For the first time in the sixteen-year history of this blog, I dare to show my adult portrait. The reason is that Benjamin is doing me the great favour of adding English subtitles to some videos I recorded in Spain, in 2009.
It’s appropriate to add subtitles to this series of thirty videos because they summarize the tragedy of my teenage life: a taboo subject in a society that, even though secularized, still adheres to the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent; to the point of absolutely forbidding, through the so-called mental health professions, to even imagine the possibility that parental abuse could cause a mental disorder in a child.
In the description below the YouTube video I uploaded yesterday, I’ve included links to my trilogy in Spanish and to the first chapter of Hojas Susurrantes, which is already available in English in print. The second chapter will soon be available in print in English, although some pages from it were published on Thursday in The Occidental Observer (TOO): my criticism of Sigmund Freud.
Once the upload of all thirty videos with English subtitles is complete, it will be clear that my exposé of Freud in TOO wasn’t capricious (remember that Kevin MacDonald also has a very critical chapter on Freud in his most influential book, The Culture of Critique). As I explain in the video linked above, a follower of Freud, the psychoanalyst Giuseppe Amara, contributed to destroying my teenage life. (In the TOO article, Amara’s name is linked to a Wikipedia article because this analyst was a notable figure in the country where I was born.)
César Tort at 50 years old in Gran Canaria, Spain.
As far as my appearance is concerned, I have never said that I am Aryan; although, since I live in Mexico, to Mexicans (most of whom are dark-skinned) I am a sort of castizo. But you don’t need to be a pure Aryan to be a priest of the 14 words.
Since The West’s Darkest Hour also promotes the 4 words, “eliminate all unnecessary suffering,” I hope visitors to this site will appreciate Benjamin’s hard work (he was also abused by his father and psychiatrists as a teenager) as we upload the subtitled video series I originally recorded in Spain without subtitles: just me speaking in Spanish.
Incidentally, when I filmed that series, I hadn’t yet discovered the forums of white nationalism: which I would discover that same year, also in Gran Canaria!
Wow. What a find. I’ve always thought that fairy tales reflect realities that illustrate what I want to say in my trilogy of books I’m translating into English—and look what I found today!
In the real Middle Ages, not in fairy tales, some mothers—who we would now say suffered from malignant narcissism—killed their most beautiful daughters for reasons of power, if we understand the dynamics of the noble classes. (I couldn’t help but think of the infanticide campaign that my mother subtly unleashed during my puberty and that virulently culminated in my adolescence. But that’s another story.)
A few blocks from the studio where I now live, on the 20th of last month, a shocking revelation from someone about what I love most in the world (only my correspondent Benjamin knows the details) affected me so profoundly that I’ve been searching for defence mechanisms to free myself from intense anxiety and anguish!
Today, while walking down a quiet street in Coyoacán, it occurred to me that to combat this state of mind brought on by the unexpected revelation, I’ll have to do extraordinary things.
After returning to this continent from a Spanish island in 2009, I spent several months thinking about the life of Vincent van Gogh. The best of the several books I read then was a huge one my friend Paulina gave me, which contains all his paintings (it was one of the ones that got wet in this year’s flood, and it took me a long time to dry it in the sun).
Van Gogh’s Painter on his way to work.
Vincent had a phrase that I’ve liked ever since: “active melancholy.” He was an absolute workaholic who painted from sunrise to sunset, sometimes even at night (one of the reasons the stupid villagers of Arles in France were scandalised and hurt him horribly by calling him crazy).
Now that the revelation, the details of which only Ben knows, is eating away at my soul, and it seems it will continue for months, if not years, I thought I’d emulate Brother Vincent.
In my case, of course, that doesn’t just mean continuing to translate my books (I think the second one will be ready soon for visitors to obtain via Lulu Press). Since I now have to work day and night to try to exorcise what’s corroding my soul, why not finally start on an idea I’ve had for a while?
I’m referring to creating a channel on Rumble—only there would they not cancel me—with a catchy title like “Nick Fuentes Critic.”
Among white nationalists, Fuentes is the only online streamer who speaks like a real man, so I respect him immensely, truly. Since Tucker Carlson interviewed him, Fuentes has been widely mentioned both on MSM and on social media. (By the way, aside from The Occidental Observer, it’s a shame that the rest of the racialist forums seem to envy him.)
So, if I “go for it” by recording myself in my native language (Spanish) and learning to use AI programs to translate the videos into English (the most sophisticated programs even modify lip movements to reflect the English words), I’ll be working just as obsessively as Brother Vincent.
It’s a very artificial way of trying to reduce the pangs of the inner demon that presently gnaws at my soul (ideally, I’d solve the problem in the real world, but to do so legally I’d need 15 million Mexican pesos, no less). But that’s how all the creators who have become geniuses operated. Although this doesn’t mean I consider myself a genius, I know it’s the only way to distract myself from the existential crisis that has befallen me since last month.
So, let’s get to work!
Since I’m 67 years old and quite clumsy with computers, it will take me much longer to learn how to use AI translation programs. But as I said, I have no other option given the circumstances.
The idea is to present the things Fuentes says in his podcasts, but criticise them from a National Socialist perspective. I repeat: I have immense respect for this young man. Compared to him, the vast majority of white nationalists seem like eunuchs to me. But I believe that his Catholicism, and in particular his Christian ethics, is detrimental to his very purposes (see my recent posts about Fuentes, especially what I say about the need to create Dachau concentration camps in the US).
It will be quite amusing, given that both Fuentes and I have Mexican blood. But it’s not our Indigenous heritage that makes us speak with such brutal frankness. It’s Spanish blood. Did any of you live in Franco’s Spain, when men still spoke in the way men used to speak? That is the way Fuentes and I speak!
And if learning the ropes of using AI translators takes longer than expected, I could start commenting on Fuentes’s programs in text form, like this very post.
It’s an indirect way of introducing the white nationalist I admire most: by criticising him. Fuentes has just extended the Overton Window (the JQ) in the marketplace of ideas among conservative Republicans. What I want now is to extend it further among the Groypers themselves.
Of course, if someone wants to help me translate my videos into English, it would save me a ton of work, and I could focus exclusively on the content of the “Nick Fuentes Critic” channel.
The Reading of the Will Concluded
Edward Bird (1772–1819)
Bristol Museum.
Although I’m in good health and don’t plan on dying soon, I went to a notary to sign my will today.
The reason for doing so is because I was disturbed when Lasha Darkmoon’s and Eduardo Velasco’s sites, the former in English and the latter in Spanish, which provided good content for the 14 words, suddenly disappeared (did they die suddenly?).
I don’t want that to happen to The West’s Darkest Hour if death were to surprise me, so I bequeathed my documents and assets to someone who will ensure that the content of this site won’t disappear (as Lasha’s and Eduardo’s sites did).
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.
______ 卐 ______
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.
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.
____________
[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.
[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”.
[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.
[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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
