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Psychology

Deepest

Editor’s Note: In 2018 I posted ‘William James’ principle’:

Behind the groupthink is the great finding of William James, ‘The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated’. It is this principle that moves whites to the phenomenon of virtue signalling: if I join the ethos of the masses, I will be appreciated, even if it is a suicidal ethos.

Counter-Currents’ recent article ‘Unlearn Your Views’ by Bill Pritchard reminded me what I said in 2018. Pritchard said:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Leftists from conservative backgrounds insist that they changed their minds because they ‘thought for themselves’, and order all Right-wingers to do the same—or else.

The claim that they ‘thought for themselves’ is easily disproven. Truly thinking for oneself is difficult. Shedding old beliefs in the pursuit of truth is an arduous, even painful process, like summiting a mountain. Anyone who has embarked on this path would realize that beliefs cannot simply be discarded overnight…

In most cases, people who reject the value system instilled in them by their upbringing did not arrive at their views through reason. They were simply initiated into a peer group/subculture whose ideology they absorbed, or they consciously decided to rebel against their parents. Swapping one ideology for another via peer pressure or rebellion is relatively easy. It’s akin to memorizing a formula instead of actually deriving it oneself and understanding why it works. This explains why Leftists scoff at those who struggle to leave old beliefs behind and proclaim that ‘it’s not rocket science’…

if you really cared about timeless truths, you would be indifferent to social fads and would not invoke the Current Year as an argument. Many Leftists from conservative backgrounds are upwardly-mobile strivers afflicted with status anxiety who prize their social standing over truth…

The reason why formerly conservative Leftists strayed further from their upbringing than I and many other White Nationalists is not that they are smarter or more independently-minded, but that they were subjected to peer influences and social pressures to which we, being loners, were not…

If the vast majority of people will never be able to independently and organically experience a radical shift in their worldviews, then telling them to do so amounts to telling them to find a new peer group.

Categories
Psychology

RIRO / GIGO

In computer science rubbish in, rubbish out (RIRO) is the concept that, if the original data is aberrant, even the most sophisticated computer program will produce aberrant results or ‘rubbish’ (in the US the term used is garbage in, garbage out, GIGO). The principle also applies to more mundane situations, for example, what is happening in our universities.

But Christendom, from Constantine to the forthcoming demise of Christianity—Xtianity’s fundamental premise is that whites must worship the god of our ancestral enemies—is the perfect paradigm of RIRO/GIGO. The darkest hour in the West—rubbish out!—is nothing but the acting out that whites suffer today as a result of such an extremely aberrant programming.

Categories
Parapsychology Psychology

Slaves of parental introjects

Yesterday I wrote that many people who want to do something for the white race cannot do it because they continue to be slaves of their parental introjects. But not only yesterday. On this site I have used the term ‘parental introject’ many times. And on my stats page I’ve noticed that several visitors try to understand its meaning when I link the word to Wikipedia. But the best way to explain it is simply by anecdote.

Professor of psychology Nicholas Humphrey does not usually use the term introject. But by 1997, when I had already abandoned my belief in parapsychology, I was still reading on the sceptics of the paranormal. At Barnes & Noble in Houston I sat down to read some passages of Humphrey’s Leaps of Faith, and on page 147 I had a eureka moment. On that page we can read:

Imagine that in childhood, before you thought of questioning it, you were told as a fact that Jesus performed miracles and therefore was the son of God, and not till later in life did it occur to you that the miracles might not be genuine. By that time, you might well find that your critical faculties had already been hijacked. For how could you possibly entertain such doubts about the works of a man whose works had already proved he was never to be doubted! The importance of the first step taken in childhood was not lost on the Jesuits: ‘If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life.’

Above, Humphrey as a boy. It was after that passage, on that same page, that the author added a phrase that caused my eureka moment. Keep in mind that his book is a critique of parapsychology. Humphrey said that even when an alleged psychic is shown to resort to fraud, because of the image implanted on us about Jesus, the damage had been done in the believer’s mind.

When I read those words my mind immediately flew to the introject that my father had put in me as a child about Jesus’ miracles, an introject secularised by parapsychologists with their beliefs in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis among humans. So to understand the word introject, we just have to think about Humphrey’s quote from the Jesuits above, ‘If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life’.

That’s it! Once you have a specific malware programmed in your soul at a tender age it is incredibly difficult to remove it.

Leaps of Faith can be read online, but I suggest obtaining a copy because it is one of those books that should be in our bookshelves. It explains why so many people still cling, like children seeking reassurance, to belief in supernatural phenomena like an immortal soul and life after death. It is also a devastating critique of the existing evidence for paranormal phenomena, ranging from miracles to the laboratory experiments for extrasensory perception.

No matter what the evidence, those who have not fulfilled Delphi’s commandment will continue to believe that ‘there must be something there’. They’re slaves of parental introjects.

Categories
Psychology

The wall

With the average white nationalist, I have run into a wall on issues such as Pierce and Kemp’s stories of the white race (the basis for understanding everything), why many anti-Semites continue to worship the god of the Jews, conspiracy theories like JFK and 911, or scepticism about a currency crisis due to the Fed panicking through QE4 (a process that apparently has started these pandemic days). The cause of the mental wall is succinctly explained by the American philosopher Peter Boghossian:

People do not formulate their beliefs on the basis of evidence. They think they do, but instead, they cherry pick pieces of information or pieces of data to support the beliefs they already have.

The key thing to understand is that people formulate their beliefs because of some moral impulse, derived from a community to which they belong. They have a strong moral sense of why they ought to believe something.

Arguing with evidence doesn’t work. That triggers something called the backfire effect—it’s well established in the literature—where people just hunker down or double down in their beliefs.

So instead of providing evidence, there are other ways that we have to shift those conversations.

The way to reach people about these issues is through values and not evidence. You have to figure out what somebody values and why they value it. In fancy terms, that’s called moral epistemology.

Once you figure out someone’s moral epistemology, that’s like the lock. And the templates that we use in the book [How to Have Impossible Conversations] are like keys to unlock that lock. Epistemology is just a two dollar word for ‘how you know what you think you know’. And morality is just a word meaning ‘what ought I to do’.

People don’t really think very much about how they come to their moral beliefs. It’s remarkably interesting how brittle those moral epistemologies are. With a few targeted questions, people can become more reflective about that.

Fortunately, there are a few nationalists who live on the other side of the wall.

Categories
Psychology

A response to Highrpm

– Re: this –

But why Game of Thrones resonates with whites? Why the novel and film of Ben-Hur resonated in the last centuries in the West?

It doesn’t matter that one can say that the authors of Ivanhoe and Ben-Hur were silly Jew-admirers. The question remains: Why did their novels become such huge bestsellers?

White nationalists who presently are ignoring Game of Thrones are also ignoring the buttons the show had pressed in the white psyche to become so popular.

To me, it’s obvious what lies behind: a longing for pre-technological civilisation, when life was cruder but in many aspects fairer than the unnatural ways of today’s lifestyles; a return to a sort of idealised Middle Ages, the adolescence of the white people’s story, but without Christianity, as in the Game of Thrones universe there’s not a single Christian whatsoever.

Because in activating the right archetypes in the collective unconscious lies the possibility of white awakening, nationalists are ignoring the Game of Thrones phenomenon at their own peril.

Categories
Psychology

Without…

any reference to Game of Thrones whatsoever, in 2015 I already knew that only good stories, however mythical, can galvanise the white psyche to the point of boosting its self-image and self-esteem, let alone racial preservation.

Categories
Psychology

The power of stories

Or:

How Bran the Broken was always the ending

by Yezen IRL

Given the massive controversy and confusion around King Bran, and the ending of Game of Thrones, I figured I would give a brief explanation why Bran the Broken was always GRRM’s endgame, what this means for the story, and what it says about fate, free will, justice, and the stories that bring people together:

Melissa Krauss: I really did like this summary. Instead of criticizing, you explained how it really did fit the book. It did make a lot of sense. I’m glad that you showed this perspective.

Adrian du Plessis: A fantastic level-headed insight that enriched my experience of the show and renewed my excitement for the upcoming books. Thank you.

Nicole Cox:
Well done! You gave a reasonable analysis of themes that were underdeveloped… But, nevertheless, present if we look for them.

Loopy Luppy: I would very much appreciate it if you were to continue this channel as I love your perspective on this show and would love to see it on others!

Kimseungsoofan:
I loved Bran since the beginning and it made me happy to see him as the king, but what made fans mad was the build up!

Undertow: You know, I wasn’t a fan of the writing for the past couple of seasons mainly because of the rushed pace and the way they tossed the last two books aside, but it sure is refreshing to find a channel that stays positive and tries to find hope in the things we got. And considering you have read the books it sure is great you interpreted the spirit of the plot points… so thank you and keep up the amazing work!

Al Rezz: You make me love GOT again! I am going to rewatch it!

Buntado:

D&D: Were we right? In what we wrote?
RR: What WE wrote.
D&D: It doesn’t feel right.
RR: Ask me again in 10 years.

Ty Hijau: I was hooked on your channel since watching your last video about Bran being crowned king, well before the end of the series. Don’t know if I have ever come across another channel where the creator uses this level of critical thinking and analysis…please, keep it up. There are some out there, like me, who do appreciate this content. All your videos have been top notch!

Abilyn: Your perspective is the comfort needed for this end… Thank you.

Daniel Polanco: Thank you for appreciating and delve into the reasons for Bran’s kingship when everyone else seems enraged by it. This final season (and your video essays) gave me all the more reasons to dive into the books I’ve been holding back from ever since I started watching the show. Cheers.
 

______ 卐 ______

 

My two cents:

Why am I posting so many posts about GoT?

Because of what I said a couple of days ago: ‘Jews win because they have a story. Whites lose because nowadays they’ve lost their story’.

It is high time for the white race to recover their stories, starting perhaps with Pierce’s Who We Are. Otherwise, the Jews will continue to win.

Categories
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Psychology Revilo Oliver Thomas Goodrich

Gravitas

Five years ago I said on this site: I am writing this entry from a borrowed computer. It now looks like I’ll need some time to stabilize my financial situation, probably overseas, to the point of resuming my blogging. Meanwhile I’d like to add something to what I had said in previous entries, that in order to understand our woes you must purchase and read a copy of Tom Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany (1944-1947).Readers of this book have complained a lot that a detailed account of the Allies’ atrocities committed during and after the Second World War—a true Holocaust of German victims—is too ghastly and painful to contemplate. The author himself told me that he died ‘a thousand deaths’ while writing Hellstorm.In his Archipelago Solzhenitsyn said that in prison you have to ‘eat a mountain’ of pain to be able to metamorphose your soul instead of becoming mad, as other zeks became mad in the Gulag. He meant to go across the Dark Night of the Soul all the way through the other side. Some passages of his book convey beautifully what I want to say here.

Recently Andrew Anglin, in his first article on his critical series of the white nationalist movement, mentioned George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce and David Lane as the background of today’s movement. Anglin made it clear that the new generation of nationalists did not rely on these names, as the chain had been broken. Anglin says that the new generation of American nationalists emerged from internet chats.

It is curious, but it is just this new generation of nationalists, to which Anglin himself belongs, the ones who are unable to delve into the subject of white decline—precisely because the chain of what was left of the spirit of National Socialism after WWII was broken. I mean the spirit not only of Rockwell but Pierce’s clever books, or the very learned texts by Revilo Oliver.

The figure of Oliver has always reminded me of the American aristocrats that I saw in the black-and-white films when I was a child (aristocrats not in the sense of riches, but of the educated bourgeoisie of a nation). If there is something antithetical to the aristocrat Oliver, it is precisely the vulgar kids who contribute and comment not only to Anglin’s blog but to other similar sites.

The neo-Nazis of today boast of naming the Jew constantly, but are incapable of telling the plot of a single opera by Richard Wagner, something inconceivable in real Nazis when my parents were children, or among learned Americans in Oliver’s generation. In the movement of white nationalism, people like Tom Sunic are the exception when it comes to what in Europe is considered an intellectual: a man with vast knowledge of History and Literature.

I cannot take the authors of the Occidental Observer seriously in this regard as they aren’t as radical as the real Nazis; or like Rockwell, Pierce and Oliver. For example, unlike the Observer, Pierce and Oliver knew perfectly well how toxic Christianity has been for Aryan and Western preservation. I cannot take Counter-Currents seriously either. Its anti-Nordicist editor would be considered a charlatan from the National Socialist viewpoint. For example, CC’s editor has said, ‘There is no evidence that Rome fell due to race-mixing’. Compare it with what a Swedish scholar who died in the times when I used to watch the above-mentioned films wrote about racial mixing and Roman decline.

But I am not talking to older folks such as those who contribute to the Observer or Counter-Currents. Young people in the United States should be modelled after the aristocrat Revilo Oliver instead of pubertal sites where one competes for who produces more LOLs. Just eat the mountain of pain that Solzhenitsyn talked about. Reading Solzhenitsyn and Goodrich is the only way to get out of the frivolity of those sites and develop the proper gravitas.

Last week I told a female friend that my gravitas is so severe that even when, unexpectedly, my sister—the only family member I loved—died in January 2016, I hugged nobody or shed a single tear in public. (They did embrace themselves sobbing, as everyone does at funerals.)

Categories
Carl Gustav Jung James Mason Kali Yuga Name of the Rose (novel) Oracle of Delphi Psychology

Dark night of the soul

I’m looking forward to Richard Spencer and James Edwards running for president and vice president this year to let white nationalists know that, legally, they’re not going anywhere (cf. Charlottesville).

The time has come to speak about a revolution within the limits allowed by the law of the United States. As today the book Siege is the most popular of the radical wing of the nationalists, I must say a few words about the author and Siegereaders. Recently, a friend posted this on his Twitter account:

I think James Mason’s current philosophy—that there’s no need for revolutionary action because NS Germany sacrificed for us all, just wait until the climax comes—is related to the fact that Mason’s had enough days of action and is now a 66 year old Boomer in retirement phase. 

Another friend emailed me:

James Mason’s Christian Identity may seem an obvious point to start at. Not that he is CI of course, but that he apparently does nothing to vanquish Satanism from Atomwaffen [Division]. If he truly believed in his own religion then he would be writing multiple articles denouncing Satanism and proselytising his theological beliefs, and yet he concentrates on doomsaying and the occasional news commentary. If he believes in fire and brimstone then he should give them fire and brimstone. 

Not long ago Mason spoke about the entire world being punished as in the Old Testament, the innocent along with the guilty (listen to his brief audios: here). But what about the revolution that he used to preach? Is it possible that Christianity has tamed the blond beast? There are many 66-year-old Islamists who yearn to die heroically in Jihad attacks for their holy cause. What would have happened if, instead of the Christian pond to which Mason fell after writing Siege, he had reached the towers that appear below? Would he still promote revolution?

Impossible to know. But I still would like to say something about the pond.

I do not believe in the magic of the Tarot. But I do believe, as Jung said, that the figures in the pack of cardsrepresent archetypal symbols. And from this angle I can use the symbol of The Moonto offer my views on Mason and his epigones. Unlike the ‘psychoanalysis’ of the Jew Freud, Jung’s analyses had much more Aryan overtones. So here I would like to interpret the two quotations cited above, and what I’ve heard of Mason, from the point of view of what Sallie Nichols wrote about the card of The Moon. [1]

As we see in the picture, the hero that Nichols sees in other Tarot cards does not appear in The Moon. The intellectual ego of the hero has been submerged in a pond. He fell deeply into a depression, because unlike the hopeful card The Star, no human figure appears to help him out of the darkness. He is as immersed in the aqueous unconscious as is the prehistoric crab imprisoned in the pond. This is the blackest moment in the journey of the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana: a journey towards the knowledge of our Self (the ideal of the Oracle of Delphi).

The territory that is on the other side of the water is unknown land, a country unexplored until now. Advancing through this place full of abysmal terrors and infinite promises (the towers of distance) requires great courage, more than Mason and his epigones have shown in their later years, as it involves full apostasy (not pseudo-apostasy) from the religion of our parents. As in the initiation rites that we will see in the forthcoming articles about Emperor Julian, in the transition that the hero must now face he should go by naked and alone.

He cannot go back to the mandates of Christian ethics because, expelled from worldly conventions, the hero has been rejected by civilisation, by Western humanity. It takes courage and faith to act as our ancestral enemy, Abraham, did: to get away ‘from your people, from your loved ones, from your home, in search of the land to which I will lead you’ (Gen. 12: 1).

In a route that goes exactly opposite Jerusalem (to Jerusalem all whites of our century are heading), our hero must transform himself to be reborn from the night of terror. We find other accidents in the sky that are bad omens, because the multicoloured drops that appear, unlike the card of The Sun, are directed from the earth to the sky. It is as if the Goddess Moon, as a devouring mother, called to herself all the creative energy of the land of the white man, leaving it desolate and empty.

It is the Dark Night of the Soulthat the most famous saints of the language of Cervantes spoke about, as in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross. In psychological terms, it symbolises a victory of Jerusalem over Rome: the devouring aspects of the unconscious that have resulted in a historical psychosis throughout the West. The Moon of the image seems to suck the energies of the hero, leaving him totally weakened to even think about revolutionary action.

But rebelling against Judeo-Christianity also has its perils. The dogs of Hecate, also trapped under the spell of the Goddess of Night, could tear the hero apart, leaving him raging and foaming at the mouth into a perpetual night: a psychosis without recovery like the one Nietzsche suffered from 1889 to 1900, when he died. Only in the regions of greatest terror, such as the darkest hour of the West, can the golden treasure be found. As Jung said, enlightenment is not achieved by imagining (as stupid New Agers do) figures of light. It is achieved by making ourselves familiar with our darkest side (what I do with my autobiographical books).

The hero sees the river crab trapped in the pond. He feels that it can be prepared to abandon his annoying carapace (the last Christian vestiges) and climb the scale of evolution (as the Greeks, Romans, and also those who dined at the Führer’s table had done). Wet with our own dew of the lacrimae lunae, the tears of the moon, when we are faced with this card the golden towers look very attractive. One wants to move forward to discover what’s inside them. There is no possible return: the road, especially in other pictorial versions of the Tarot’s Moon, leads clearly forward.

The towers of the card are the knowledge that this site provides, especially what we say here about the history of Christianity and how Christian ethics have turned the Aryans into lunatics: a perpetual night of the soul from which not even the revolutionaries have awakened. Regular visitors to this site will remember that, last July, I interrupted my weekly publication of SiegeMason had written:

In Southern Europe, Christianity came to power slowly, via more subtle means, while in Northern Europe it was brought to power largely by the use of the sword.

Interspersed in Siege’stext I offered my reply:

Mason wrote this article the year of my first visit to the US. There was no internet and Mason was completely unaware that Southern Europe had suffered an ISIS-like takeover by fanatic Christians after Constantine empowered them. Remember: the real history of early Christianity has only been revealed to the general public of our times thanks to the efforts of Karlheinz Deschner in German, Vlassis Rassias’ book Demolish Themin Greek, and more recently Catherine Nixey in English. At the time that Mason wrote his article only ivory-tower academics knew about the apocalypse that southern whites had suffered in the 4th and 5th centuries. 

But not only ivory-tower academics knew about real history. To write JulianGore Vidal had to read a huge amount of classical literature while living in Rome (he wrote the novel from April 1959 to January 1964). That knowledge, the one that Vidal became acquainted with without knowing this site, is the treasure that the towers of the faraway keep. Ever since I read the book of Nichols, those towers have reminded me of the library tower of The Name of the Roseby Umberto Eco, located in the Middle Ages when knowledge of certain forbidden books was feared by a monk who began to poison those who dared to read them.

Satanism in Atomwaffen? That’s pseudo-apostasy, as these bubs are still immersed in the pond of Xtian symbols.

Christian Identityinfluence on Mason? All that and more is just howling at the Moon in a dense and haunted night instead of reaching the finis Africae.[2]

_______

[1] Sallie Nichols (1908-1982) was a lecturer at Jungian organisations in California. A long-time student of Jung’s psychology, she had the opportunity to study at the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich while Jung was still alive. 

[2] In Eco’s novel the finis Africae was a hidden room in the tower that contained the forbidden works of the pagans.

Categories
Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Psychology Sigmund Freud

‘Patients are only riffraff’—Freud


To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. Below, an abridged translation of a chapter of one of the books that I wrote in the last century:

Many psychiatric survivors have written manuscripts about their experiences but are rarely successful in getting their books published. 

—Al Siebert [1] 

Being silent is itself an indication of how we have been oppressed and ignored. The forces that keep us silent and invisible are most vulnerable to our speaking out. 

—Harvey Jackins [2] 

It is biography, and especially autobiography, the royal road to the conscious and unconscious, that continent barely explored; not Freud’s system. But to be fair with Freud, and very independently that as a physician of the soul he had been soulless, I must recognise that the man made a couple of good points.

In the Epistle for instance, I used a Freudian concept, the idea of abba(dad-God) in Jesus. Moreover, Freud introduced the fascinating notion of the unconscious and perceived that dreams meant something. (This doesn’t mean that his libidinous interpretation was accurate.) In this very indictment of psychiatry, although not directly, I based my ideas on a Freudian concept. According to John Modrow, the Sullivan-Modrow model of panic leading to a psychotic breakdown was based on Freud’s principle of self-delusion.

I confess I have scarcely read Freud. However, in my opinion (and Modrow’s) his fundamental discovery was that ordinary people continually distort reality in order to boost their self-esteem. This self-delusion is completely involuntary and inevitable. The objective is always to boost the self-esteem or self-image that an individual has of himself. According to Modrow, from this principle Harry Sullivan deduces that the most dangerous thing for mental health is an assault to the self-image. I call this an ‘assault to the Self’, and from Freud’s principle of self-delusion I would deduce that after our ‘I’ is assaulted, all sort of delusions crop up as defense mechanisms, such as religious and ideological delusions (psychoanalysis included!).

I recognise these lights inspired by Freud. But Freud also created a lucrative profession on the basis of human suffering, and that is precisely a fraud based on self-delusion.

Sándor Ferenczi, one of his closest disciples—so close to Freud that in 1909 Ferenczi, Freud and Jung vacationed together to America—, became aware of the fraud. I will only quote three lines of an intimate diary that Ferenczi wrote, a diary he devoted to the serious doubts he had about psychoanalysis. In a private conversation of Ferenczi with Freud, the latter:

said that patients are only riffraff [Die Patienten sind ein Gesindel]. The only thing patients were good for is to help the analyst make a living and to provide material for theory. It is clear we cannot help them. [3] 

By some cruelty of fate Ferenczi died at fifty-nine (a little earlier for his diary reflections to crystallize to be published), disillusioned by a dispute with Freud and his colleagues about the veracity of incest in the lives of his female patients (Freud, who sided the Vienna establishment, always denied that actual incest took place).

According to Jeffrey Masson, Jung’s dissidence was not a threat to the fundamentals of psychoanalysis. But Ferenczi’s was.[4] Jung merely exchanged Freud’s pan-sexual meta-narrative by his own mystic-religious one but Jungian analysis, as the Freudian, claim to help people understand themselves and enlighten them with their problems. Ferenczi, on the other hand, knew that these problems could not be solved with so-called psychoanalysis. Freud also knew it (‘It is clear we cannot help them’), and could have confessed it to the world.

He didn’t: that could have aborted the birth of a lucrative profession.

Besides the moral limitations of the founder, this side of psychoanalysis must be exposed. Tom Szasz’s view is that both psychiatry and psychoanalysis are a kind of Machiavellian rhetoric; I would say, the rhetoric of blaming the victim. An inquisitorial pseudoscience, psychiatry, blames the body of the victim. Psychoanalysis, a system of inspired invectives (Szasz’s words), blames the mind. These pseudosciences are two sides of the same coin. They sprang from the same sources, but Freud had great intellectual powers and immense literary gifts. However, he had little heart toward human suffering, as we saw in a previous chapter.

Psychotherapists, far from helping those who suffer, make a profit on the basis of that suffering. There are more than two hundred schools of psychotherapy in the United States and fifteen million Americans that consult psychotherapists. The fee for a fifty-minute consultation with an “analyst” is something above the hundred dollars. Psychotherapy is a multibillion-dollar business, and its popularity continues in Spain, Italy and Latin America.

Freud was the father of the mystification to see the problems of those who asked for help as ‘neurosis’. Actually they are familiar, economic, social and political problems. Psychotherapists have invented a whole Newspeak. They redefine these problems as ‘mental problems’ of ‘patients’, otherwise they could not justify their profession and income. The ultimate truth is that anyone who claims to sell psychic solutions to environmental problems has entered, consciously or not, the reign of fraud. Unless someone sponsors economically a person suffering from tribulations, very few will be capable of helping him. But no therapist sponsors his clients: in that profession money flows one-way only.

It is worth saying that, since a quack is the one who earns money pretending to be a physician, the writer Vladimir Nabokov used to call Freud ‘the Vienna quack’. I would add that Freud’s legacy has some analogy to Marx’s. Both proposed totalizing meta-narratives that bamboozled a good part of the Western intelligentsia: one about political economy, the other about the politics of the psyche. Now, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxism agonizes but psychoanalysis lives. It is my hope that the 21st century witnesses more critics of analysis. Although I recognise the few lights Freud showed us—Marx showed us a few lights too—, the quackery of his legacy must be exposed. Freud’s epigones are a parasitic class of which civil society must free itself from.
 
Scholarly quackery

That not only psychoanalysts but biological psychiatrists behave as quacks can be seen in the case of one of the most influential psychiatric geneticists in our times. David Rosenthal edited The Genain quadruplets, a book about four women, identical twins, and family dynamics.

The father of the Genain family was an alcoholic that beat his wife and daughters, whom he restricted contact with the outside world. According to his wife, he was ‘always so angry and hateful’ and once he threatened to murder her when she wanted to leave home. The father played sexually with one of his daughters, but when he realised that the teenagers masturbated he send them to an unscrupulous surgeon who mutilated their genitals. The mother abused the girls too. On one occasion she banged two of the girls’ heads together to stop them crying. When the husband wanted to prevent the masturbation, she participated in the use of acid in her genitals. This occurred before she approved the initiative to mutilate them.

The four daughters got mad.

The Genain quadruplets is a treatise for biological psychiatrists, saturated with scholarly references of genetic studies. One could expect that, confronted with such a story, the contributing authors exposed the case as proof that some parents drive their offspring mad.

They did the opposite. Rosenthal believes his data is proof of a genetic aetiology of the madness of the daughters. The book is a study about hereditary and environmental factors in the family, but Rosenthal, an apologist of the medical model of mental disorders, stresses the hereditary factor. Genes turned out to be responsible for the ‘schizophrenia’ of these poor women. The very name ‘Genain’ is a pseudonym invented by Rosenthal, deriving it from the Greek words ‘dire birth’ or ‘dreadful gene’.

The psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of a dozen books critical of his profession, read The Genain quadruplets and discovered that throughout the book, hidden in the irrelevant scholastic material, information existed about the happenings in the family:

The book presents one of the most tragic chronicles of child abuse recorded anywhere. Yet at no time is the abuse discussed as such. In no place in the book is it summarized. The data is strewn throughout the six hundred pages in the reports of the various professionals. Much of it is contained in the footnotes. The synopsis I have provided was put together from these observations. [5] 

Breggin concludes that the omission to talk plainly about what really happened in that family constitutes intellectual complicity with the parents.

If one of the most renowned psychiatric geneticists ignores this level of abuse and inverts the information, blaming the genes of the victims, it is not surprising that ordinary psychiatrists ignore the anguished testimony of their patients in relatively lesser cases of abuse.

In the 1980s an American series of scientific programs was televised under the title The Brain. One of the programs approached the subject of madness. It did not pass the microphone to any professional of the trauma model of mental disorders. But the program passed the mic to two biological psychiatrists who have devoted their professional lives to “demonstrate” the biomedical foundation of madness. Let’s listen to Daniel Weinberger:

At the turn of the [20th] century, every neuroscientist that was interested in schizophrenia was convinced[emphasis in Weinberger’s voice] that this is a brain disorder. There was no skepticism about that. It was only as that sort of stagnate [that] people really couldn’t make much of the findings they had through the 19th century that people begin to raise this notion of psychogenesis that somehow either bad mothering causes schizophrenia, or that bad neighborhoods [a strawman: the trauma model doesn’t claim that] causes schizophrenia, or drugs [same strawman] or some peculiar school experience [same strawman] or some major psychic trauma of some kind—for which there’s absolutely no scientific evidence, whatsoever! [great emphasis in Weinberger’s voice with a parallel movement of his hand on the table].[6] 

In the same program Fuller Torrey, after talking at length about the Vienna quack Freud and his disciples, stated:

What the psychoanalysts said about schizophrenia is that it is caused by early childhood experiences. [False: analysts make no such a claim.] There is no evidence whatsoever for this! And in fact all of the research evidence today is diametrically opposed; it is exactly on the opposite side.[7] [Note of 2019: In fact, it’s the bio shrinks who lack scientific evidence. See: here.]

At the moment of the filming the program, Weinberger was a young professional who spoke with charisma. How could his emotional voice have impacted the millions of TV viewers (The Brain was televised in several countries)?

In the same program the case was presented of a very disturbed adolescent who spoke before the cameras and stated that his problem was originated in the rape during his Kindergarten years. But just as Rosenthal did in his treatise of the Genain girls, Weinberger and Torrey did not pay attention to his anguished testimony.

Like many other renowned psychiatrists, Weinberger and Torrey publish scholarly quack papers in the American Journal of Psychiatry. What is scholarly quackery? Let’s taste a flavour of it: ‘Evidence of dysfunction of a prefrontal-limbic network in schizophrenia. A magnetic resonance imaging and regional cerebral blood flows study of discordant monozygotic twins’.[8]

The journal that Breggin publishes has rebutted this and other quack, though scholarly, papers by Weinberger and Torrey. But as Colin Ross revealed to me when I visited him in Dallas, the psychiatric community kept silence about his book Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry, which also includes rebuttals. [9]

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[1] Flier published by the Kenneth Donaldson Archives for the Autobiographies of Psychiatric Survivors, Al Siebert, executive director.

[2] Harvey Jackins, What is wrong with the ‘mental health’ system and what can be done about it: a draft policy prepared for the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities(Rational Island Publishers, 1991), p. 21.

[3] Against therapy(op. cit.), p. 129.

[4] The revelations of Ferenczi’s diary and Masson’s observations appear in a whole chapter of Against therapy.

[5] Toxic psychiatry (op. cit.), p. 106.

[6] The brain, episode 7, ‘Madness’ (1984).

[7] Ibid.

[8] D.R. Weinberger, K.F. Berman, R. Suddath and E.F. Torrey in American Journal of Psychiatry, 1992, 149, pp. 890-97.

[9] Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry(op. cit.), pp. 56, 60 & 174f.

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