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Category: Psychology

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Friedrich Nietzsche Goethe Psychology Stefan Zweig

Master Builders

A Typology of the Spirit

by Stefan Zweig

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

Translated from the German
by Eden and Cedar Paul
Viking Press, 1930

PART TWO

The Struggle with the Daimon

Hölderlin
Kleist
Nietzsche



Excerpted from the introduction:

Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche are obviously alike even in respect of the outward circumstances of their lives; they stand under the same horoscopical aspect. One and all they were hunted by an overwhelming, a so-to-say superhuman power, were hunted out of the warmth and cosiness of ordinary experience into a cyclone of devastating passion, to perish prematurely amid storms of mental disorder, and one of them by suicide.

A power greater than theirs was working within them, so that they felt themselves rushing aimlessly through the void. In their rare moments of full awareness of self, they knew that their actions were not the outcome of their own volition but that they were thralls, were possessed (in both senses of the word) by a higher power, the daimonic.

I term “daimonic” the unrest that is in us all, driving each of us out of himself into the elemental. It seems as if nature had implanted into every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were interminably striving—with tense passion—to rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives. The daimon is the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being (otherwise quiet and almost inert) towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation, and even self-destruction. But in those of common clay, this factor of our composition which is both precious and perilous proves comparatively ineffective, is speedily absorbed and consumed. In such persons only at rare moments, during the crises of puberty or when, through love or the generative impulse, the inward cosmos is heated to the boiling point, does the longing to escape from the familiar groove, to renounce the trite and the common-place, exert its mysterious way. For the daimon cannot make its way back to the infinite which is his home except by ruthlessly destroying the finite and the earthly which restrains him, by destroying the body wherein, for a season, he is housed.

Thus it comes to pass that everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles perforce with his daimon. This is a combat of titans, a struggle between lovers, the most splendid contest in which we mortals can engage. Many succumb to the daimon’s fierce onslaught as the woman succumbs to the passion of the impetuous male; they are overpowered by his preponderant strength; they feel themselves joyfully permeated by the fertilizing element. Many subjugate him; their cold, resolute, purposive will constrains his ardours to accept their guidance even while he animates their energies.

Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche were the Promethean race which is in revolt against customary forms and tends thereby to destroy itself. There is no art worthy of the name without daimonism, no great art that does not voice the music of the spheres.

The first thing that is obvious in Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche is their detachment from the world. The daimon plucks away from realities those whom he holds in his grip. Not one of the three had wife or children, any more than had their congeners Beethoven and Michelangelo; they had neither fixed home nor permanent possessions, neither settled occupation nor secure footing in the world. They were nomads, vagrants, eccentrics; they were despised and rejected; they lived in the shadows. Not one of them ever had a bed to call his own; they sat in hired chairs, wrote at hired desks, and wandered from one lodging-house to another. Nowhere did they take root; not even Eros could establish binding ties for those whom the jealous daimon had espoused. Their friendships were transitory, their appointments fugitive, their work unremunerative; they stood ever in vacant spaces and created in the void. Thus their existence was like that of shooting stars, which flash on indeterminable paths, whereas Goethe circled in a fixed orbit.

For Kleist, Hölderlin and Nietzsche, living was not to be learned, nor worth learning. Fire became their element; flame, their mode of activity; and their lives were perpetually scorched in the furnaces which alone made their work possible. As time went on, they grew even more lonely, more estranged from the world of men. To the daemonic temperament reality seems inadequate: Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, each in his own way, were rebels against the existing order.

The formula of Goethe’s life was the circle, a closed curve; that of an existence perfectly rounded and self-contained; the daimonics’ curve is the parabola: a steep, impetuous ascent, an uprush into limitless space, a brusque change of direction, followed by no less a steep, a no less impetuous decline. The climax, both in respect of imaginative creation and in respect to the artist’s personal life, is reached immediately after the fall. Goethe’s death, on the other hand, is an inconspicuous point in the circle; but the life of the daimonic terminates in an explosion or a conflagration. In the latter case death compensates for the material poverty of life.

Invariably, even in the most perplexing and most dangerous manifestations, the creative genius has a value supreme over other values, a meaning profounder than that of all other meanings.

Categories
Psychology Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Paradigm shift

duck-rabbit_illusion

Kuhn used the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way.


Most white nationalists start their intellectual career by believing that the West’s darkest hour is due to “homicide”: Jewish influence is killing us. I myself navigated in that ship. But the more I thought on the subject, the more water entered the ship in the sense that holes started to appear in my working paradigm. The recent exchange at several threads of Occidental Dissent on this subject gave me an opportunity to disclose my ideas in a popular forum outside the provinciality of this site.

It is a very difficult subject from the psychological viewpoint. And you will be surprised to learn that in the past I constantly shifted in my mind from Type-A to Type-B and vice versa—that’s to say, in my soliloquies I blamed Jews Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and Whites Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays!—depending on the sort of literature I happened to be reading.

The biggest hole that started to sink the ship, and I am following the metaphor in the sense that all of it was a mental warfare inside my head, was the fact that even when Christianity was healthy the Iberian whites, especially the Portuguese, ruined their gene pool by mixing their blood with non-whites in the very centuries when Jews had no power in the Iberian peninsula thanks to the Inquisition. I thought along those lines because, as my readers can appreciate, I was born in a place formerly known as New Spain. (Which explains why I could write so easily a long essay about the Aztecs that I translated for this blog.)

A paradigm shift is, according to Thomas Kuhn in his influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a change in the basic assumptions or paradigms within a ruling theory. See the image at the top of this entry and discover what happened in my mind:

During the process of wrapping my mind as I tried to solve the conundrum of who was guiltier, Jews or Whites, the only defense I had against such intellectual agony was simply to take a closer look at the evidence. For instance, investigate what had happened to the white people in cultures that predate the Jewish takeover of the western media today.

The closer I zoomed in, the more I realized that the phenomenon I was trying to grasp in my visuals was not a duck but a rabbit. It only looked like a duck at a distance because of an optical illusion. In other words, all shifting in paradigms is due to an internal change. It is the mind what “chose” to see it either way. That’s why I stated above that trying to decipher whether Western malaise is suicide or homicide is, in the final analysis, a psychological issue.

In other words, if you eat too many Jews for breakfast, as monocausalists do, you will always see a duck. It is only when you start to broaden, say, Kevin MacDonald’s perspective into the meta-perspective that William Pierce offers us in his last book, Who We Are, when in addition to the Jewish Problem you start to see a gigantic White Problem as well. Pierce’s book is what one finds at the deepest level of the rabbit hole.

In the last chapter of Who We Are Pierce says, “In the final analysis, however, none of these things changes the fact of profound moral illness on the part of the White populations of the Western nations in the postwar era. It is an illness with roots deep in the past, as has been pointed out in earlier installments, but in postwar America it bloomed. It is difficult to analyze the witches’ brew and place exactly the proper amount of blame on each ingredient.” And after mentioning the ingredients of the brew he added, “The evil spirit of the immediate postwar period was, at the time, apparent only to an especially sensitive few, while most could not see beneath the superficial glitter of change and motion.”

Take note that Pierce always was perfectly aware of the Jewish problem. As you can see, the article I mention at the sidebar, “Best article on the Jewish question” is #1 when I advertise his texts. But unlike monocausalists and Type-A bicausalists like Greg Johnson (“So, is it all “our fault”? Of course not”) Pierce knew that, after the Second World War, something monstrously evil in the white soul was ultimately the culprit of our woes.

That’s why I will always advertise Hellstorm as the starting text to understand this blog.

Categories
Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Feminism Hojas Susurrantes (book) Islamization of Europe Liberalism Psychiatry Psychology Women

A body-snatched Spaniard

I have edited and moved this entry here (see also here).

Categories
Holocaust Justice / revenge Psychology Red terror Richard Wagner

Healing Amfortas (cont.)

wagner-parsifal

Further to my previous post. Below, (1) my presentation of Colin Ross’ cornerstone to understand the trauma model of mental disorders; (2) a translation of “Regaining Self-esteem” by Dr. Claus Wolfschlag—original in German here—, and (3) my views on traumatized Germany.



1.- Ross’ trauma model

Note of August 25, 2017: Today I will move this text to an entry quoting my book Day of Wrath, where the text properly belongs.




2.- Wolfschlag’s translated piece

A note was sent to me about the topic of “Trauma, fear and love.” The psychotherapist Franz Ruppert from Munich has dealt with so called “trauma energies” in his books, a trauma that can be passed down through generations. Because individual psychological findings can at least partially be transferred to collective experiences, I have read the slides on “perpetrators” and “victims” from Ruppert’s website from this vantage point.

A fortnight ago I wrote an article about some recent movies where the subject of the expulsion of civilian Germans after 1945 plays an important role. But such artistic products of processing the trauma are still rare and on individual cases. There is a striking imbalance in the German “culture of remembrance.” Since the 1970s the Holocaust and the persecution of leftist-resistance groups during the Nazi period have obtained a dominant, partly sacralized meaning while German victim stories of those years, which could also incriminate other actors as “perpetrators,” have increasingly been hidden and marginalized.

If occasionally an audible voice rises intending to give these German victims their right in the German “culture of remembrance,” it will immediately be attacked with the rationale of equating “victims and perpetrators” and that the dead Germans are, at most, victims of second or third class. This lesson was learned and requires constant repetition, since it is ultimately a very important tool to preserve the foreign political control over the economically important German industrial base.

Passivity is an emergency response of the victim

In conservative circles it is frequently heard that since 1945 Germany would be in a traumatized phase. In this context the words of Ernst Jünger have been recorded: “From such a loss one cannot recover.”

So now I had this in mind when I looked at the slides of Franz Ruppert, which appeared to me like an incidental proof of the theory of “the traumatized nation.” After Ruppert’s definition of the terms “perpetrator” and “victim,” he goes on to explain that the victim would make the damage even bigger with a stress reaction to the suffering inflicted upon him or her. A failure to react is, therefore, an emergency response of the victim to maximize her chances of survival. The victim gives in to the situation, but experiences herself as helpless and powerless.

Presently this reaction can be seen very clearly in the behavior of the Germans after the end of the War; it partly persists even to these days. One must give up on further acts of resistance and surrender oneself into a feeling of political powerlessness. This in spite of the fact that for some political groups there are now separate possibilities of participation and new beginnings. I speak of the collective, national, fundamental experience. According to Ruppert, the splitting of the personality allows the traumatized individual to live on. It is a survival strategy, and it means the victim’s experience will be suppressed and split off. The traumatization will be denied; memories will be tried to be erased, and impulses of resistance suppressed.

The prosperous Germany is only very moderately happy

The result of this repression, according to Ruppert, are feelings of guilt. In addition to it, it comes the imagination that the wounds, which one has suffered personally, are “fair punishment.” One doesn’t perceive the perpetrator as such, but rather defends him. The individual even identifies herself with the needs of the perpetrator.

As a side effect the traumatization shows itself in constant complaining, suffering, bemoaning without being able to give cogent reasons for it. According to an assessment [linked at the original article], the affluent Germany only takes a middle place on a map of Europe ranked by perceived happiness. And that alongside poorer eastern European countries, which have to process their own traumatizations due to Soviet occupation. The people of the poorer western European nations on the other hand are interestingly almost happier than the Germans. Why?

For the perpetrator the traumatization also has consequences. He denies the injury inflicted on other humans, even feels justified. He blames and ridicules the victim and declares to have acted on behalf of a higher thought. This behavior is often the result of an earlier victimhood of the perpetrator and a misguided coping strategy. It leads to events such as the recent election in the Czech Republic, where Miloš Zeman could win the presidential elections with his defensive nationalistic position against Karel Schwarzenberg, who cautiously reminded us the historic suffering of the Sudeten-Germans.

Learning to mourn, developing compassion for oneself

Franz Ruppert comes to the conclusion that unprocessed experiences of victimization can turn into eruptive perpetrator behavior. The powerlessness can be followed by a furious outbreak of aggression. Victims turn into perpetrators, and the lack of emotion towards oneself leads to a lack of empathy towards the new victim. In this way victim-perpetrator spirals keep running: a power which can be seen interpersonally and also in the larger political conflicts. Innocent people are dragged into the conflicts, and it comes to delusions and acts of self-destruction.

An eruption of violence is not yet to be expected from the Germans in their current state. Perhaps nothing will ever come from them again, except a last gasp on the deathbed. But maybe one can at least try to heal a couple of things.

Healing would, however, require a massive reform of our “culture of remembrance.” This would, let’s not delude ourselves, encounter the most brutal resistance since this is where the core of the trauma is located [emphasis added], in which influential people have a vested interest.

For the healing process one can therefore transfer the problem-solving approach from the individual of Ruppert to the national situation. First of all one has to acknowledge one’s own traumatization and psychological injuries, but also learn to mourn for oneself, to develop compassion for oneself. Finally, although one must refrain from blind vengeance it is by all means appropriate to “demand from the perpetrator a concrete compensation for the damage, if still possible” (Ruppert).

Only compensation can bring healing

One can speak of compensation, and if it only consists of the annulment of the discriminatory Benesch-decrees in the Czech Republic, the construction of memorial sites for the displaced Germans in the Czech Republic and Poland, bilingual place signs and symbolic material compensations, a memorial for the German victims of the bombing campaign must also be constructed in London and Washington; in Moscow, another for the German Gulag-slaves and the women who were raped by the Red Army.

Only then will the false and traumatized relations of today be overcome. Only then will constructive symbiotic relations be possible, from which all participants can profit.

At the end of this process stands for all sides the rediscovery of self-respect. Because for the perpetrator too the acknowledgement of responsibility for his own deeds is a way to inner healing.

The problem of the German process of coming to terms with the past is, after all, not the examination of one’s own crimes but rather the one-sidedness, the political instrumentalization and anti-German manipulation. The healing process, which was outlined here, has for now been delayed in the Czech Republic due to the electoral defeat of Schwarzenberg. However, time and again it will knock against the coffin lid from below, no matter how much earth one hurls onto it.



3.- My 2 ¢

Today’s Germans, so attached to the Judeo-American perp and overburdened with guilt, remind me the character of the badly wounded Amfortas in Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal.

(See YouTube clip of track 7 of Parsifal’s Act I: here)

Unlike Wolfschlag, I believe that only full revenge heals the wounded soul, even if it comes from Above, not from Below. The good news for German nationalists is that they will soon be gloating after the dollar crashes and Murka burns. Together with an England overwhelmed by immigrants, as depicted in the film Children of Men, the fall of the US will do the healing trick with no need of Teutonic violence—insofar as the subversive tribe that my beloved Nazis wanted to deport from Europe is directly involved in their ongoing / coming fall.

I call this poetic justice (Murkans really lost the War because they fought on the side of those who would one day enslave them)…

The Russians on the other hand have already suffered a lot after their incredible blunder: allowing the empowerment of Jewry right after the Bolshevik Revolution, where dozens of millions of Slavs were killed. But yes: the Russians must erect monuments commemorating the German victims anyway.

Only thus can Amfortas fully heal.

Categories
Child abuse Kevin MacDonald Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychology

MacDonald and psychiatry

Discussing in a radio show with Carolyn Yeager the horrific Connecticut killings perpetrated by Adam Lanza, Professor Kevin MacDonald, who in addition to his studies on Judaism is familiar with child psychiatry, said:

I am in favor of biological psychiatry and in the understanding of all of these mental disorders in a biological manner.

In other words, like virtually all psychology academics, MacDonald is grossly misinformed about this subject.

Biological psychiatry is a pseudo-science insofar as the etiology of mental disorders is not somatogenic but psychogenic. I wonder if MacDonald knows that there’s an entire journal by professionals in mental health, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry that aims to debunk the claims of biological psychiatry. (For my own take on this very subject, see my paper that took years of research, “Why psychiatry is a false science”.)

In the interview MacDonald also said:

I don’t think we can really understand what is going on in his [Lanza’s] brain.

This confusion of the “mind” with the “brain” is pandemic too among the brainwashed, that is, almost all American society. MacDonald seems to ignore that the mind is not the brain, and that we can commit heinous acts, say killing children, with perfectly normal brains (though our souls must be rotten to the core).

Those psychiatrists that blame the brain for any mental disorder and try to fix it through physical means are similar to a hypothetical computer technician who claims there is no software—only hardware—, and always tries to fix the computers’ viruses of his clients by messing the mother board with his pliers. “Never use an antivirus if the software doesn’t exist.” The fact that in humans the “software” does indeed exist escapes the brainwashed individual. Again, see my paper linked above. It demonstrates that psychiatric bio-reductionism is as unscientific as the methods of this hypothetical computer technician (Greg Johnson corrected some of my syntactic inaccuracies of that paper).

MacDonald said:

His mother should have put him [Lanza] into a treatment facility… She seemed to be aware that he had severe problems. She apparently quit her job to be with him all the time… She knew that he had these demons. Well, if she had taken him into a treatment facility and if there would be good psychiatrists there they would not leave him out on the street. I do think that a lot of people have to be confined… In the old days we used to put [homeless people] in psychiatric hospitals.

There are no “good psychiatrists” in “psychiatric hospitals” for the simple reason that psychiatry is as pseudoscientific as, say, parapsychology or UFOlogy. MacDonald’s statement is also very common in his profession but is plagued with so many errors of judgment about both mental disorders and the psychiatric profession itself that I wish that my whole book was translated to English to be able to link it now!

Suffice it to say that when I lived in Marin County in California I interacted a lot with white homeless people, most of them perfectly sane. I wonder if MacDonald and his colleagues can see that living on the streets causes severe mental distress and not the other way around: that so-called schizophrenics end up homeless? Furthermore, unlike the ubiquitous Hollywood stereotype, people labeled as schizophrenics are, according to statistics and my own experience with these people, not more violent than non-schizophrenics.

In another part of the interview both Yeager and MacDonald stated that the anti-psychiatric ideas that deinstitutionalized the mental hospitals were promoted in the 1960s by the Left. While it is true that at the other side of the Atlantic typical anti-psychiatrists like Ronald Laing and David Cooper were leftists, in America the foremost critic of psychiatry, Tom Szasz, who incidentally died earlier this year, was not a leftist by any stretch of the imagination. What’s more, deinstitutionalization was in no way caused by Szasz’s views, who never had any power whatsoever in institutional psychiatry. Deinstitutionalization in America’s 1960s was a matter of social policy; of federal economic interests vs. state interests.

More to the point, Lanza’s monstrous actions are probably the result of having been victimized by an extremely abusive mother: the most heretical hypothesis in the mental health professions today (as heretical as saying in the academia that “Whites also have ethnic interests” or that “Hitler was not that bad after all”). However, I cannot explain the trauma model of mental disorders here, only link to a brief section of my book of what a psychiatrist, whom incidentally I once visited at his Dallas clinic, says about that model.

Briefly, if Lanza’s mother destroyed Adam’s mind society should have committed her, not the victim as MacDonald advised. By committing the original perpetrator, Adam Lanza would have felt socially vindicated and no pathological displacement of his rage on innocent children would have occurred.

But society assaults the victim instead. Through the mental health professions society makes a massive effort to obfuscate the fact that some parents produce the most horrible form of mental hell in a child’s mind. This blindness is precisely what drives the society, as explained in my book, to “re-victimize” a child who already was victim of maddening parental abuse. The psychiatric re-victimization is performed by means of an insulting psychiatric label together with psychotropic drugs and/or involuntary commitment: a blame-the-victim, soul-devastating action that often increases the chances of driving the child mad.

In my writings I speak of “the trauma model” to contrast it with the pseudo-scientific “medical model of mental disorders,” a medical model that MacDonald subscribes (“I am in favor of biological psychiatry and in the understanding of all these mental disorders in a biological manner”). Although the trauma model explains severe psychoses, it can also be used to explain comparatively lesser forms of mental distress, such as neuroses. Those who would like to visualize how engulfing mothers—and I am talking now of cases far less serious than Lanza’s—often drive the child into explosions of rage can see my essay-review of a silly bestseller authored by a junior whose father made a fortune in the Big Pharma.

Categories
Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Deranged altruism Judaism Kali Yuga Kevin MacDonald Liberalism Neanderthalism New Testament Old Testament Porphyry of Tyre Psychology Revilo Oliver Universalism

Gospel Fictions

It seems to me that the etiology of Western malaise is more complicated than what the average nationalist has imagined. While reading MacDonald’s first trilogy study on Jewry I thought that the etiology was, at least, threefold.

First: the hardware. As MacDonald and many others have pointed out, whites “have some unique characteristics such as individualism, abstract idealism and universal moralism” that are apparently genetic (precisely the characteristics that presently are being exploited by the tribe).

Second: the software. If the above is a problem in the hardware (something like whites being wired the wrong way when dealing with other races), these hardware characteristics were augumented after a Catholic cult, which means “universal” including all ethnic groups in the world, took over the Roman Empire.

Third: the virus. Paradoxically, once Christianity starts to be abandoned by the white people, our universalist-individualist-idealistic frame of mind, taken to its ultimate logic naturally results in liberalism, a “virus” of the mind operating within the white psyche.

If our diagnosis of the West’s darkest hour is correct, then the Jewish Problem is an epiphenomenon of the deranged altruism resulting from the secular fulfillment of universal Christian values. (Proof of it is that Muslims don’t allow the suicidal empowerment of Jews in their nations.) It also means that both our hardware wiring and our Judeo-Christian software must be understood before we can grasp the whys of the psycho-ethical structure that is preventing us from taking elemental action (e.g., disempowering the Jews). For the Christian that I was, and this is purely anecdotal (others may find different venues), the first step to understand the virus was starting to question the historicity of the gospel narratives.

Thus I typed many passages from Helms’ book in honor of Porphyry, the first man to write a prolegomena of what fifteen centuries later started to be called “higher criticism” of the Bible.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Christendom Hate Homosexuality Psychology

Against the Fourth Commandment

In the “Saturday Afternoon with Carolyn Yeager: Kairos on The German Character,” a man called to rebut the German blogger Kairos arguing that Christianity is good because of the Fourth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

What the caller ignored is that the Fourth Commandment is intrinsically intertwined with the Monsters from the Id that are destroying our civilization.

I don’t want to explain the subject at length. Suffice it to say that the late Alice Miller discussed how religion can contribute to the guilt that prevents us from being conscious adults. In The Body Never Lies Miller urges us to realize that the Fourth Commandment offers immunity to abusive parents, and argues it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in ruined adult lives.

Below, a page
about the poet Arthur Rimbaud from The Body Never Lies that I stole from Miller’s webpage:

Self-Hatred and Unfulfilled Love

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 and died of cancer in 1891, a few months after his right leg had been amputated. In other words, he only lived to be 37 years old. Yves Bonnefoy tells us that his mother was harsh and brutal, a fact on which all the available sources are unanimous.

Bonnefoy describes her as ambitious, proud, stubbornly self-opinionated, arid, and full of covert hatred. He calls her the classic case of someone fired by the pure energy derived from bigoted religiosity. The astonishing letters she wrote around 1900 reveal that she was enamored of death and destruction. She was fascinated by graveyards, and at the age of 75 she had gravediggers lower her into the grave she was later to share with her dead children Vitali and Arthur, so that she could have a foretaste of the eternal night that was to come.

What must it have been like for an intelligent and sensitive child to grow up in the care of a woman like this? We find the answer in Rimbaud’s poetry. Bonnefoy tells us that his mother did everything in her power to curb and thwart his development as a poet, albeit to no avail. Failing that, she nipped in the bud every desire for independence on his part, every premonition of liberty. The boy took to regarding himself as an orphan, and his relationship to his mother split up into hatred, on the one hand, and obsequious dependency on the other. From the fact that he received no token of affection Rimbaud concluded that he must be in some way guilty: “With all the strength of his innocence, he rebelled fiercely against the judgment passed on him by his mother.”

Rimbaud’s mother maintained total control over her children and called this control motherly love. Her acutely perceptive son saw through this lie. He realized that her constant concern for outward appearances had nothing to do with love. But he was unable to admit to this observation without reserve, because as a child he needed love, or at least the illusion of it. He could not hate his mother, particularly as she was so obviously concerned for him. So he hated himself instead, unconsciously convinced that in some obscure way he must have deserved such mendacity and coldness. Plagued by an ill-defined sense of disgust, he projected it onto the provincial town where he lived, onto the hypocrisy of the system of morality he grew up in (much like Nietzsche in this respect), and onto himself. All his life he strove to escape these feelings, resorting in the process to alcohol, hashish, absinth, opium, and extensive travels to faraway places. In his youth he made two attempts to run away from home but was caught and restored to his mother’s “care” on both occasions.

His poetry reflects not only his self-hatred but also his quest for the love so completely denied him in the early stages of his life. Later, at school, he was fortunate enough to encounter a kindly teacher who gave him the companionship and support he so desperately needed in the decisive years of puberty. His teacher’s affection and confidence enabled him to write and to develop his philosophical ideas. But his childhood retained its stifling grip on him. He attempted to combat his despair at the absence of love in his life by transforming it into philosophical observations on the nature of true love. But these ideas were no more than abstractions because despite his intellectual rejection of conventional morality, his emotional allegiance to the code of conduct it prescribed was unswerving. Self-disgust was legitimate, but detestation for his mother was unthinkable. He could not pay heed to the painful messages of his childhood memories without destroying the hopes that had helped him to survive as a child. Time and again, Rimbaud tells us that he had no one to rely on except himself. This was surely the fruit of his experience with a mother who had nothing to offer him but her own derangement and hypocrisy, rather than true love. His entire life was a magnificent but vain attempt to save himself from destruction at the hands of his mother, with all the means at his disposal.

Young people who have gone through much the same kind of childhood as Rimbaud are probably fascinated by his poetry because they can vaguely sense the presence of a kindred spirit in it. Rimbaud’s friendship with Paul Verlaine is a well-known fact of literary history. His longing for love and genuine communication initially appeared to find gratification in this friendship. But the mistrust rooted in his childhood gradually poisoned their intimacy, and this, coupled with Verlaine’s own difficult past, prevented the love between them from achieving any permanence. Ultimately, their recourse to drugs made it impossible for them to live the life of total honesty that they were in search of. Their relationship was crippled by the psychological injuries they inflicted on one another. In the last resort, Verlaine acted in just as destructive a way as Rimbaud’s mother, and the final crisis came when Rimbaud was shot twice by the drunken Verlaine, who was sentenced to two years in prison for his crime.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity, in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help him understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice, his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child that was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her.


Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left)
depicted in an 1872 painting
by Henri Fantin-Latour

Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as an attempt to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition. After every abortive escape attempt, he returned to his mother, both after the separation from Verlaine and at the end of his life, when he had finally sacrificed his creative gifts by giving up his writing to become a business man, thus indirectly fulfilling his mother’s expectations of him. Though Rimbaud spent the last days of his life in a hospital in Marseille, he had gone back to Roche immediately before, to be looked after by his mother and sister. The quest for his mother’s love ended in the prison of childhood.

♣

For those interested in the subject, I’ve written about why forgiving our parents may invoke those Monsters from the Unconscious that are destroying our civilization. In Fallen Leaves I mention the mental issues of a poor Michael Jackson that forgave his father:

“Solitude among millions of fans”

More to the point, a few years ago I analyzed a woman who hates the West as a result of transferring her repressed, parental rage onto substitutive objects:

“A Woman Chasing after her Revenge”

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Human sacrifice Infanticide Lloyd deMause Psychohistory Psychology

Miller and deMause

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious

9.- For Your Own Good by Alice Miller
(read in 2002)

10.- The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
(read in 2006)


In my review of books 5 and 6 I said, “That smart people seem to be drawn to sects has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the human mind’s strayed ways of trying to cope with the unprocessed trauma of earlier experiences at home.” In other words, the root cause of my former alienation in cults and paranormal pseudosciences was, of course, the previous abuse I had experienced at home. Below I reproduce an index page of my now defunct antipsiquiatria.org webpage (2003-2010), specifically, a version of what used to be the page of the English section of my website, where I explained why I shifted focus from antipsychiatric subjects—the subject-matter of some of my previous entries—to the authors whom I am most indebted with:


My critique of psychiatry is now relegated to a second plane. The reason for such a drastic change is that in the last few years I have read two authors that have changed my worldview: Lloyd deMause, and Alice Miller who died earlier this year [this was written in 2010]. Though Miller and deMause do not focus on psychiatry, their legacy opened my eyes: it made me see that the child abuses in the psychiatric profession are only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider crime.

Since the times of our simian ancestors infanticide was common, and it continued through the prehistory of Homo sapiens in the ancient world. This can be gathered from the remains of the sacrificed victims. For example, in the city in which I live the ritual murder of children was regularly practiced before the Spanish conquest.

I confess that when I read deMause I was unprepared to face the vast body of historical evidence about infanticide, child mutilation, the tight and tortuous swaddling of babies, the ubiquity of incest and other horrors, many perpetrated through millennia. Once in a while I had to suspend my reading of one of his books to give me a break before the horrific nature of the revelations.

Similarly, the books of Alice Miller made me to delve deeply through the very core of my being: something that detonated an emotional atomic bomb. Miller is right when she states that the suffering of a child victim of extreme parental abuse can surpass the level of pain in a concentration camp for adults [for those who can read Spanish, cf. my chapter on Miller in my Hojas Susurrantes].

Due to what John Bowlby calls attachment, parents are the most notorious soul murderers. For those who have been emotionally crushed and years later have made contact with their inner being, this is obvious. However, it’s not obvious at all for most of mankind. Because of our attachment to the perpetrator, what we are dealing with is the foundational taboo of civilization: what Alice Miller called “the forbidden knowledge.”

♣

For the other eight books see here.

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Psychology

Psychotherapy: the queen of the cults

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious
7.- Final Analysis
(read in 1999)

Do you know that one of the editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official diagnostic guide of the American Psychiatric Association used by all psychiatrists, holds that for a “patient” to state that a therapist is boring is a primary sign of “the self-defeating personality disorder”? I propose the following experiment to those racially conscious individuals who believe that psychotherapy on mental issues represents a legitimate profession: Make an appointment in the nearest therapist office and express your racial concerns.

Your concern will be immediately labeled as pathological by the professional whether he or she is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst or a clinical psychologist.

I have devoted one of my most thoughtful papers to the subject of pseudoscience in biological psychiatry, but have not touched the subject of the non-psychiatric professions in the so-called “mental health” field. Here I would like to mention the book that has debunked psychoanalysis as ferociously as Phil Klass debunked the field of UFOlogy, or as James Randi, mentioned in my previous entry, has been exposing the “psychics” for decades. I refer to Jeffrey Masson’s Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst.

Final Analysis is, by far, the most searing exposé of psychoanalysis that I am aware of. Keep in mind that Masson was a Harvard professor, a prominent psychoanalyst and that later, when he realized that his own profession was a fraud, Masson completely abandoned the very lucrative practice of therapy.

Only from the literary point of view, Final Analysis is a treat: Masson’s misadventures in the cult of psychotherapy are as readable as any entertaining novel. It is true that, as a typical liberal, Masson ignores that race matters. But the above thought-experiment that any racialist could put into practice to check for himself the legitimacy of the therapeutic profession, moves me to quote Masson’s final words of his book:

There are no experts in loving,
no scholars of living,
no doctors of the human emotions
and no gurus of the soul.

♣

For the other nine books see here.

Categories
Autobiography Parapsychology Pseudoscience Psychology

Parapsychology

Or:

The ten books that made an impact in my life
before I became racially conscious

5.- A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology
(autographed inscription 1989)

6.- The Relentless Question
(autographed inscription 1990)

In “The Sickle” I said this Tuesday that I arrived to the San Francisco airport in 1985. Living in San Rafael the very first days after my arrival to the US, I paid a visit to San Francisco and found in a bookstore the just released A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. I remember a pic of James Randi on the dust cover among other notable skeptics and wanted to purchase the book. Alas, I didn’t since I had very limited economic resources and was only starting to look for a job at Marin County.

I mention this little anecdote because had I purchased the book I could have been spared from the extremely agonic stage in California. As explained in “The Sickle,” when I lived there I was immersed in the fantasy to “force the eschaton in history.”

But how do I know that my Quixotic—to say the least—endeavor that so much suffering caused could have been avoided by a book? Because when I returned to Mexico, in 1989 the main contributors to the skeptical handbook, Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Paul Kurtz and James Randi visited my native town and, finally, I could afford to purchase A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology: which started a cognitive process that completely and absolutely disabused me from my “eschatological” beliefs.

Well, it’s more complicated than just a single book. In fact, after these skeptics visited Mexico City I subscribed The Skeptical Inquirer and ordered many books on the paranormal published by the skeptical contributors of Kurtz’s group. If I chose a single book to convey the fact that the process of reading them started an apostasy process of my belief in ESP and PK (again, cf. “The Sickle”) it’s because the copy of A Skeptic’s Handbook that I own was signed by Kurtz in front of me on November 12, 1985.

My previous post was about Childhood’s End, the novel that most influenced my life. I recognize that it must sound crazy that someone took a novel so seriously as to believe that the eschaton could be forced by purely psychic means in the real world. How could I have fallen into such grandiose delusion? (A couple of days ago Deviance, a commenter put it this way, “When I read you, Chechar, I wonder if intelligence is a blessing or a curse—smart people seem to be drawn to sects, cults, pseudosciences and false theories of all sorts…”) The answer is devastatingly simple.

A pseudoscience is a system that pretends to be scientific but that is not. In other threads of this blog I have stated that the process of debunking a sophisticated pseudoscience requires an extraordinary input of energy. You need to be a specialist in a specific pseudoscience (e.g., a skeptical specialist in parapsychology, another in UFOlogy, still another on a very specific conspiracy theory such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc). The sheer mass of literature and conferences on purported conspiracies of, say, the assassination of JFK, is such—thousands of books—that it took Vincent Bugliosi twenty years of research to address and refute each claim.

Generally, people who believe in pseudosciences, cults or conspiracy theories never dare to seriously study the critics of their cherished beliefs. That’s precisely the religious mindset: never listen to the critics. Although I was ready to listen when, standing in a San Francisco bookstore I learnt that a skeptical handbook had just been released, I was so sure that parapsychologists had demonstrated the existence of “psi” that I didn’t bother to listen the other side even when I finally got a job in California.

When I believed in the existence of paranormal phenomena, John Beloff of Edinburg University (right), who eventually became my editor in parapsychological matters, was the single most important author that convinced me of the realities of such phenomena. Again, just as I chose A Skeptic’s Handbook as a paradigm of the literature that eventually would became a vaccination for my mind, if I mention Beloff’s The Relentless Question it is only because he sent me by mail a copy of his book with his longhand inscription: “For C. T. who has the courage of his convictions from John Beloff, June 1990.”

When I received The Relentless Question I had already read much of what Beloff had written in professional journals, including some of the articles contained in his book. Just as A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology is representative of what I may call a vaccination, The Relentless Question is representative of the continuing infection that took place in my cognitive process since I left Eschatology for the more “scientific” parapsychological research.

To answer Deviance, that “smart people seem to be drawn to sects, cults and pseudosciences” has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the human mind’s strayed ways of trying to cope with the unprocessed trauma of earlier experiences at home. This of course goes beyond the reach of this entry, but I nevertheless mention The Relentless Question because it is written in the terse, academic language by a respected professor of the psychology department of a well-known European university: the only university that held an academic chair of parapsychology in the western world.

In the previous incarnation of this blog Lawrence Auster discussed with me the subject of parapsychology: he as a believer and I as a former believer (now turned skeptic). For those who have not made their minds as to whether paranormal phenomena might be real or not, these two books, one edited by the founder of a skeptical group, the other authored by a late professor, are good starting points to listen to both sides of the debate.

♣

For the other eight books see here.