the painters of his time, I have sacrificed the most basic aspects of physical survival in pursuit of enlightenment about what happened in my early life. The difference, of course, is that in the real world there are no children of the forest to help me, even with their black magic. I have survived to the age at which Cézanne died, but it is unclear how I will survive when I reach my seventies. It really sucks that, if my literary work has any value (I am referring to the trilogy), I have to die to be recognised. And that’s if you’re lucky! (the work of Aristarchus of Samos, for example, was lost forever when the Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria).

I will end this post with an image of the very copy that I used to look at with my parents when I was a child, around five or six years old: a book that inspired me greatly to understand the great painters. I am referring to an image of the first painter reviewed in the book, Cézanne:

Categories
Autobiography

Consumption, 4

Chapter Fifteen

In 1999, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had been suffering from a chest infection, and though the usual treatments of antibiotics had been administered, her condition did not improve. […]

This was of no consequence to my bullies, though. By that age I was living between lessons in a dormitory, the pupils separated into independent ‘houses’ that competed with one another in sport and singing competitions […]

Naturally, free from adult condemnation or reprimand, they continued to mock her to my face, telling me that “it would be funny if she died” and reminding me as if in sincerity and the vulgar slang of the day that she was “still fit though” and thus “shaggable.” The worst culprits for this were Chris and Tim. Their horrible words left me shaken to my core and weary, damaged, appalled that they would be so weak and so feral as to, in effect, pass above me to insult my mother long distance, a sadly all too common line of child-on-child abuse that I have always considered extremely below the belt. […]

“Hello there! I’m Ben’s mum; I’m a fat, ugly Irish c**t!” My mother was still in her acute phase of healing in real life at this point, having just left the London hospital following her two-week window and in recuperation in Chelmsford’s Broomfield. It was not the worst insult I had heard from one of them over the cruel months, but it was enough. Something I had never felt before welled up in me, a piercing column of dark flame and red-hot rage filling my consciousness.

I slammed out of my desk and stared at him with pure hatred, not saying a word. Never before had I tackled a bully, but I knew my body was stronger, and I was now well over six feet tall, and besides, I was angry. Without a second passing, I reached out, grabbing him by the throat with my right hand and squeezing, and picked him up a little by the neck, pinning him to the wall of the cubicle. My fingers squeezed tight around his windpipe, feeling the warm flesh in my hand, that physical connection, his stiff surprise, and all the pounding intensity of full on contact aggression. Then, pushing him to one side, him yelping, his eyes wide in shock, spluttering and choking, I glanced over at the first-floor window, motioning that I was going to throw him out of it. “What the hell did you say!” I shouted at him, gritting my teeth, snarling in inchoate rage, “You’re the f**king c**t!!” and his struggling face writhed in panic, in total surprise and fear. Only then did I let go and heard him immediately say, and in fluster, “I’m sorry, Ben! I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!” I had no more trouble with him on the matter after that.

By now, my anger had faded, still more melancholic by nature than aggressive enough to be able to defend myself adequately in the long run, a painful consequence of the years of torment and sorrow before. I felt awful that I had felt compelled to use swear words, especially words of that calibre, and, despite the circumstances of the incident, I remember taking what I had said to Confession with me at Our Lady Immaculate and what I had done, re-wording it to the priest a little to downplay Tim’s words, and the context of our fight, embarrassed and torn, feeling myself morally culpable, despite being in defence of my mother. […]

Knowing of this incident, the other boys ignored me instead of directly confronting me with their mockery and put-downs. They were never really my friends, and I knew then that I was never well liked, not even by the quieter, less popular pupils who could tolerate my company. I had shown them something in me that they had never seen before, and, perhaps unfairly, they distrusted me for it and considered me above all “really weird”, if not “a psychopath”, words of ignorance and judgement which have always hurt me. I never again had the personal necessity to physically engage a pupil at that school with my newfound rage. However, I was no better in confidence despite my defensive act, too used still to my long years of passively suffering violent attacks before that, and a sad, shy boy.

Time paced on slowly, and I moved on in my emptied, silent spaces, always lonely, watching happiness from the sidelines, already missing a world I had never been privy to. I just did my work when I could and slipped away, looking to the sky and the woods and the fields and pacing out alone down the bleak countryside tracks to the side of the river a mile off to lie by the soft banks of the water and cry, returning in the twilight, with no expression on my face.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note:

In the first instalment of this series, I mentioned that a mudblood migrant raped Benjamin when he was six years old, the age at which he appears in this photograph. In that instalment, I didn’t include the photo because I posted another one: the location of the rape, which Benjamin visited many years later as part of his introspection and self-therapy.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

Consumption, 1

“The stars are not for man” —Karellen in the novel Childhood’s End.

As I said in the comments section of my previous post today, it is foolish to be a cosmologist when your race is being actively destroyed. This is not the time to fantasise about space travel, but rather to travel into inner space; that is, to fulfil the mandate of the Oracle of Delphi. A quote already cited in this blog (and on a page of my Day of Wrath) sheds light on the subject:

Only a ripe artist, one thoroughly acquainted with the workings of the mind, can be successful here. This is why psychological self-portraiture has appeared so late among the arts, belonging exclusively to our own days and those yet to come. Man had to discover continents, to fathom his seas, to learn his language, before he could turn his gaze inward to explore the universe of his soul.

We are commanded to know the universe of our own soul! I iterate: it is madness to start planning interstellar travel without first knowing oneself, knowledge that implies knowing what causes the darkest hour of the West. That is why it is worth quoting some passages from Benjamin’s book, Consumption, whose blurb I quoted a couple of days ago.

The key to understanding psychosis is what Colin Ross calls the problem of attachment with the perp, a concept explained in my Day of Wrath. Well into the book, Benjamin wrote:

I love my father. It is the deepest, most intrinsic love and one I could never shift or diminish, even if I wanted to. It brings me to tears as I think about it… But then I remember (and how could I forget?) these terrible childhood tortures on my father’s part…

One of the things Neanderthals don’t want to understand is that the mind is like the body: it has a breaking point. Primitive people, whom we revile as “Neanderthals”, seem to be saying—so alienated are they by their work ethic—that despite all mistreatment the human mind is infinitely resilient. The truth is that, just as it is not the same for the body to fall from one metre, three metres or from an aeroplane, the same is true of the mind: there are orders of magnitude in which the self can, literally, break.

In Benjamin’s life, and I am not only referring to his first trauma with his father when he was just five years old (the “apple episode” that I won’t recount here), there was also trauma at school. I am referring not only to bullying but also to the rape by a traitorous government that imported non-whites, including teenagers, due to the self-hatred that the English have suffered since 1945: a madness, alas, shared by the entire West.

I would like to quote a passage from Consumption after the rape of a mudblood that the author experienced at the age of six:

…I cannot remember as she [his mother] drove down the long evening lanes, the sun reddening in a haze over the yellow fields, and I sat way down in the seat, the seatbelt pulled down over my stomach, my legs curled up tight in the lock of my forearms, foggy, and faint in mind, with soreness all over, and with nothing I could have been able, or, tragically, allowed to say.

I never mentioned this incident to my parents afterwards, not once, for at least twenty-eight years, though I knew of it the while, even when they were, in some way, aware that I had had bad times at school. They still have no real clue, and I was brushed aside with an “Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, did that happen to you? How awful!” of polite disbelief when I did mention it to my mother, crying and raging down the phone, her reception the same as if it were a coffee morning anecdote in passing, or a fanciful tale for inadvertent amusement, as narrated by my aunt in one of her drunken outbreaks of hysteria. Each new time I tried, periodically over years, I’d hear an “Oh? Really? That’s not good to hear” from her, as if her memory too was missing over the occurrences, and she was instead hearing for the first time, and, dogmatically, she has always been known to tell others that “his early life was good” and “no, nothing ever happened to him, he had a good life with us” and words to that effect, all a further torture for me, as if she was honest, and as if it were her place (and her place alone) to say…

The gulley where I was molested

I did not blame my mother at the time for not helping me, and was unsure even how she could have. I could not register the pain myself and, bizarrely, forgot soon enough as times moved on, relegating it to a small corner pocket of an otherwise full and engaged mind, but as an adult, I raged mercilessly at her for her disbelief and was more than wounded.

This is where the soul murder only begins, plunging the child into a spiral of amplifying abuse until his mind collapses. When parents without empathy don’t understand, or do not want to understand, why their child no longer wants to get along with their schoolmates, instead of blaming the environment they blame the child: courtesy of biological psychiatry, although there are still professionals who realise that the fault did not lie with the child. Benjamin tells us:

Indeed, my thorough lack of interest in football was one of the prime reasons that my parents, in some heightened suspicion of me, took me at this age [seven years old] down to the village surgery to request an autism evaluation…

…given that I was used to being heavily bullied, “he dislikes noisy groups of children.” Though the GP listened to their unfounded complaints, did a few simple tests on me, and gave me the all-clear almost immediately, telling them quite bluntly to go away and stop speculating, I was left upset by this lack of faith on their parts, and the initial zeal of their incorrect sentiment offended me a little, acknowledging to myself that, for some frustrating reason, they had been swift to pathologise my innocuous – and totally normal – childhood behaviours, and still somehow, despite capitulating outwardly, could not entirely take the doctor’s firm “no” for an answer, confident in thinking themselves equipped to know my health better.

In the coming days I will continue reading Consumption. For now, the above quote provides a clear idea not only of the literary genre that Benjamin and I want to inaugurate, but also of why studying inner space is infinitely more important than studying outer space. The first may save the white race from its ongoing self-destruction; the second may not.

The stars are not for man.

Categories
Autobiography Mexico City

Decadent

capital residents

One more word about what I wrote the first day of the month.

Returning to the zone of my childhood and early adolescence, when I hadn’t yet been abused by my parents, doesn’t solve my future but makes me think…

First, it irritates me that people don’t write about their existential pains. If they did it would be much easier to save the Aryan man from the ongoing extinction, as I told Dale Jansen yesterday.

Transvaluing our values doesn’t mean accepting the legacy of the Enlightenment and thus being considered apostate. For example, the neo-normie Voltaire wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary that “it is natural that the children honour their parents”, a mandate taken directly from the Judeo-Christian decalogue (visitors who haven’t read the all too important Neo-Christianity PDF should read it now).

As Nietzsche knew, true apostasy lies in the transvaluation of all values. That includes replacing such a Judaeo-Christian command with the “Know thyself!” of Delphi. An insightful Aryan is already able to save his breed from extinction because he has identified the enemy: the Semitic malware with which the Aryan man has been infected for millennia. And when you know yourself the most natural thing is to keep a public blog, or personal diary, about your spiritual odyssey.

So back to autobiography. The zone where I lived happily many decades ago has horribly fallen due to the geometric reproduction of those whom I call Neanderthals. To boot, there are millions more cars in the capital and, worse, they have torn down many cosy houses to build soulless buildings.

A couple of days ago I went to a central intersection of avenues where I sat in a two-chair stall of a shoe boiler (my very dirty shoes had land that dated from my stay in Yautepec). The gentleman who was next to me, talking with the shoe polisher, commented that the palm trees (which I loved), that for decades were on the dividing strip of the avenues of the neighbourhood, were removed because the leftist government cut the budget and the palm trees weren’t irrigated… and died. So there are not only millions of Neanderthals, cars and soulless buildings in the streets of my most beloved memories, but the living beings that I loved died from negligence.

Yesterday I went to visit the friends of the park where I started playing chess fifty years ago. One of those old friends I met yesterday. I learned that another, much younger than us, rents a place in front of the coffee shop where we were that sells… meat! When he left I learned that this young man, who apparently has zero Indian blood (like the other friend), hasn’t procreated after four years of marriage. His wife recently went to Japan to vacation without his husband: something inconceivable for the values of my grandmas.

So I changed the naïve Indian people of Yautepec, where I lived for a few months, for the big city with this type of extremely decadent Westerner (yesterday, by the way, I had a passionate discussion with some of these chess players, including this young man, about these issues)! Even so, I don’t regret having left Yautepec because there it was impossible to go out for my daily walks due to the merciless sun (due to its great height above sea level, the capital is fairly tempered). The same young man who rents a carnivorous shop and allows his wife to travel alone told me the great truth about the neighbourhood where I now return: “the streets are very walkable”.

Why do the editors of the racialist webzines not saturate their articles with autobiographical vignettes such as these? To do so, accompanied by writing books about our most painful memories—that is, to comply with the religion of Delphi—would result in abandoning the monocausal POV of people like Nick Fuentes, who like me also has some Indian blood.