Category: Pseudoscience

Narcissism, 3

I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.

Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.

Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.

In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.

The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.

A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?

Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)

Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.

The schizophrenogenic mother

The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)

Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).

What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.

With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.

Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.

When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.

But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?

The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).

And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.

See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.

Tags Biography, Trauma model of mental disorders

Nordicism Pseudoscience Science

Anti-Nordicism

by Heinrich

There are some anti-Nordicists, such as those in Counter-Currents, who claim that Hitler was not a Nordicist. These people can easily be proved wrong simply by showing them the facts. But there is a more frequent and different kind of anti-Nordicism even in neo-Nazi circles.

The worldview of Hitler and National Socialism was not based on superstition or occultism, as many uneducated people claim, but had a scientific basis and ice-cold logic. If science proved that there was a mistake in their racial policy, they would surely have corrected it.

Anti-Nordicists will tell you that if the top Nazis were alive today, they would realise that their racial policy was wrong and that it’s time to turn the page, so that’s what we should do. They claim that scientific advances in the field of genetics have shown that there is not even such a thing as the ‘Nordic race’ and that Europeans with this phenotype are the same as other Europeans who do not have it.

They say that we need some continuity with the ideology of National Socialism but not with its racial policy. A good starting point is to point out that, as early as 1950 an United Nation’s educational, scientific and cultural organisation set up a committee of experts (with a very high percentage of Jewish demographics) which issued a Declaration on Race, stating that there was no scientific basis or justification for racial prejudice. They even went so far as to call race a ‘social myth’. It is clear that only five years after World War II they had no knowledge about race, nor was there any scientific breakthrough in this field, so it cannot be said that the scientific community moved away from pre-1945 race science as a result of a scientific breakthrough.

A very similar explanation can be found on Wikipedia: ‘After the war, the discovery of the Holocaust and Nazi abuses of scientific research (such as Josef Mengele’s ethical violations and other war crimes revealed in the Nuremberg trials) led most of the scientific community to repudiate scientific support for racism’. The alleged reason is Mengele and the Holocaust, not science. With this in mind it is very likely that were it not for this politically and morally biased disruption of racial science, today’s geneticists would not be contradicting the pre-1945 racial classification.

These people argue that racial anthropology should be thrown out of the window because we now apparently have more advanced knowledge about race. In reality, we only have more advanced technologies. However, these are not being used in the field of racial research in the way they should be, and this is easily demonstrated by the fact that not only have no new racial categories been established using all this advanced technology, but most researchers do not even talk about race any more.

A 2021 study examining more than 11,000 articles published between 1949 and 2018 in the American Journal of Human Genetics found that the term ‘race’ was only used in 5% of articles published in the last decade. Coupled with an increase in the use of the terms ‘ethnicity’, ‘ancestry’ and location-based terms, it suggests that human geneticists have mostly abandoned the term ‘race’.

So it should be clear to people with a functional brain that we cannot replace the racial foundation of National Socialism with this new science. I am not saying that what contemporary geneticists say has to be ignored in its entirety, but it has to be interpreted in a way that supports our ideas and not in a way that proposes the total annihilation of everything we knew so far. Consider, as a positive example of this, Evropa Soberana’s ‘The New Racial Classification’, published as an appendix to The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (see our books —Ed.), a summary of which is reproduced below:

Editor’s summary: The European race is divided into three primary races: the European Nordic White (‘White Nordid’ or WN), the Central Asian Nordic Redhead (‘Red Nordid’ or RN) and the Near Eastern Armenid. The white race is a mixture of two or more races. We cannot say ‘this person is pure white’, but ‘this person has a mixture of races A, B and C in such proportions’. By terms such as Aryan or White we mean a mixture of Nordid White and Nordid Red and their slight crossbreeding with non-White ‘Armenids’ or ‘Mongolids’, usually people of Germanic and Slavic origin. Therefore, although the ideal white is a White Nordid with a Red Nordid, we cannot say that whites who have some Armenid or Mongolid genes are non-white. However, we could say that they are non-white if they have a considerable amount of Armenid and/or Mongolid and especially Congid blood. He who knows how to analyse facial features can be almost as good at genetic analysis or even better, as to date genetic analyses do not include detailed racial information.

The reason why physical anthropology should remain the basis for racial classification is very simple: it is the natural approach. Other technologies should only be used to supplement it. But if anthropology is discarded, then the actual physical basis of race is discarded as well, and race is reduced to a mere theory, something that can only be observed in a laboratory rather than a material reality visible to the human eye in the real world.

All of this appeals to sheep-minded people who are willing to ignore physical realities and blindly believe their claims. For example, Christians believe that our bodies are irrelevant because inside we are all made in the image of God. The anti-Nordicists of today’s racial right believe something very similar with the difference that they try to use genetics, not the ‘human soul’.

Does the same DNA inhabit these very different bodies?

Many of them often realise that this is compromising and will try to do damage control by dishonestly claiming that they are not actually in contradiction with visible realities, but only with the conclusions that were drawn about these visible realities in the 20th century.

The problem is that anthropologists have established different racial categories based on the physical characteristics they observed. Geneticists will not tell you that the characteristics themselves do not exist (for example, as if they told you that blue eyes do not exist): that would be total madness. They will only tell you that it is not a definitive marker of a distinct human race, and this makes the contradiction very clear.

Many of them even argue that we should disregard the conclusions of professional geneticists and try to be sceptical and say that we should analyse for ourselves the data they produce and draw our conclusions. This may sound similar to what I have suggested above, but there is a huge difference: I question the methods used in this field, as they only care about the results they see. (Note that I have not suggested that racial policy should be determined by laypeople. Only the authority of NS anthropologists should be respected, and that genetic data should be interpreted from this point of view, as a mere complement to physical anthropology.)

One methodological problem is to ignore race. Populations, when examined, are divided along geographical lines or into ethnicities, but never into racial categories, so it is useless to shove these graphs in our faces, as if they were some sort of refutation of Nordicism or physical anthropology, when in fact they do not refute it, but simply ignore it.

It is very stupid to use such research and argue that the similarities between Germany and Russia could mean that Nordicism is disproved. ‘Germany = Nordics, Russia = subhuman Slavs’. On the forums, I have personally encountered this statement many times. Of course, the reality is that there are some Nordics in Russia and, unfortunately, there are also East Slavic racial types in Germany. This is a well-known fact and even Hitler himself addresses it in his Zweites Buch.

If the racial types as defined by anthropologists were examined separately by looking at pure specimens of each group, the results could only validate what we have known to be true for so long. Professor Hans F. K. Gunther gives us the following definition of race: ‘A race manifests itself in a human group that is distinguished from any other human group by its combination of bodily and mental characteristics, which are reproduced [biologically] only by its fellows’. As for phenotype, Wikipedia gives the following definition: ‘In genetics, the phenotype is the set of observable characteristics or traits of an organism. The term covers the morphology or physical form and structure of the organism, its developmental processes, its biochemical and physiological properties, its behaviour, and its products’.

The definition corresponds roughly to Gunther’s definition of race, except that Gunther, in the last sentence, adds a reproductive criterion which is essential. So, if you don’t pay attention to the phenotype you don’t pay attention to the race, because it has now been shown that the phenotype is the race. So the claim that race would be something more than the phenotype is proven false.

The anti-Nordicists, of course, do not like to hear this and will scream and complain and resort to all sorts of attacks to counter it, but this is still the definition of race and there has not been a trustworthy and more competent professional to come up with a better definition. The fact that Nordicism hurts your feelings does not entitle you to change definitions.

Note also that you have to change the definition of race to argue against our position. All other avenues are futile and this speaks volumes. It is one thing to say that the triumphant Nazis would have refined some details in their racial classification after 1945 and to claim that they would have changed the basic definition of ‘race’. That is extremely wild and highly improbable speculation.

I am not ignorant of genetics at all, I am just writing for the sake of clarity. Phenotype is not magically encoded but by genetics. Therefore, a difference in phenotype means a difference in genetic makeup. So the claim by many anti-Nordicists that people with different phenotypes are genetically identical is either a deliberate lie or the result of mild mental retardation. One could argue that perhaps factors other than genes are responsible for the phenotypic differences. But then what this would tell us is that these genes are very important, not that they are meaningless as our enemies want to present them.

Some people would try to say that this definition of race is discredited because darker people can carry Nordic traits recessively and produce offspring with some Nordic traits, thus breaking the criterion of ‘producing only their kind’. But only people who have at least some Nordic admixture can do this, not purebred specimens of any race. Using the Evropa Soberana classification, pure Mongolids or pure Armenids will never bring Nordic-looking children into the world, and also for a Nordic couple, as already specified above, it is biologically impossible to have children with dark features that clearly show that they are a race of their own.

Many of the anti-Nordicists are not even familiar with basic Mendelian genetics. What most of them want is to replace racial anthropology with archaeogenetics: the ancestry of ancient populations such as the hunter-gatherers (whether Western Eastern or otherwise) Yamnaya and early European farmers. In his book, David Reich, the leading authority on the subject, says: ‘Although the great majority of scientists are focused on the biological information that is contained within the genes, there are also occasional differences between DNA sequences. These differences are due to random errors in copying of genomes known as mutations that occurred at some point in the past. It is these differences occurring around one every thousands or so in both genes and in junk that geneticists study to learn about the past’.

Since the methodology does not deal with what genes code for, racially (phenotypically) identical populations could be classified as different, and this is very important for their ‘everybody is mixed’ agenda: ‘We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated populations mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no population is—or could be—pure’, writes Reich. This is the man who provides the genetic data to the so-called racists and neo-Nazis who oppose Nordicism. Needless to say, he is ethnically Jewish, and racially he looks like a textbook Armenid.

Reich also mentions in Who We Are and How we Got Here that our methods of classification are not good enough because physical traits can be influenced by environment and diet. When we analyse this carefully, we find that he does not have any solid argument against us and it can be deduced that he is secretly aware of being wrong on this point. From the fact that environment and diet can have some effect on a person’s physical features, it seems to follow, in his logic, that this can make someone look like another race. Better food may make one bigger and taller, and bad habits may make one look uglier, but no diet will make the light features of one race resemble the features of another race.

No diet will make the blond hair dark, the long skull round, the high bridge nose flat, and so on. Physical characteristics are about as reliable as you can get, especially when we are talking about examining purebred specimens, and we are only interested in purebred specimens.

According to Reich and his team, all early Europeans were mostly brown and today’s Europeans are mixtures of these various dark races. There is plenty of room for tricks and dishonesty to be exploited by Reich and his people. For example, a professional can easily select fossil remains for testing. In reality, the only thing his findings prove is that there have been mixed types in Europe even in the Neolithic. It does not prove that all early Europeans were dark, nor that the Norse did not exist (more on this later).

Reich and his team are quick to draw these false conclusions for one reason: to stamp out racism. In the book cited above, he writes: ‘To understand the power of the genome revolution for undermining old stereotypes about identity and building up a new basis for identity, consider how its finding of repeated mixture in human history has destroyed nearly every argument that used to be made for biologically based nationalism.’ And cherry picking is not the only tool they use, as we can see in the following image.

One need only glance at Reich’s book to realise that the anti-Nordicism in racialist circles comes from this man. Almost all of his arguments are adopted by the anti-Nordicists in our circles, although many of them probably don’t even know who David Reich is.

Anti-Nordicism is a poison designed to stamp out racism and encourage race-mixing. The fact that some people believe that this genetic ‘research’ can be used to promote racism is utter madness. Of course, it doesn’t matter how they present it or what context they give it. It will still be the same poison as before. It’s like giving your children cyanide but thinking you can change the effect of the substance by adopting a different attitude towards it.

From a pro-race-mixing point of view, I can understand someone spreading the idea that the ancestors of Europeans looked like Arabs, but I have a hard time understanding it from a racist point of view.

Why on earth would anyone spread such lies? What does it achieve? What is the purpose of spreading them? Are they going to have any positive effect, or is it just to bring down the hated blond man? This new science also makes claims about the Aryan invasion of India: claims that inevitably influenced our circles. It was probably designed for this.

They say that what we know today as Nordic did not really exist until the Bronze Age, and that all Europeans are descended exclusively from people of mixed Arab and Indian appearance. At this point, one would have to be brainless not to see the point of all this: to destroy the racial pride and identity of the Nordic people. The usual suspects are David Reich and his followers. Reich wrote: ‘The fusion of these highly different populations into today’s West Eurasians is vividly evident in what might be considered the classic northern European look: blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today. The first farmers of Europe mostly had light skin but dark hair and brown eyes’.

Reich goes on to say that the blond hair came from another northern Eurasian population that was also racially different from the previous two, so yes, the Nordic people are a product of racial mixing. In Who We Are and How we Got Here he continues: ‘The ancient DNA revolution has shown that today’s classifications do not reflect fundamental “pure” units of biology. Instead, today’s divisions are recent phenomena, with their origin in repeating mixtures and migrations. The findings of the ancient DNA revolution suggest that the mixtures will continue. Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.’

Reich says this right after explaining that the Nordic race never existed, and the stupid goyim accept it without question. To counter this let’s look at the skull of a Cro-Magnon man, which is a race that occupied the European continent possibly as far back as 56,800 years ago.

If we look at the skull we see essentially Nordic features: dolichocephalism, not quite vertical forehead, square jaw, sharp and pronounced chin, narrow nose with a high bridge and tall stature.

Reich only deals with the pigmentation of northern Europeans and does not mention the equally unique combination of facial features, stature and skull shape that also characterises them. We can assume that these would also be explained in the same way if this is how the population in question was formed, i.e., a gradual racial mixing that ended sometime in the early Bronze Age. Now, isn’t it strange that in Europe we have evidence of people with almost the same physical traits for over 50,000 years?

The only thing that makes the Cro-Magnon skull different from today’s Norsemen is a slightly broader face. But there is a simple explanation for this: Cro-Magnons ate a hunter-gatherer diet, which is by far the most complete form of nutrition. This diet, together with a more natural and healthy lifestyle, builds a more consistent skeleton, greater muscle development and a wider face than the later cereal-based diet imported from the Near East during the Neolithic. So we have every reason to believe that Cro Magnon looked like this:

Anti-Nordicists never realise this because they don’t know how to analyse physical traits and don’t believe in physical trait analysis. For them, there is nothing to connect tall stature or certain facial features with light pigmentation. But they are connected, just as the facial features of various African races are connected to their dark pigmentation.

It is also interesting how many anti-Nordicists do not believe that one should be sceptical of David Reich because he is a trustworthy person for them. They assume a kind of conspiracy by the Nordics to oppress non-Nordics and talk about how the racial science of the Third Reich was politicised. They even show stubborn scepticism when confronted with direct first-hand evidence from writers about ancient Greeks or Romans who were blond (see the articles on Greece and Rome in The Fair Race—Ed.).

Which one do you find more reliable: the Nazi or the kike?

It is also worth mentioning that many of the people who demand blind faith in David Reich’s research are… holocaust deniers! Some of them even believe that there is a breakaway Nazi German civilisation flourishing on the moon at the moment, so they are not guided by a fair grasp of reality. The first anti-Nordicist I met was a man who denied the abduction of children from the eastern territories for the Lebensborn (see, e.g., pages 117-129 of On Exterminationism, linked in the sticky post—Ed.). They also betray an immense lack of knowledge about the Third Reich and National Socialism, which explains how their ridiculous claims originate.

These neo-Nazis fail to see that, in repudiating Nordicism, they repudiate the racial view of history: the central pillar of historical National Socialism. They are not even capable of substituting the Nordic civilisation for something of similar magnitude. According to their nonsense, the ancient Greeks or the Romans were racially different from the Germanics, which by the way is not only detrimental to NS ideology but also European culture and identitarianism. In contrast, Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 2 April 1927, said: ‘Mankind owes everything great to the struggle and to a race that has triumphed. Take away the Nordic German and all that remains are the dances of the ape’.

Map taught in a German school

In National Socialism, all history and all historical development are analysed from the racial point of view. Races are not only considered different from each other but categorised in a racial hierarchy. Consequently, the mixing of races is considered extremely detrimental because it diminishes the quality of the superior breed. ‘A herd beast can be bred from all sorts of ingredients, but from such a mixture never emerges a man who will be the bearer of culture or, better still, the founder and creator of culture. The mission of mankind could then be considered as finished’ (Mein Kampf).

If one accepts the neo-Nazi narrative, there is no point in being a National Socialist anymore. It is clear that miscegenation has no negative effect if this is their ideology, so there is nothing to fear. From a self-preservationist perspective, there is nothing to preserve. You are a combination of many different races. You don’t belong to any one race, basically like a pardo from Brazil. Why not add a bit of a Bantu-Negroid component to the cocktail at this point? It might do you good.

Reich is fully aware of the implications of what he is promoting, but many of the goyim don’t want to see them. I hope it has been sufficiently demonstrated that this way of thinking is incompatible with National Socialism.

Based on my past experiences in debating with people, I know that as soon as it is shown that one side has to be chosen, none of them will choose our side, something that betrays that their worldview had not even been NS in the first place. However, I must ask one thing to these people.

Don’t be the kind of mindless idiot who ignores these contradictions and still call yourself a Nazi. This face only poisons the well of true National Socialism. In the coming conflict, Europeans who care about the future and follow NS principles will have the task of preserving the existence of a very distinct human phenotype, much like the one that motivated our predecessors to fight.

If you have a problem with this, you are not on our side.

Pseudoscience Psychiatry

“Chemical imbalance” myth

Friedrich Nietzsche Pseudoscience Psychiatry Quotable quotes

Nietzsche quote

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 11, 2022

Yesterday I came across a quotable quote from Nietzsche:

‘The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much “truth” he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified’.

It reminded me that many white nationalists aren’t strong, in that they don’t tolerate the truth about their religion, which arose out of Jewish subversion and under the pen of the first evangelist at a time when the Romans were destroying Jerusalem. These nationalists have the JQ diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted and falsified in what we have been calling ‘monocausalism’ because they don’t want to grow up. But I would like to talk about something else.

I said recently that the scandals with the pseudoscience behind Covid and the sexual butchery of the LGBT movement—especially the ‘T’ folk—where surgeons are literally cutting off teenage penises and breasts, are beginning to move some quarters to question the medical establishment. However, as I was saying last week, voices have long been raised questioning another area of medicine: psychiatry.

In the old incarnation of this site a young Englishman told me that if anyone read my views on psychiatry, they would think I was a crank. Obviously, this young man hadn’t been aware that in his country the anti-psychiatry movement arose in the 1960s and that the Englishman Ronald Laing, a critic of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, had been criticising that book before he died. I pointed out to this young man the link to my text critical of psychiatry from its origins.

But my text is rhetorically flawed.

The fact is that such an enormous subject, as is the fact that pseudo-science has been taught in universities since the 19th century, seems implausible if we limit ourselves to reading texts. From a psychological point of view, we need lectures given by eloquent speakers who have studied psychiatry and disseminate their findings in front of an attentive audience.

Dr James Davies did that recently, and best of all, in front of a white audience.

Davies researched how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the handbook of psychiatrists in America—has been put together. I had known all this for two decades, thanks to my reading of the dissident psychiatrist Peter Breggin. But, as I said, reading anti-psychiatric books or articles isn’t the same as listening to a speaker who expresses his ideas in such a didactic way.

Nietzsche’s quote applies not only to those who don’t want to see that JQ and CQ are two sides of the same coin, but to those mental infants who cannot conceive that a pseudo-science, psychiatry, is being taught in universities.

Chris Martenson Pandemics Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Debunking the Covid narrative

Post author By C .T.
Post date January 22, 2022

Watch today’s dialogue between Bret and Chris before they vaporise the channel (by the eighth minute Chris’ microphone didn’t work, but then it did):

Several scientists are beginning to realise that the medical profession is a mixture of real science, bad science from corporations seeking only profit, and even pseudoscience. I knew it decades ago. But who has listened to what I have said about psychiatry (see pages 143-166 of my Daybreak)?

Chess Pseudoscience Psychiatry

The human side of chess, 14

Post author By C .T.
Post date July 5, 2021

The profession called psychiatry

The first thing to keep in mind when a loved one is in crisis is the Hippocratic oath of doctors: do no more harm. Unfortunately, it is precisely the doctors who violate that oath, since the crises of the spirit should never be the province of the doctor.

Carlos Torre was electro-shocked in Monterrey when he lived with his three brothers, all doctors. I read this in the book 64 Variaciones Sobre un Tema de Torre by Germán de la Cruz. I was so intrigued that I made some inquiries. I spoke with Jorge Aldrete, a bridge and chess fan from Monterrey based in Mexico City, who had sold me several imported chess sets. Both Aldrete and Ferriz suggested that I contact Arturo Elizondo in Monterrey. On April 24, 2004, I spoke with Mr Elizondo, who graciously answered my questions. This man of more than eighty years was neither more nor less an eyewitness of the electroshocks to Torre. When I asked him if what de la Cruz said in his book was reliable, he replied: ‘I am sure because to control his physicality’ he was ‘by his side’ during electroconvulsive therapy. I asked him what the symptoms were so that they took such a drastic measure with the Yucatecan chess master. Elizondo replied: ‘The only thing, he was stubborn but he wasn’t aggressive and nothing like that’. Elizondo only slightly disagreed with de la Cruz’s version insofar as he affirmed that the brothers weren’t directly responsible for the commitment. ‘It was the nephew, surnamed Torre’, a Masonic grand master and colleague of Elizondo at the Nuevo León lodge. According to Elizondo, this happened in 1957 in the psychiatric ward of the General Hospital of Monterrey. Due to Torre’s ‘excitatory stage’ to use Elizondo’s expression, the diagnosis was manic-depressive, which is now called bipolar disorder. It had been the arousal phase of his manic-depressive crisis when they applied electroshocks to calm him down.

Universities teach kids psychiatric treatments, such as electroshock, as if they were the praxis of real medical science. No wonder that, being Elizondo a chemist sympathetic to medicine, he repeated to me what is claimed at the universities: that Torre-type excitations are of a ‘neurological nature’, a claim that Elizondo repeated several times during our telephone conversation. The truth is that, without any laboratory testing, psychiatrists rule out psychogenic hypotheses of delusions (see once again my anti-psychiatric site whose address appears on page 3 of this book). He also told me that electroshocks are ‘a very noble therapy’ because it ‘completely relaxes’ the excited. Elizondo participated in the coercive relaxation of Torre, in which he even helped hold him down. He even confessed to me, ‘One or two days I gave him accommodation, then he left with his nephew’. But what Elizondo ignored is that electroshock is a crime. This electric hammer blow to the head frequently erases part of the memory of the people who receive it. One of the cases I mention on my antipsychiatric site is that of a graduate student who, after she was shocked from depression, forgot what she had learned in college. We can imagine the handicap that the ‘therapy’ represented for her career. In Torre’s time there was the aggravating circumstance that it was common to perform marathon electroshock sessions: a practice that some call electrical lobotomy. We can imagine how this barbaric practice could have diminished Torre’s intellectual capacity for chess. Do you remember the scene of the electroshock applied to the character played by Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

This type of assault on healthy brains (like the character played by Nicholson, the electro-shocked folk had a healthy brain before ‘therapy’) continues to be performed in Mexico. This is done even in the largest psychiatric hospital in the nation: the Fray Bernardino Álvarez Hospital in Tlalpan, where students do their internships. In 1960, three years after his experience in Monterrey, Torre was once again harassed by his sponsors and by psychiatrists. When he lived in Mexico City, he was committed for a few days at the Sanatorio Floresta, which was in San Ángel, under the care of psychiatrist Alfonso Millán. Alfonso Ferriz told me this personally, who in his splendid naivety paid for the commitment. The Floresta psychiatric hospital no longer exists, but as I indicate on my aforementioned website, on November 25, 1970 an article appeared in Siempre! entitled ‘A season in hell’ written by two sane young men who were interned at Floresta. The authors of the article reveal that a grandson of Victoriano Huerta was lobotomised and confined there: ‘Before, he was very aggressive until he had a lobotomy. He now is a child. At meals he twists around on the chair, he eats desperately. While eating he drives the flies away from the table’. Ferriz and Elizondo acted in good faith, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. According to Ferriz himself in one of the interviews recorded by Obregón, Torre felt resented with him for life after the outrage of which he was a victim in the psychiatric hospital. In fact, Torre didn’t see Ferriz again until the latter visited Mérida.

In his book, Gabriel Velasco, ignoring what psychiatry is, after the New York crisis wrote that Torre ‘needed medical care’. There were still no electroshocks in the 1920s. But if Velasco refers to some other psychiatric therapy that was applied to him, this way of using language (‘medical care’) is a euphemism for medical crime. In the prologue to Velasco’s book, Jesús Suárez praises that Velasco has omitted all speculation about Torre’s ills. The truth is that it was pure intellectual cowardice, both by Velasco and Suárez, to have omitted that he was electro-shocked in Monterrey; that in Mexico he was admitted to the Floresta, and that he resented Ferriz for life.

Those who knew him were struck by the fact that Carlos Torre was a very affectionate person with people. He called them all angelito, padrecito, madrecita (little angel, little father, little mother): expressions that portray the goodness of his character. Let’s put ourselves in the master’s shoes for a moment. Imagine that we speak in sweet Mexican diminutives. How would we feel after the involuntary commitment by our loved ones? What would we feel after the assault on the brain in Monterrey? In addition to the intellectual loss, wouldn’t it be an attack on one’s dignity and self-esteem? How would our self-image look after the attack?

Although Ferriz assured me that he wasn’t electro-shocked in Mexico City, they administered him psychiatric drugs at the Floresta. I wonder if Torre was tormented there with drugs called neuroleptics: a ‘hell’ as described by the authors of Siempre! According to the words of Ferriz himself, which I wrote down in an interview at his house in March 2004, I guess that Torre was sane when committed. Ferriz confessed to me: ‘But also, he didn’t seem crazy! It was hard to get what was wrong with him’. Like the ‘stubbornness’ Elizondo spoke of, Ferriz interprets anger as a mental disorder. I didn’t argue with Ferriz or Elizondo. But after the interview with the former I wondered what they had done to Torre in the Floresta, the psychiatric hospital that had Huerta’s lobotomised grandson in custody. And by the way: was this guy lobotomised there? Nobody asks questions of this kind in Mexico for the simple reason that it’s difficult to imagine that a pseudoscience is taught in universities. It is a stupendous irony that in Mexico the medical institution had to have arisen precisely in the same building of the Inquisition of New Spain: the palace of the old Faculty of Medicine.

This brief book is far from my extensive treatise on psychiatry that can be read on the internet. But just to give an idea of what I am talking about, I will mention a chilling fact: In the 21st century, lobotomies continue to be performed in Mexico and the rest of the world. The fact that defenceless citizens are currently electro-shocked and lobotomised, as they did to the character that Nicholson played in One Flew, may seem incredible to us. But a little story will shed some light on this matter.

For three centuries, Western civilisation has been cruel to people suffering from spiritual crises. Although the individual who suffers a sudden crisis doesn’t harm anyone—let’s take as a paradigm the buffoonery of imitating St. Francis on a public streetcar—the brain of he who suffers the crisis is damaged by society. From the origins of the mental institution at Bedlam in London and general hospitals in France, the treatment of the individual in crisis has been simply to torture him with various techniques (see ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’, pages 143-166 in my book Daybreak). Although these tortures have nothing to do with real medical necessity, they were given a scientific lustre in the 19th century for public acceptance. I wonder what they did to Steinitz in one of those so-called hospitals. In his time, psychiatrists hadn’t devised electroshock and lobotomy, techniques that directly damage the brain, but they did devise some torments that broke the spirit of the person in crisis. In 19th-century nursing homes, beatings and chains were a thing of every day. There were even torture devices. I have not read the biography of Steinitz written by Bachmann. I suppose the Kneip technique applied on Steinitz, an extreme regimen of ice water baths, was involuntary.

Iatrogenesis is the stupid attempts to heal by doctors that produce new and more serious disorders than the existing ones. I believe that Steinitz’s illusory ideas at the end of his life, such as his belief that he could move chess pieces without touching them, were aggravated by psychiatric iatrogenesis.

The Kneip torment is discontinued in psychiatry. Due to modern technology, since the 1930s medical science has progressed from tormenting Steinitz’s body to directly assaulting the brain—what they did to Torre. In addition to electroshocks, chemical lobotomisers that are administered to those who cross through crises like the one Torre suffered are currently very fashionable. With a prescription, about twenty of these chemicals are sold in Mexico: Clopsine, Ekilid, Fluanxol, Flupazine, Geodon, Haldol, Haloperil, Largactil, Leponex, Leptopsique, Melleril, Piportil, Pontiride, Rimastine, Risperdal, Semap, Seroquel, Sinogan, Siqualine, Stelazine, and Zyprexa. Aliosha Tavizon, with whom I used to speak at the Gandhi Cafeteria and who in his category won the Carlos Torre Tournament in 2003, was given one of these crap drugs due to an unreciprocated love that temporarily unhinged him. For months he had a crooked neck and many other muscles in his body. To speak to him, he had to position his torso in profile: a tardive dystonia that may have been irreversible. Under no circumstances, not even during flowery psychoses, should an individual ingest any of these dangerous neurotoxins. Fortunately, there are principled psychiatrists, like Peter Breggin, who denounce the crime of prescribing disabling drugs in their profession.

The West, and especially the United States, have fallen into the cognitive error of addressing any psychological disturbance from a biological POV, ignoring the humanities. I do not think that this pseudoscience will be repudiated soon despite the iatrogenesis it produces. In my treatise I show, in a nutshell, that the profession doesn’t pass the falsifiability test devised by Karl Popper that distinguishes between science and pseudoscience, and that those who finance psychiatric ‘science’ in journals are the same companies that manufacture the drugs mentioned above. The academia itself has been corrupted by Big Pharma. If the reader doesn’t want to read my book because I am not an established author, read Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge: Perseus, 2001). Robert Whitaker, the author, won the Pulitzer Prize for medical matters.

Blacks Chess Pseudoscience Racial studies

Classification of life

Yesterday and today I watched the Systematic Classification of Life series on YouTube by L. Aron Nelson, an American who changed his name to Aron Ra.

According to his Wikipedia page, he is a feminist and tried to run in the Democratic Party. It’s fascinating how in the first forty-nine episodes of his series of fifty he describes elegantly the biological evolution from worm to man. But in the very last episode Nelson speaks of human races repeating the most psychotic claims in vogue today, that races don’t exist, etc.

In the comments section of that video 50, in which Nelson appears with a T-Shirt flaunting heavy metal (in the previous episodes he painted his beard blue: a symbol of the current degeneration), I left him a note today: ‘You’re so wrong! in claiming “Modern ethnic groups have very little differences outside of appearance”. Human races do exist and you completely ruined your otherwise excellent series with this politically-correct final episode. Haven’t you even watched the most interesting exchange between Stefan Molyneux and David Rubin?’ And I added: ‘Do you want the scholarly sources?’ linking the AmRen books on race realism.

It is amazing how men of science immediately turn into pseudoscientists when opining about the human races. I recently debunked the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit showing that in the real world women cannot compete with men in chess (here, here and here).

Well, the IQ differences are even bigger between blacks and whites. At least several women have managed to obtain the norms to achieve the status of Grandmaster of chess. But only one black man has managed to obtain such norms, and with a rating of 2504 when he reached the peak of his chess career (the first chess boards in the world have more than 2800).

Nelson doesn’t want to see these brutal differences between blacks and whites for the simple fact that, despite his scientific background, upon reaching the subject of human biodiversity in Episode 50 he bows to the dogmas of the time, just as the scientists of yore had to bow to geocentrism.

Tags Nature

Chris Martenson Pandemics Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Covid & profits over lives

Post author By C .T.
Post date November 19, 2020
2 Comments on Covid & profits over lives

When the previous century I began an in-depth study of psychiatry, I came across a revealing fact. According to studies by the World Health Organization, poor countries such as Colombia, Nigeria and India had much higher recovery rates in people diagnosed with schizophrenia than in western countries. Reason: those poor countries couldn’t afford neuroleptics (‘antipsychotics’ in western Newspeak). So-called antipsychotics cause akathisia, that is, they are iatrogenic drugs. See what I recently said about Jordan Peterson regarding his akathisia produced even by other psychiatric drugs.

So from the last century I knew that there was a pseudoscientific dimension within conventional medicine. Just for the record, I recently told my female friend that ‘I reject one hundred percent alternative medicine and ninety percent of conventional medicine’, referring to drugs in the latter case; that is, most of what comes from Big Pharma.

Chris Martenson’s most recent video on covid-19 is very revealing, the summary of which tells us:

As many parts of the (so-called) developed world enter second lockdowns, and people line up for miles in their cars seeking food handouts in Texas, the less developed nations are busily discovering Covid-19 treatments that actually work. Really well. They work in an outpatient setting, in mild, moderate and severe cases of Covids-19. They work prophylactically. As always, I present the studies for your thoughtful examination.

The video is worth watching. Just keep in mind Martenson’s use of the code term ‘Dwizibin’ when he refers to hydroxychloroquine!

Although I am not sick with covid (not yet…), I already bought both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The doctors where I live are under the influence of pseudoscientific propaganda against these drugs, so I had to pay an informed doctor to give me the prescriptions. About these drugs that do work, in the YouTube discussion thread of Martenson’s video a couple of commenters said: ‘It’s almost like a vaccine is superfluous if we followed these guidelines’. And: ‘It’s because there are expensive vaccines now that must be sold’.

It seems very clear to me that Western capitalism must be destroyed if we ever reach power. The absolute proof that it has corrupted the white man is shown in that there is not a single millionaire or billionaire today who substantially sponsors the racialists; let’s say, as they were sponsored in the previous century by the German businessmen who helped Hitler. Although the present ‘profits over lives’ policy is very noticeable in the covid-19 pandemic, capitalism in general corrupts the Aryan soul as much, or even more, than Christian ethics. Or to be more precise: the effect of both is lethal for the race, which is why the US has become a paradigm of ethno-suicide.

For those who haven’t read the essay on the meaning of the ring in both Wagner and Tolkien, it is time to do it…

Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis

Nobody wanted to listen, 6

Post author By C .T.
Post date October 14, 2020

A humanitarian analyst

Once again, I will be told that I chose the wrong people: that the Escobars were unfortunate cases and that in the world there are professionals capable of understanding a tragedy for what it is, a tragedy and call a spade a spade. Let’s now see what happened to me with the most benevolent analyst I have ever met.

Dr. Carlos García had lent money to my parents when they were going to be expelled from their house in Tlalpan for not paying it. Likewise, when I was unemployed at twenty-three, García invited me to play chess with him once a week and paid for my classes. Almost two decades later, the same month as my disagreement with the Escobars, I went to his house to personally deliver a copy of my Letter to him. Let’s see what my diary says of that encounter in his home study:

July 15, 1998

Today I went to see Dr. García and he surprised me with several comments that corroborate my vision of him as a good person. For example, he told me ‘I have never committed a patient since 1960’ and used the word ‘curse’ from Szasz, with whom he says he agrees, when referring to psychiatric labelling.

Given the prestige that the doctor has in society, Tom Szasz says that the semantic stigma with which the psychiatrist denigrates his victim results in a social curse.

He liked Ronald Laing because of his colourful personality, and he told me that Laing played bassoon and had died playing tennis in Monaco.

Also, and this is novel because it qualifies what I wrote in previous pages, it vindicated the role of benevolent analysts like him. He told me that at psychiatrists’ symposia he had been blatantly told ‘That won’t work’—psychoanalysis. ‘This is where the buck is made’— psychiatry—since psychiatrists earn four times as much as analysts. He has had schizophrenic patients and one ‘labelled’—he used that word—of manic-depressive who had been prescribed lithium for life, but he left her well with only therapy, taking away the medicine. The shrink who had treated her before ‘was on the same page’ he told me, pointing to a book by Ramón de la Fuente.

This was a splendid start, and everything suggested that I had finally found a friendly ear in a professional. A doctor who recognises fraud in his profession can be a guarantee of good feelings towards the victims of the parents and the doctors who pay them. A month after I gave him my manuscript I excitedly called García to see what impact my precious text had caused. I don’t know shorthand, but I managed to jot down some important phrases by writing as fast as I could while talking to him on the phone:

17 of August. ‘It is very well written. It is a good testimony, like Kafka’s letter. In my opinion, the family problem must be removed: by removing the names, it could become a good testimony to be known socially; we must remove the character of denunciation and give it more social and collective function. It has curative action. It is a book against family, medical institutions and in particular, ahem, the health [apparently an euphemism for the psychiatric] institution. With pseudonyms… hopefully it may be published’.

This opinion encouraged me and I made a new appointment with him. But I must confess something. Years before I had been offended by García when in his home study he defended Amara against my complaint. That happened before I started my psychiatry research and could properly present my case in two books. But García’s comments about my Letter reconciled me to him, at least momentarily. The day I saw him, back in his home study, I wrote these reflections in my diary:

August 28. Today I went to see him and spent an hour and a half talking to him. I was wrong in believing that García wasn’t compassionate. The first thing he said about my Letter to Mama Medusa was: ‘I was so amazed. I felt moved’.

And he did talk about Amara: that there was no communication, although I remember that he was ambiguous about assigning blame (he implied that it was necessary to find out where the error came from). But he did say that instead of wanting to understand family dynamics Amara turned to drugs. This comment and others end the resentment I had for him when he long ago repudiated my criticism of his colleague. He also spoke of the terrible lack of communication with my parents as a teenager. That was the year [1974] that García met me at my parents’ school. He was incomparably more human than Angelica, Hector and not to mention Solbein. García confirmed to me that no physician in Mexico publicly opposes psychiatry. Almost at the beginning he spoke of ‘the high-risk situation’ in which I found myself as a teenager. But he added that it would be ‘pamphlet’ if I didn’t use pseudonyms, which was ‘the only objection’ he made to my text.

So García advised me the same as Tere: he was more concerned with the public image of my family than with my need to report the case.

Without having assimilated this fact, two years later I would send him How to Murder Your Child’s Soul. Once again, I wrote down what he was saying to me over the phone. The brackets and ellipsis mean that I couldn’t write down his sentences in full, but the fragments are significant to know what García was thinking:

June 9, 2000.

What a disappointment! Dr. García told me:

‘I read half. I haven’t finished it; the question of sight has become more acute. From what I have read, I believe that you are wasting time and vital energy on the family matter. [You have to] put a line, a full stop and dedicate yourself to other issues. The critique of psychiatry is somewhat outdated; I feel it’s anachronistic, like that criticism of Dr. Amara. As far as I have read, if you reoriented your critical skills in another field… I think there was a series of misunderstandings and it led to suffering… My point of view [is that you should abandon your project so] you don’t have to continue paying the toll of what happened to you in youth. [I would suggest that] the question of Dr. Amara be put aside’.

I asked him ‘Are you friends?’ and he replied: ‘Not properly. We don’t treat each other; I don’t know about his activities. My opinion isn’t influenced by a question of friendship’.

García’s little sermon caused me enormous indignation. I embarked on a reflection for several days that made me fill my diary with expletives. I didn’t respond to García either at his home study or in writing because it would have been useless. But on the very day of his paternalistic advice I wrote down this soliloquy:

Do you remember his defence of Amara years ago that hurt me? Good!: history repeats itself. All this corroborates my view that only apostates of an ideology understand reality. García is an analyst. He never apostatised from his profession: he’s part of the guild. His internal alliances don’t allow him to see reality. He’s like Hector Escobar: good people but wrong. I mustn’t interact with them at all! I mustn’t speak to him again. You have to accept your solitude, Caesar: no professional will be able to understand you since the profession itself is a trap. Now the last door is closing…

11th of June. One of the nonsense that García told me that I didn’t write down the day before was that continuing my literary project ‘could harm me’. This shows that analysts know nothing of the mind. What García ignores (‘so that you don’t continue paying the toll on what happened to you in your youth’) is that you cannot start a different life without money. And even with money I would write first and only later would I dedicate myself to the cinema, for the simple reason that it’s now that my soliloquies from those years are alive and need to be written down. I have been a mountain philosopher for decades and it would be a crime if, by dedicating myself to something else, they would go out of my memory. I don’t see in what other areas I could help myself and other victims more than by telling my life.

June 17. There is something more serious in García’s response. If Amara keeps destroying teenagers in his office it is deeply immoral to say ‘put it aside’. That advice presupposes as an absolute fact that Amara hasn’t destroyed and is not destroying other young people. García didn’t deny my accusation, he simply ignored it, no matter how obvious the fact that, since Amara and other psychiatrists continue to do these things, my testimony would serve to combat them. Without knowing it, García is part of the system. His message seems to be: Your text is changing the rules of the game for me (he used those words!). I won’t read it all: it may endanger my POV about my colleagues.

June 27th. Another thing. That response from García, allying internally with someone who deserves a trial in court, shows that therapy is really a very bad thing. There is no getting around this conclusion: If García had scolded me for denouncing his colleague in the past, I’d have been terribly confused. Well, something similar happened to me years ago, but in 1976 I would have panicked. I must use this in the future to show the accuracy of Jeffrey Masson’s stance: All therapy is toxic. Now I just hate him. As a teenager he would have hurt me.

Imagine this: suppose my book has already been published and is selling well. If a journalist interviewed García to talk about the literary novelty, he couldn’t have come out with the advice he gave me. It wouldn’t have been so easy to escape. He must have faced what I wrote in that half that he read. But talking to an analyst in private lends itself to violating the most elementary rules of logic and common sense. Therapists despise what their clients tell them and shy away like children. It is too evident that the Amaras, Santarellis, Krassoievitchs, Millanes, Corrales and even Garcías [the analysts who have offended me] should only be challenged in my writings. In other words, their offices are a Wonderland where the accusations are ignored, disregarded.

Remember that counselling the victim instead of reforming the perpetrator is what Miller calls poisonous pedagogy, and the same goes for trying to ‘educate’ the victim without vindicating him against the curse that Szasz spoke of.

It is clear, Caesar, that you shouldn’t expect anything from those in the cult of psychoanalysis, including those who originally showed a good heart. They all belong to a quasi-religion and will not apostatise from it. They will take it to their graves. Forget about them. If they weren’t so religious, García and Escobar could’ve called me to politely discuss our differences. They won’t do it: this is a world without morals and the García case exemplifies it. Instead of telling me something about my accusations, they close their minds. Like my sister Korina, they give advice. It seems that the taboo on these topics is much more widespread than expected. It isn’t just my parents. It isn’t only the old Uncle Beto and Godmother or my cousins Héctor, Octavio and Carmina. People who agree with Szasz himself, such as García, also have closed minds (and let’s not talk about doctors Santarelli, Millán and other renowned analysts who have offended me terribly). That is your world Caesar, like it or not. My message is for other people. Don’t give your pearls to pigs anymore.

June 28th. I can’t leave Garcia alone. I think of the phrases ‘that criticism of doctor Amara…’, ‘there was a series of misunderstandings…’ I didn’t criticise Amara: I denounced him! Using the word ‘criticism’ suggests something like an opinion, a point of view: as if in my book I hadn’t talked about criminal actions, not ‘misunderstandings’! See now this: ‘If you reoriented your critical capacity to another field…’ Imagine telling Solzhenitsyn to redirect his criticism to a field outside Russia! I have been thinking many things about Garcia. It’s a great indicator of how bad his profession is.

García also told me by phone that the National Institute of Psychiatry [known also as INP in Mexico] ‘hadn’t allowed a patient to be committed because it was involuntary’. With this argument he tried to refute my manuscript (‘the criticism of psychiatry is somewhat outdated’) by assuming that in recent years the profession has become more humanitarian. I was speechless. It couldn’t be that I, decades younger than García, knew that the INP is the only psychiatric hospital in Mexico City in which internment is voluntary. In the large psychiatric hospital next door to García’s home, the Fray Bernardino Álvarez Hospital, involuntary psychiatry is practiced, such as electroshocking the inmates! The INP does it too, but it brainwashes the patients into undergoing therapy with their consent. Of course: they aren’t warned that that ‘therapy’ produces amnesia. A woman who was interned at the INP told me in 2005 that the electroshocks that were applied to her there erased her memories of a trip. It is also worth mentioning that the director of the INP, Gerard Heinze, told me personally that he mentions the magic word ‘Fray Bernardino’ to intimidate his patients into submitting to electroshock ‘therapy’.(*)

Garcia’s ignorance of psychiatry in the year 2000 stems from his incredible—truly incredible—blindness before the human rights violations that take place a few blocks from his home. The only psychiatric facility in the country that locks up children, the Juan N. Navarro Children’s Hospital, is also close to his home! In which bubble was Dr. García living? A few months before García told me that the criticism of my manuscript was outdated, the Mexican magazine Proceso had published a cover article exposing the crimes committed in a national psychiatric hospital run by the state. My diary from 2000 continues:

June 29. Oh García: I can’t leave you! Two years ago you told me that the schizoid label is ‘label’ and ‘a curse as Szasz says’. But when a colleague of yours labels me as a teenager while I am perfectly sane, and as an adult I want to denounce him, then you tell me: ‘Amara must be put aside’. Isn’t this precisely schizophrenia?

The anger caused by the old friend’s scolding was such that in my diaries I continued to go after him sporadically in 2001, 2002, 2003 and even 2004. But the above is enough to provide an idea of the bile that I spilled over his little piece of advice and scolding: the ‘poisonous pedagogy’ that Miller speaks of in its purest expression!

Carlos García did exactly the same that my pseudo-friend Tere had done to me. They both advised me to abandon my literary project. They didn’t realise that just by giving me that advice they would become themselves characters in such a project. The only difference is that Tere wanted to dissuade me from publishing my Letter to mom Medusa, where I denounce the crime of my parents; García wanted to dissuade me from publishing How to Murder Your Child’s Soul, where I exposed his colleague Amara. For Tere as well as for García and many others, the crimes that society commits with a family child must remain hidden. No one is to pronounce names. This pair reminds me of the first Gulag fugitive who escaped from an archipelago island and published a book about his experiences. In a crazy western world where Stalin used to be worshiped, the fugitive’s testimony was ignored and its author was subjected to the same kind of expletives that I received.
____________

(*) With another anti-psychiatric activist, in 2002 I interviewed Gerard Heinze, the director of the INP, and later I wrote a report about that visit.

Tags Mexico

Alice Miller Autobiography Hojas Susurrantes (book) Homosexuality Pseudoscience Psychiatry

On depression

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 20, 2020
1 Comment on On depression

A Stone Boat (Faber & Faber 1994)
The Noonday Demon (Scribner 2002)

When we repress our anger, writes Susan Forward in her bestseller Toxic Parents, we will likely fall into depression. But not all cases of depression, the most common form of mental disorder, are the result of repressed anger. It may originate from existential causes: the infinite gamut of insoluble problems in life. However, in cases of repressed parental abuse cathartic anger may be a balsam for its cure. Colin Ross, who coined the term trauma model of mental disorders, believes that ‘anger is the most powerful anti-depressant in the market’. Andrew Solomon takes the opposite stance: he idealised the parent and repressed his anger, as I’ll try to show in this essay-review of his books.

Andrew Solomon✡

Solomon is a very peculiar writer, the son of a millionaire of Forest Laboratories: a company that manufactures psychiatric drugs. That we are immersed in the matrix of Big Pharma is evident in the compliments that The Noonday Demon has received, especially the compliments of those who have suffered from depression. I find this so scandalous that I must write this essay, especially because The Noonday Demon was in the New York Times bestseller list. The pseudoscientific propaganda that inundates The Noonday Demon through its 700 pages (I read the Spanish translation seventeen years ago) is such that I could have written a much longer essay-review.

The Noonday Demon received the National Book Award in 2001. Solomon has thus contributed to what Thomas Szasz calls the pharmacratic status quo. Although Solomon mentions Szasz and Elliot Valenstein, he omits to say that they and many other mental health professionals disagree with the biological theories that Solomon presents as fact. It is not even apparent that Solomon has read the dissident scholars. For example, in the 860 references that he boasts in The Noonday Demon he does not mention a single reference of my critical bibliography on psychiatry that I recommend (see below).

An American pandemic?

According to Solomon’s bestseller, almost twenty millions Americans suffer from depression. Solomon confesses in his book how he suffered from this malaise since his mother died, and he recounts the therapeutic odyssey he found in a psychiatric profession that he considers benign.

The ‘noonday demons’ was a religious metaphor used since the Low Middle Ages to describe what since the Renaissance would be called ‘melancholy’, and in our times ‘depression’. Through the centuries, those who have been in panic when these demons attack have been prone to experiment with all sorts of quack remedies. Solomon himself tried a magical ritual in Africa; standard psychiatric medication, and New Age alternative remedies. He even experimented with alcohol, cocaine and opium, as he confesses in his book.

Tom Szasz, perhaps the most famous psychiatrist in the United States, proposes to abolish involuntary psychiatry. Szasz doesn’t propose to ban the prescription of drugs for adults, always provided that the professional maintains well informed his client about the risks (something they rarely do). A great deal of the economic power of psychiatry rests on this not so obscure side of the profession, the voluntary side: something that blinds people like Solomon to see that the profession has a darker side.

If an individual wants to take drugs, whether tranquilizers, stimulants, anti-anxiety pills or even illegal drugs, he should be free to do it according to Szasz. Solomon goes beyond this and mentions cases in which people in panic solicited electroshock. Although shock treatment is sometimes voluntary, I don’t believe it should be legal. Solomon himself cites the case of a young woman who told him that after a shock session she forgot everything she had learned in law school. Solomon also cites the grotesque testimony of an individual that requested psychosurgery to eliminate his persistent depression, and the neuropsychiatrists performed it! (a pointless surgery, of course, because the problem was in his mind’s software, not in the brain’s hardware).

Those procedures affected the faculties of these voluntary patients, the remedy resulting worse than the illness, because psychiatry is an iatrogenic profession. If we keep in mind Colin Ross’ words about ‘anger, the best antidepressant in the market’, instead of these harmful treatments I would recommend a depressed patient to write a long letter to the parent who caused the crisis (I myself did it, as we shall see). This is what Sue Forward recommends in Toxic Parents. Alternatively, I would recommend talking with survivors of parental abuse. Forward describes her group therapies for neurotics; Ross describes the same for people in psychotic crises. In the worst of possible cases, say schizophrenia, I would recommend a Soteria-like house, although there are very few of them because the medical profession monopolises treatments.

What neither Solomon nor the orthodox psychiatrists understand is that, by medically treating those who have been abused at home, they promote a status quo that ought to change. Those who want a better society do not propose prohibiting the drugs that are voluntarily consumed. We want to eliminate the conditions that cause mental stress and disorders. However, we do point out that with the medical model of mental disorders we are heading toward the dystopia described by Aldous Huxley. In October of 1949, when Nineteen Eighty Four was published, Huxley wrote to Orwell a letter telling him that the totalitarian state would not control people with a boot on the face as in 1984 but through much more subtle forms of manipulation: the voluntary drugging in the

Brave new world

The efficacy of antidepressants, that started to be manufactured a few years after Huxley sent his letter to Orwell, has been enormously exaggerated by the pharmaceutical companies. Solomon ignores that, just like homeopathic meds, the antidepressant that his father distributes basically functions like a placebo: the power of suggestion and autosuggestion. Studies show that a considerable percentage of the people that are told that a marvellous antidepressant has just been discovered are cured of their depression although they were given sugar pills. This effect is called ‘placebo’ in the medical profession. The companies like the one that made Solomon’s father a rich man also minimise the side-effects of the antidepressants.

In a market society it is very difficult to find the study of an independent researcher about the effects of antidepressants. The few existent studies, say those by Peter Breggin and Joseph Glenmullen, have not been rebutted either by the companies that make the drugs, or by the psychiatrists who prescribe them. Breggin, a graduate Harvard psychiatrist, recommends stopping taking any sort of psychiatric meds. It’s irritating that my dust jacket has Solomon as ‘profoundly human’ when Solomon advises people suffering from depression not to stop taking drugs. He even confesses that he got mad with his aunt’s gerontologist because the good doctor advised her to stop taking Celexa (citalopram): the very drug that Solomon’s dad distributes.

As I said, Solomon writes about psychiatric theories as fact. Curiously, at the same time he recommends alternative treatments. Lots of them! Just as the race of birds in Alice in Wonderland, in Solomon’s book all sorts of therapies, allopathic, homeopathic and alternative, win the first price in the treatment of depression. In Solomon’s wonderland absolutely everything is recommended, from the most diverse forms of popular quackery to lobotomy. Since I only have the Spanish translation of The Noonday Demon I cannot quote Solomon verbatim in English (libraries in Mexico are very poor in their English section). But he certainly says that dozens of treatments, from Saint-John’s-wort to psychosurgery, are reasonably promising. If such quackery apparently gets results, it’s all due to the placebo effect.

Solomon’s book is inundated with incredible treatments, personal testimonies from his depressed acquaintances, and with the theories of biological psychiatry. For example, Solomon writes that some people who abuse stimulants also suffer from depression in the same family. To him, this indicates that there’s a ‘genetic predisposition’ for the consumption of cocaine and other stimulants.

It doesn’t occur to Solomon that there can be no genes responsible for addictions for the simple reason that the genes of our species are older than the making of these chemicals. For instance, a putative gene that moves the alcoholic individual to drink cannot exist because alcohol is chronologically more recent than the genotype of the alcoholic individual, and there have been no substantive changes in our species since the caveman. Similarly, Solomon’s claim that the type of drugs that his dad makes represents real medicine is unsupportable. For example, he recognises that cocaine heals depression, but he disapproves of it because it’s illegal. On the next page Solomon recognises that Xanax pills (alprazolam), a benzodiazepine, caused him unpleasant symptoms. Xanax is the anxiety killer that Solomon used to take: the very drug that made George Bush Sr. vomit in Japan during his presidency. According to Solomon, with this drug he could crash into a heavy sleep plagued with dreams. However, he does recommend it because it’s legal.

Solomon never reveals in his book that Ritalin (methylphenidate) can be moral and illegal in the adult who takes it without prescription, but that it can also be immoral and legal if it is administered to a child to control him at school. Instead, he reasons like the good boy of the establishment: the legality of his dad’s company makes those drugs, by definition, moral; and the illegality of cocaine and ecstasy makes them immoral. Solomon talks about the permanent damage in the brain’s dopaminergic systems caused by cocaine. But he omits to say that Zyprexa (olanzapine), the neuroleptic that the psychiatrist prescribed him, causes exactly the same damage. Similarly, Solomon talks about the withdrawal symptoms that cocaine causes, but he does not dissuade his readers from taking neuroleptics although akathisia is pretty similar to such symptoms. Curiously, Solomon says he would accept taking cocaine or ecstasy to cure his depression, but that the withdrawal symptoms made him have second thoughts. In another part of his book Solomon recognises that while alprazolam killed his anxiety during the depressive attacks, it converted him into an addict. In a magazine article Solomon confessed he used to take about twelve pills per day, but when he’s in another mood he states that the aetiology of his depression is purely existential.

The cocktail of psychiatric drugs that Solomon has taken for years includes Zoloft (sertraline), Xanax (alprazolam), Paxil (paroxetine), Navane (thiothixene), Valium (diazepam), BuSpar (buspirone), Wellbutrin (bupropion) and Zyprexa (olanzapine). Even though this suggests that Solomon believes in the medical model of mental disorders, he often talks of souls in pain. He writes that he ‘discovered something that should be called the soul’. Other times he appears as the spokesman of psychiatric biologicism. His book is a contradictory compendium of both explicit apologetics of biopsychiatry and soft criticism of biopsychiatry; of existential testimonies of depressed people, and the biological myths of the profession. He advertises Prozac (fluoxetine) and on another page he recognises that his mother complained about its side-effects. (If Prozac and the antidepressants work as placebos, the so-called ‘side-effects’ are in fact the primary effects, the only effects of the drug; and the antidepressant effect would be caused by the power of suggestion.) Solomon also presents a mixture of both: existential and biological problems as the cause of melancholy. He sensibly concedes that extreme poverty and homelessness may cause ‘depression’, but he unreasonably recommends treating the homeless with psychiatric drugs. He adds the remarkable statement that more than in any other case, the homeless’ resistance to take drugs is a symptom of a ‘disease’. Solomon quotes the scientists or pseudo-scientists who say that the cause of the addictions is ‘in the brain’, when common sense contradicts this bio-reductionist approach. Asian people for example would disagree that their gambling is in their defective brains. The same could be said of those Westerners who are addicted to shopping in a consumer-oriented society: the problem is in the culture, not in their brains.

In his book Solomon contradicts himself in a thousand ways. As a master of doublethink, he accepts both the medical model of mental disorders, and the trauma model of mental disorders when both are mutually exclusive. In his chapter about suicide he repeats the slogans of the psychiatrist, for example when he says that we got to understand that suicidal ideation is the result of mental illness, and that mental illnesses are treatable. He recommends electroshock. Not even the horrendous case-stories that he mentions awakened Solomon’s compassion. He didn’t condemn the psychiatric institutions that maintain them alive against their will. But when he writes about the suicide of his mother, Solomon turns suddenly into a compassionate son, and suicide is nothing else than an act of a tormented soul. However, Solomon didn’t condemn the nets he saw in Norristown Hospital that maintained alive patients like mosquitoes in cobwebs to prevent that they killed themselves. They were strangers to him and he accepts involuntary therapies applied to them. But double-thinker Solomon confesses that nothing causes him more horror than the thought that he would be prevented from committing suicide.

The ‘unacknowledged revenge’ on mother

Throughout my reading of Solomon’s book the question came to my mind: How is it that someone like me, who writes in a state of virtual poverty in the Third World, never fell in depressions while Solomon, the American junior who spent a fortune in treatments didn’t only suffer from the common blues, but of horrible depressions? Could it be that Solomon has not listened to what Stefan Zweig, the biographer of tormented souls, called the daimon?

Let me explain myself. Solomon writes about some children whose parents took to the psychiatrist’s office for anger therapy. Solomon completely omits to say that this was probably due to child abuse at home. Once the legit anger is crushed in the therapeutic sessions, the shrinks acknowledge that the children fell into a melancholic state (remember Ross’ equation about anger and depression being inversely proportional to each other). Those children are, again, strangers to Solomon and he doesn’t pity them. But in another part of his book Solomon recognises that his depression originated after his mother died. And it was precisely a conflict with his mother, who hated Solomon’s sexuality, what had moved him to write another book: A Stone Boat.

I must confess that what moved me to write this essay-review is my literary project that I have written in Spanish and that I would love to see published in English. Alas, the subject is such a taboo that more than twenty publishing houses in Spain and Mexico have rejected it. There’s an almost symmetrical antithesis between the first of my books, Letter to Mom Medusa and A Stone Boat. Also, there’s an almost symmetrical antithesis between my second book How to Murder Your Child’s Soul and The Noonday Demon.

A Stone Boat is an autobiographical novel in which Solomon eludes discharging the rage he feels toward his mother. In The Noonday Demon Solomon mentions A Stone Boat quite a few times as a description of real events of his life, not as a fictional novel. Unlike The Noonday Demon I do have an English copy of it and can, at last, quote this homosexual writer. Solomon wrote:

I can remember days… that this secret [his sexual preferences] was my unacknowledged revenge on her. I would lie in the silence of my room and imagine the pain I would later cause my mother.

Although on the next page he writes: ‘I wanted somehow to take the unspeakable vengeance’, in the balance A Stone Boat is a politically-correct confessional novel: Solomon is afraid of speaking out the whole truth of his sentiments. The plot starts when the main character, Solomon’s alter ego, arrived in Paris to confront his mother because of her attitude toward his male lover.

I set off to Paris in anger, determined for the first time to act upon anger… I was, at best, trying to see my life as separate from my mother’s.

But he couldn’t. Upon arriving he discovered that his mother had cancer.

Perhaps I was angrier that week than I remember, but I think in fact that when I first saw that my mother might be sick, my anger got put away somewhere, and my mother became as glorious to me as she had been in my childhood.

Hence, writes Solomon, ‘through I had gone to France to sever ties’, the beatific vision continued until she died. In the last chapter of A Stone Boat Solomon confesses:

I forgive my mother as though I were spokesman for the very gates of heaven.

Solomon ignores that unilateral forgiveness is a psychological impossibility. The grace of forgiveness only reaches us when the offender recognises her fault. Neither in real life nor in the novel did his mother repent. And Solomon forfeited to confront her directly (the opposite of what another Jew, Kafka, did in Letter to His Father). Moreover, Solomon recounts that in the funeral he saw his mother ‘like an angel’ and, by seeing her in this way, he delivered himself into the open arms of the goddess of Melancholy.

The literary genre that I would like to inaugurate would not only oppose the biologicism that is breathed throughout The Noonday Demon, but the elegant prose of A Stone Boat: a poetic novel that has been described as a reach toward Proust. Vindictive autobiography doesn’t take care of the literary form at all: it’s a barbarous genre that breaks the millenarian taboo of honouring the parent. Without scruples, repressions and with the real names, vindictive autobiography throws in the parent’s face what s/he did to us. Conversely, The Noonday Demon is a book that approaches depression from every possible viewpoint, an atlas of the world of depression as the subtitle says. But what we need is more profundity, not amplitude. This is true not only of The Noonday Demon, but of many other quack books on the subject. The cause of the mental disorders with no known biological marker is in the psyche’s nucleus, not on a surface that a scholarly ‘atlas’ may explore.

In his autobiographical novel, my antipode Solomon wrote:

It was terrible how much I loved my mother. It was the most terrible thing in the world.

This was reinforced by the family dynamics:

My father expected everyone to understand at once that my mother was more important than everyone else [and Solomon] was as much in the habit of believing it as he was. [To the extent that Solomon] thought that if she died I would also have to die.

Solomon’s girlfriend told him: ‘Enough is enough; if you spend every minute with her, you’ll go crazy’. He further writes that ‘to be in the room’ with his mother ‘was like being splattered with blood’. He loved her despite that ‘in the first weeks of her illness, my mother was to reveal more clearly her terrible brutality: She could be harsh, and she was demanding, and she could be selfish’. The metaphor of a stone boat came from his girlfriend referring to Solomon’s idealisation of a perfect family: a myth that, according to her, would sink in the sea.

But she was wrong. Solomon didn’t sink the stony idea in a sea of truth. He continued to idealise his mom as it is surmised from the fact that, after he published A Stone Boat, Solomon embarked on a huge enterprise: the writing of a treatise to repress the aetiology of his depression even further, The Noonday Demon. In this later work, his magnum opus, Solomon tells us that the old Freudian precept of blaming the mother has been discarded.

Solomon is wrong in all counts. Blaming the mother is neither a Freudian principle (it’s Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s), nor has it been discarded (cf. the work of Alice Miller), and Solomon himself has to get his ass even with his mother’s if he is to win the battle against depression. That’s Sue Forward’s advice, who recommends the depressed adult to read a vindictive letter to the late parent in front of the grave to achieve inner peace. As a researcher, I have been in anger therapies in the Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma in Dallas. The level of overt fury and hate toward the invoked perpetrators shocked me. The emotions I witnessed there were not creatures of the surface but the demons of the Old World that Solomon and his depressing fans don’t dare to invoke.

The daimon

Those who fall in depression are like extinct volcanoes that have long passed by the tectonic plates’ hot spot beneath them. Solomon has not done a good introspection: he’s an extinct volcano. Only thus can we understand when he writes that one of the most terrible aspects of depression, the anxiety and the panic attacks, is that volition is absent: that those sentiments simply ‘occur’. Obviously Solomon has no idea of the demonic magma that inhabits beneath him and that desperately needs a way out. The bestselling author on depression doesn’t know what depression is: psychic congestion or a cooled crag that, blocking the escape valve, impedes the deliverance of a monster. Had Solomon choose the genre of the eruptive epistle instead of the toned down novel or a scholarly treatise, he could have confronted the inner daimon that haunts him and vomit the hell out of it.

There’s a passage in The Noonday Demon that suggests this interpretation. Solomon writes that he once believed that his sexuality was responsible for the suffering of his mother: suffering she endured until she died. The mother hated Solomon’s homosexuality, and that hatred was a poison that started to impregnate Solomon’s mind. I’m not inventing this: I’m rephrasing what Solomon wrote from the translated copy of his Noonday that I have access to. Solomon even writes that he cannot separate his mother’s homophobia from his own homophobia to the point of exposing himself to the HIV virus. And he further confesses that this exposure was a way of converting an inner self-hatred into a physical reality. In A Stone Boat he writes that his mother told him: ‘No child was ever loved more than you’, and in the following pages he adds: ‘A minute later I thought of killing her’ to end the mother’s agony. Mom’s cruellest tirade had been telling him she would eat poisonous maggots and die, and that only then would Solomon regret having been a naughty child.

Solomon’s confessions can help us to understand his depression in a way that Solomon can’t. As he writes in The Noonday Demon, which unlike A Stone Boat is not a novel, his mother committed suicide to stop the pain of her ovary cancer. On June 19, 1991 in front of Solomon his beloved mother swallowed red pills of Seconal (secobarbital: a barbiturate). He and the rest of his family assisted the suicide. Solomon confesses us that his mother’s suicide was the cataclysm of his life; that it’s buried in his guts like a sharp knife—these are his own metaphors—and that it hurts every time he moves. In some of the most emotional passages Solomon tells us that his mother took pill after pill, the ‘poisonous maggots’ she had threatened would make him feel really bad. Solomon even writes that by imitating her he later learned to take handfuls of anti-depressants, ‘pill after pill’…

The psychic radiography of Solomon starts taking shape. However, like the proverbial prodigal son that represses in his mind the parent’s behaviour, Solomon tells us that it is nonsense that teenagers reproach their parents when they have done everything for them. His non-reproached resentment metamorphosed into acute melancholy: just what happened to the children whose shrinks eliminated their anger. But it is the prohibition of touching the mother what makes this Œdipus write that we should not deceive ourselves; that we don’t know the cause of depression and that we don’t know either how it came about in human evolution.

That, my dear readers, is biological psychiatry: the art of blaming the body for our cowardice to confront mom.

Œdipus’ struggles with the daimon

In his desperate attempts to escape the harassment of his inner daimon, Solomon found the exit door by a fluke. In The Noonday Demon he paraphrases the psychoanalysts who have written insightful passages about melancholy. For example, Solomon writes that, in order not to castigate the beloved person, the melancholic individual re-directs the anger and the ambivalence he feels for the loved one onto the patient himself. And following Sigmund Freud and his disciple Karl Abraham he self-analysed himself well enough when he wrote that during his first crisis, after his mother’s death, he incorporated her into his writing. Unfortunately, he also writes that he lamented the pain he caused to her, and this false sense of guilt persisted. He further writes that her death prevented that his relationship with his mother had a healthy closure. In A Stone Boat he had written: ‘Our flashes of intense hatred had never really undermined our adoration of each other’.

Solomon never crossed through the very door that he opened. In contrast to John Modrow, the valiant memorialist who published a touching autobiography about his maddening parents, Solomon’s struggles with the daimon of honouring the parent never ended. When he published A Stone Boat the daimon of guilt assaulted him once more. In The Noonday Demon he writes that when he published the novel it made him feel like a defiant son, and that the guilt feelings began to consume him. He even writes about an internalised love-object, his mother, and about internalised sadism: what Solomon did to himself. Solomon wasn’t only masochist to defend the idealised image of his mother (cf. what Ross says about ‘the locus of control shift’ in his book The Trauma Model). He broke pictures of himself hanging in his home, and he left the hammer in the middle of the broken crystals.

Once he even attacked viciously a friend to the point of breaking his jaw and nose. The man was hospitalised and in The Noonday Demon, where we wouldn’t expect fiction or literary embellishments as in the novel, Solomon confesses to us that he will never forget the relief he felt with each of his vicious punches. He found himself even strangling his friend and says that could have killed him. However, Solomon omits to say if he was arrested or if dad’s attorneys kept him out of jail. He does confess, however, that he hasn’t repented from what he did. He justifies his actions and he wrote that otherwise he would have become mad. And he adds that part of the sensation of fear and impotence he suffered in those times was alleviated by those savage acts. And still further he adds the illuminating confession that to deny the curative power of violence would be a terrible mistake, and that the night of the fighting he arrived at home covered with blood with a sensation of horror and euphoria at the same time.

Miraculously, that night he felt completely released from his daimon! But was the struggle with it over? Nope!: this acting out was nothing else than the displaced fury he felt toward his mother.

Alice Miller has taught us that displaced rage is infinite. It never ends. One is left to wonder what would the hospitalised friend say of Solomon’s fans, who have described him as ‘compassionate and humane’. On the next page of Solomon’s fight he gives us the key to enter his mind. Solomon wrote that he realised that depression could manifest itself in the form of rage.

This cracks the daimon’s cipher. Those who fall in depression and go to the shrink office to pop up a bottle and take a pill don’t know what’s happening in their heads! What these people actually feel is rage and fury toward the perps. But God forbid: we cannot touch them. Parents are to be honoured. A Miller reader would argue that only when our selves get integrated about how and when we were abused, we won’t displace our rage on innocent friends. Solomon also confesses to us that he displaced the anger he felt on his lover: ‘I hated Bernard and I hated my father. This made it easier to love my mother’. This is exactly what Silvano Arieti said in Interpretation of Schizophrenia about one of his patients who ‘protected the images of his parents but at the expense of having an unbearable self-image’. The dots start to be connected. Solomon imagined that he ‘would mutilate his [Bernard’s] cat’. But that was not enough:

I wrote him a letter carefully designed to make him fall in love with me, hopelessly in love, so that I could reject him brutally. I would castrate him with a straight razor. [And also fantasised] putting rat poison in his coffee, but I couldn’t remember why.

Of course he couldn’t: he was still displacing his anger onto a scapegoat (in The Noonday Demon he ratifies the actual existence of the person he called Bernard). Solomon was looking for a safer object to transfer his unconscious affects toward his mother, a mother about whom he wrote: ‘You don’t love me. You are obsessed with me, and you keep trying to drag me down into your illness’. Since displaced anger is infinite, in The Noonday Demon Solomon confesses that, in desperation, he went to Senegal looking for an exorcism. The persistent daimon had to be expelled at all costs, and he tried the ritual called ndeup. But witchcraft didn’t work. The powerful spell that his witch-mother had cast unto him wasn’t broken in black Africa.

After his Senegal experience Solomon continued to look for the cause of depression in psychiatry’s blame-the-body theories, and he also tried many pop remedies. It’s fascinating to see that quite a few of his quack remedies are identical to what Robert Burton prescribed in his famous 1621 treatise on melancholy. Both writers, the 17th-century Burton and the 21st century Solomon, recommend Saint-John’s-wort! And parallel to these Old Age and New Age quackery, Solomon writes a ‘scientific’ chapter on evolutionary biology to answer how could it be possible that natural selection allowed depression.

If we take into account that depression is a crack in our attachment systems due to unprocessed abuse, the above is a pretty stupid question. While I only have minor quibbles with Solomon’s stupidities, when he mentions involuntary psychiatry he sides the parents and the professionals against the patients. The pages that infuriated me the most are the ones in which Solomon sides the parents who label their sane children as mentally ill to control them through psychiatric drugs, especially at school.

It is understandable, therefore, that Solomon didn’t dedicate The Noonday Demon to the child victim of involuntary psychiatry, what I do with my texts. He dedicated it to his millionaire father who financed his investigation and whose income depends on the selling of those drugs for social control.

Recommended readings:

Criticism of language is the most radical of all criticisms. The following is the first book of my list because, if in our vocabulary we don’t root out the Newspeak of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists, it will be impossible to understand the family, social, economic and existential problems that we all have:

(1) Thomas Szasz: Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

On the importance of vindictive autobiography:

(2) John Modrow: How To Become A Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry (New York: Writers Club Press, 2003).

(3) Susan Forward: Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life (2002 by Bantam, first published in 1989).

On psychoanalysis and all sorts of psychotherapies:

(4) Jeffrey Masson: Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing (Common Courage Press, 1988).

(5) —————–: Final analysis: The Making And Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (London: HarperCollins, 1991).

On the pseudoscientific nature of biological psychiatry:

(6) Colin Ross and Alvin Pam (eds.): Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry: Blaming the Body (NY: Wiley & Sons, 1995).

(7) Elliot Valenstein: Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs And Mental Health (NY: The Free Press, 1998).

(8) Peter Breggin: Toxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the “New Psychiatry” (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

(9) Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (Cambridge: Perseus, 2001).

Note of 2020:

Anyone who wants updated information can watch Robert Whitaker’s YouTube videos, which includes videos from this year (not to be confused with white nationalist Robert W. Whitaker who died in 2017).

My books on the subject appear on the sidebar: Letter to mom Medusa and Day of Wrath.

Tags Trauma model of mental disorders