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Tag: Trauma model of mental disorders

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Aztecs Chess Friedrich Nietzsche St Francis

The human side of chess, 12

In case of mental disorder

‘First do no harm’.

—Hippocratic Oath

Carlos Torre Repetto undressed on a streetcar in 1926 on Fifth Avenue in New York. That happened during the crisis that eventually led him to quit chess. The immigration police deported him in a steamer to Merida. Gabriel Velasco, the author of the only well-written book about the Mexican grandmaster, omits these vital events about his life in his misnamed book The Life and Games of Carlos Torre. I know Velasco personally, but in the next few pages I will break the taboo of not writing about Torre’s life. What did the champions think of the Mexican GM? Alekhine wrote:

(Left, Carlos Torre.) Since 1914 the chess world has not seen a first-rate luminary, one of those players who, like Lasker and Capablanca, mark a milestone in contemporary history… But about six months ago, shortly after the New York Tournament, in the United States appeared a faint light susceptible—at least we hope so—of transforming into a star of the first magnitude. We are talking about the young Carlos Torre, who is nineteen years old and whose short career has peculiarities worthy of attention… Without a doubt, Torre is not mature, which should not be surprising in a young man who has so little serious practice, but we admire the solidity of his game as well as his brilliant tactical qualities that allow him to emerge safely from sometimes dangerous positions in which he finds himself due to lack of experience. After having examined a number of his games, we cannot but congratulate Dr Tarrasch on his resolve to invite him to the next tournament of international masters to be held in Baden-Baden.

Alekhine wrote these words in 1924. Just two years later, when he came within a shot of winning the 1926 Chicago Tournament, Torre had the New York crisis. It is worth saying that the only game that Torre played with Alekhine was a ‘grandmasters draw’ played precisely in the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament. Alekhine, who two years later would dethrone Capablanca, immediately accepted the premature draw proposition by Torre on move fourteen: a sign of the respect he had for the Mexican. That year, the Moscow International Tournament was also held, where Torre made a sensational start. He started out beating three strong masters, including Marshall. He then drew two games with Tartakower and Spielmann to obtain other resounding victories, one of them against Sämisch, with which he placed himself along with Bogoljubov, Rubinstein and Lasker leading the tournament. Lasker said: ‘These first steps by young Torre are undoubtedly the first steps of a future world champion’. One of the most famous games of that tournament was the one Torre played with Lasker himself, who had been world champion from 1894 until Capablanca dethroned him in 1921, four years before the Moscow Tournament. Lasker held the title of champion for twenty-seven years. This great champion had to face Torre in the twelfth round of the tournament and got to obtain a positional advantage in the opening: an opening that was baptised as Torre Attack because the Mexican master introduced it to the practice of masterful chess. But on move 25 something unexpected happened. Word spread in the tournament hall: ‘Torre has sacrificed his queen to Lasker!’, something that rarely happens in professional chess. When it happens it causes a sensation. Within minutes Torre and Lasker had fans around their board. That game, known as ‘The Mill’, carved the name of Torre in chess annals; among others, it deserved an extensive comment from Nimzowitsch in My System.

I have quoted what Alekhine and Lasker thought of Torre’s future. The other champion of the time was Capablanca; as I said, the only Latin American who has won the title of world chess champion. It is an irony that very few Mexicans, and Alfonso Ferriz is an honourable exception, openly say that Torre could have conquered it as well. Capablanca commented on Torre after the Moscow International Tournament: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this young man soon started to beat us all’. The only game between Capablanca and Torre was played in that tournament. Capablanca was then the world champion, and his virtuosity lay especially in his mastery and understanding of the end of the game: that is why his game with Torre has a special value. The Mexican played with such precision and ingenuity that he managed to tie a very difficult endgame with the champion. Averbach, the Russian pedagogue, chose this ending to illustrate the theory of positions in his book Comprehensive Chess Endings: Bishop vs. Knight. When analysing the ending one is left with the feeling that this game between Capablanca and Torre is beyond the comprehension of ordinary fans, and that only a chess professor like Averbach and others can decipher it. When he played with Torre, Capablanca was at the height of his abilities. His game with the other Latin American is a tribute to the classic style of both, and should be studied as a paradigm of the endgame of knight against ‘bad’ bishop.

Torre’s arch was like the myth of Phaeton. After Torre’s crisis at the age of twenty-one, which marks the end of his brilliant but fleeting career, he lived without a profession, in a petty way and depending on his family until the early 1950s. He worked for a time in a pharmacy helping his brother in Tamaulipas, but he didn’t make a career or have children. In 1955 Alfonso Ferriz brought him to the capital of Mexico and kept him in a ‘very cheap’ guest house, according to him. Both Ferriz and Alejandro Báez, generous chess lovers in Mexico, tried to help him. Ferriz employed him in a hardware store, but the sixty-four-square aesthete was overwhelmed by the clientele.

During my vacations from junior high to high school, I worked at the Bank of Mexico and over time I purchased chess books for my collection (when I came of age I got rid of all of them). After work at the Bank of Mexico in the centre of the great capital, I would visit El Metropolitano: a chess den that, like all dens, reminds me of the room where opium addicts tried to escape from reality. In that unlikely place I listened to the chess master Alejandro Báez. His talk wasn’t directed at the beardless ephebe I was, but at the fans Carlos Escondrillas, Raúl Ocampo and Benito Ramírez who frequented El Metropolitano. My presence at a distance in those talks in 1973 went unnoticed. But what stuck with me the most was that Báez pointed out Torre’s admiration for San Francisco: the saint who undressed in a public place as a protest against the humiliation that his father had inflicted on him. I deduced from Baez’s talk that imitating the Franciscan buffoonery frustrated Torre’s career.

Carlos Torre died in 1978. The Russian magazine Schachmaty published an account of the tournaments of the time when Torre had flourished, from 1920 to 1926. Although Torre was then fifth in the world behind Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine and Vidmar, he was ahead of masters of the calibre of Nimzowitsch, Rubinstein, Bogoljubov and Reti. Note that this fifth place refers to the early years of Torre’s career. Would he have reached the top without his psychotic breakdown, imitating the man of Assisi? As I said, in the book that Velasco wrote about Torre the premature retirement of the master from Yucatán is taboo.

Some Mexican players wonder why if Chigorin, who was close to being a world champion, is considered the father of national chess in Russia, Mexican fans ignore Torre’s figure. One possible answer is that the stigma attached to the term ‘mentally ill’ is the most degrading thing we can imagine: more degrading even than having been in jail or having had a homosexual scandal in Victorian times. It is a subject buried in mystery, and the Criollo Velasco’s reluctance to touch on the subject perpetuates the darkness. Many grandmasters, and even world champions, have suffered nervous breakdowns. Although Steinitz is considered the first world champion, at the dawn of the 20th century he died in abject poverty. It is rumoured that he believed that he was in electrical communication with God, that he could give him a pawn advantage and, in addition, win him.

(Plaque in honour of Wilhelm Steinitz, World Champion from 1886 to 1894, in Prague’s Josefov district.) What causes insanity? Since it is prohibitive for today’s society to ponder the havoc that abusive parents wreak on the mind of the growing child to become an adult, a pseudoscience is tolerated in universities that, without any physical evidence, blames the body of the disturbed individual. This is such an important subject that I have written a dense treatise to unravel it. Here I will limit myself to mentioning some reflections that have to do with chess players.

One of the things that motivated me to write this little book is to settle the score with Carlos Torre’s biography. Unfortunately, there is no relevant biographical material on Torre to know exactly why he lost his sanity. The rumours of his supposed syphilis don’t convince me. Ferriz told me that his friends took him with whores in Moscow. But Torre was sane for the last eighteen years of his life. Had he had neurosyphilis his symptoms would have gone from bad to worse. Torre’s mystical deviations and his imitation of the man from Assisi suggest a psychogenic problem. Likewise, Torre’s nervousness, manifested in the film that captured him playing in Moscow, as well as his habit of smoking four daily packs of Delicados brand cigarettes, suggests a psychogenic problem.

The syphilitic hypothesis that Ferriz told me reminds me of some speculations about Nietzsche’s madness. The author of the Zarathustra suffered from psychosis for almost a dozen years until he died: a psychosis very different from Torre’s fleeting crisis. But as in Torre’s case, blaming a supposed venereal disease for Nietzsche’s disorder has been done so that his tragedy fits within the taboos of our culture.

The root of Nietzsche’s madness was not somatic. The ‘poisonous worms’, as Nietzsche called his mother and his sister in the original version of Ecce Homo (not the version censored by his sister), may have played a role. In The Lost Key Alice Miller suggests that the poisonous pedagogy applied to him by his mother and aunts as a child (his father died prematurely) would drive him mad as an adult. It is worth saying that Stefan Zweig’s splendid literary essay The Struggle Against the Daimon (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche) has also been translated into English and Spanish. As Nietzsche confesses to us in Ecce Homo, a kind of autobiography where his delusions of grandeur are already noticeable, his mother and sister were ‘the true abysmal thought’ of the philosopher in the face of the eternal return of the identical.

Nor is it convincing what Báez said: that Torre masturbated a lot. In the 19th century the myth that excessive masturbation among boys caused insanity became fashionable; and when old Báez said that Torre was a consummate onanist, I can’t help but remember that myth. Equally wrong is the story of Raúl Ocampo. Although Ocampo is one of the best connoisseurs of Mexican chess, Juan Obregón captured him on the tape recorder maintaining a bizarre theory: that a telegram sent to Torre by the Jews to inform him that his girlfriend was breaking up with him was the trick that triggered the crisis. When I interviewed Alfonso Ferriz, one of the few survivors who knew Torre, he couldn’t tell me anything substantial about the Yucatecan’s childhood and adolescence: the time when his mind was structured and the only thing that could provide us with the lost key to understand his mental state. But one of Ferriz’s anecdotes that most caught my attention was that Torre ‘had an almost mystical respect for women’. He called women las santitas (the holy little ones). ‘How is the little saint?’ was his question when referring to Ferriz’s wife.

I would like to talk a little more about Las Arboledas park. Although Fernando Pérez Melo fled home due to abuse and became destitute, I don’t know of anyone among the park fans who has held his father responsible. Society has been obsessed with not seeing the obvious. As the mother is the most deified figure in Mexico, why not start with her, breaking the taboo of the parental deity? Just as it caused a shock among the ancient Mexicans to see how the bearded people pulled from the pinnacles of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan the effigy of the Coatlicue’s son during the fall of the Aztec capital, for us to mature the figure of the mother has to be defenestrated. When Humboldt visited Mexico, the New Spaniards unearthed the Coatlicue statue to show it to him. They didn’t understand this work of art and they buried it again.

When I speak with Mexicans, I realise that they continue to bury the symbols of those female figures and terrible archetypes that they don’t understand or don’t want to understand. For this reason, the ‘santitas’ that Torre spoke of—compare it with Nietzsche’s expression ‘poisonous worms’—continue to be an object of veneration in Mexico. However, and despite all this speculation of mine, there is no substantial information about Torre’s childhood. Ferriz says that Torre never spoke about his parents or his siblings. So, instead of speculating about his childhood, I will focus on the life of a chess player who died in more recent times and about whom a little more is known.

Categories
Child abuse

WN ∩ child abuse = Ø?

Let’s remember the Venn Diagrams that we were taught in school. Many people believe that the issue of the mistreatment of children by their parents has nothing to do with white preservation. In set theory, that claim could be visualised by saying that the circles of white nationalism (WN) and child abuse don’t share any area, that they form an empty subset (symbolically, WN ∩ child abuse = Ø).

But that isn’t true. Let’s also remember my old essay ‘A body-snatched Spaniard’. And now that I was reviewing Erectus Walks Amongst Us I noticed that in Chapter 33, ‘Re-Classifying the Left’, Richard Fuerle wrote (square brackets are mine):

Before leaving this chapter, let us address the important question of why so many whites are anti-white. It has not escaped notice that the most fervent of the white white-haters are not only on the left politically, but many are Marxist. When the working class did not rise up against the exploiting capitalists, as predicted by Marx, the Marxists ideologues of the Frankfort school (Frankfort, Germany, which moved to Columbia University in New York City when Hitler came to power) sought out other classes of exploited victims who could be induced to rebel against the hated establishment. They settled on women, homosexuals, and minorities. The [Jewish] Marxists have no real concern with these oppressed classes, but find them handy weapons for weakening white societies so that they can be more easily overthrown. Why so many whites eagerly embrace white-hating, however, remains to be explained.

If you have been reading this book, you know that egalitarianism is clearly false—populations are not genetically the same and that is obvious even to small children. To hold a view that so clearly conflicts with reality is surely psychopathological, i.e., these people are mentally ill. Nor is it a trivial illness, as it perverts their most important biological function—passing on their alleles. It is only because psychologists and psychiatrists are also mired in the same psychopathology that egalitarians [as I have said elsewhere, psychiatry is pseudoscientific] do not have their own special place in the Manual [the shrinks’ DSM].

I have written elsewhere on this subject, where I argue that the problem has its genesis in the inevitable conflicts that children have with their parents. If children decide that it is the parents who are wrong, unfair, even evil, they readily identify with those whom they see as similarly oppressed, urging them to overthrow the ruling class, i.e., initially their white parents but, by projection, all whites, including themselves. The parent’s justification for ruling over them, that there are biological classes, in this case, children and adults, must be refuted, hence fervently held egalitarianism, that there are no biological classes. Marxism, which promotes class warfare and hatred of those who have and rule (i.e., for children, their parents), is just an extension of this psychopathology. Unfortunately, the egalitarians will be with us forever unless children can be raised to see their parents as wise and loving guardians, not as arbitrarily frustrating obstacles.

Never mind what Fuerle later said in endnotes 25-27 (he was no expert on the subject). Although the subject is huge, only those who have read my Day of Wrath will know what I have in mind. Suffice it to say that while Christian ethics is the basic aetiology of the dark hour, in cases of abject self-hatred like the Antifas I could assure that they were devastated by their parents, and presently are transferring their wrath onto a scapegoat: their own race.

Categories
Human sacrifice

Mhysa

‘Mhysa’ is the third season finale of the American medieval epic fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and its 30th episode overall, originally aired on June 9, 2013 on HBO in the US.

Although I don’t like the character due to the sadistic feudal house he presides over, I always liked Roose Bolton’s gravitas. In these photos we see him the day after the Red Wedding while the servants clean up the pools of blood, in front of Lord Frey. But I was disgusted by the scenes of psychological torture of his bastard son Ramsay in another place, who had Theon’s penis cut off. Those scenes are an excess, completely unnecessary, although the Jews who film them love to throw that on us.

Even after the physical and mental torture of Theon, the anti-male messages continue. In the next scene Ramsay sends his penis to Theon’s father, the king of the Iron Islands, and warns him that he will send more pieces of Theon unless he takes his men out of the north. In private the father tells his daughter ‘The boy [Theon] is a fool’ and let’s remember how smart Yara is. But the inversion doesn’t end there. Yara takes the fastest ship in his father’s fleet and fifty of the best assassins on the Iron Islands to try to rescue what remains of Theon. The cinematic shots of Yara make the viewer see the masculinity of this brave woman when she sets sail.

In King’s Landing, Shae is one of the most repulsive women in the series. But only until this episode did we find out why. And here the fiction of Martin or the scriptwriters isn’t bad. They are certainly bad at describing King Joffrey as the king’s cruelty is inexplicable. But what happened to Shae is perfectly explainable from the trauma model of mental disorders, about which I have written a lot on this site.

Ever since Tyrion met Shae it struck me that she said that if he asked again about her parents she would take his eyes off. But only up to this episode the why is revealed.

Varys: ‘When did you come to this strange country?’

Shae: ‘When I was thirteen’.

Varys: ‘You were only a child’.

Shae: ‘I stopped being a child when I was nine. My mother made sure of that’.

Since Shae’s trade is prostitution it seems that her mother prostituted her from such an early age. (Anyone who wants to know how abusive parents are behind mental illness should read my Day of Wrath.)

Another unreal scene is Arya’s first killing in the series, which we see in the episode. The problem with these scenes is that even if Arya were a teenage boy, the scene would be just as unreal: pure Hollywood. I don’t even want to describe the details, or who she killed. The subsequent love-hate scene between Ygritte and Jon is also unreal: once again, pure Hollywood. Nor is it worth describing.

Although the Shae case is clarified from the realistic point of view of human psychology, the wickedness of the witch Melisandre is never clarified, who in this episode insists on sacrificing Gendry. In the real world we guess the psychological motivation of human sacrifice rituals, as I explain in my aforementioned book. But here we are with Martin’s fiction, where Davos helped Gendry escape.

The scene that ends the series, a Dany as a goddess among a huge crowd of non-whites, enthused the audience and even some white nationalists. But in reality those are bones that Jews drop to us from time to time to make us believe that there is some pro-white message in the series. Unlike these nationalists I didn’t like that final scene of the season, least of all the cheesy music they played.

Categories
Autobiography Beethoven

My father’s tale

I’ll be busy for a few days and won’t post articles until I finish a course. But I would like to leave these lines during my absence. The thing is, when reading Karlheinz Deschner’s chapter on Pope Gregory I came across this sentence:

Archbishop Maximus did public penance in July 599, prostrate after hours in a street and shouting: ‘I have sinned against God and blessed Gregory’.

The anecdote reminded me of a story that my father told me decades ago. A king had to humble himself for days at the doors of the pope’s residence because he feared for the salvation of his soul: begging the Vicar of Christ to forgive him (I think the pope’s name was Gregory). Finally the pope deigned to open the doors and forgive him. My father told me this with enthusiasm, in the sense that even the most powerful king had to humble himself before the headperson of the Roman Catholic Church. The lad I was didn’t like that story, but only much later did I begin to understand my father’s mind.

One of the milestones in understanding why he was so destructive to me was Silvano Arieti’s book that I have already talked about in Day of Wrath. In Father, the sixth book of my series of eleven I quote some passages from Arieti that astonished me and I’m going to explain them with my own examples. Think of the baby monkeys that are sold as pets, how they cling to the owner as if she were a mother (the instinct is hard-wired in the creature as it’s vital not to fall from the trees). The point is that some adults deal with childhood trauma like these young pets do with their owners: by desperately clinging to authoritarian figures.

Arieti mentions his patients who, to use my example, hung themselves like little apes onto substitute images of their parents: a church, a political party, and even their own spouse. In Father I analyse how, in repressing his childhood traumas, he clung to no less than three defensive mechanisms: religion, nationalism, and his wife. But we are talking about pathological levels of hanging onto the surrogate parent, like an ape who never grows. The example that comes to mind is a biographer of Mary Baker Eddy who recounted that one of her most faithful disciples declared that even if she had seen Mrs. Eddy commit a crime, she wouldn’t believe her own eyes!

That is the level of co-dependent subjugation my father wielded regarding his church, the nationalist myths of the country where he was raised, and his wife. So when in my adolescence my mother went crazy my father went crazy too: what in my books I’ve called the captive mind or folie à deux.

I am not going to explain here everything I said in my sixth book in Spanish. The English speaker can order a copy of my first book to get an idea (see Letter to mom Medusa on the sidebar). What I want to get to is that some insecure people tend to fall into a state of folie à deux not only with the wife, but with the church or political party to which they belong. Analogous cases of Eddy’s disciple are endemic, for example, when I try to argue with those who cannot conceive that Mesoamerican Indians ate their children despite the overwhelming evidence from the first ethnologist of the American continent.

Once the defence mechanism is established, for instance the nationalistic pride of some Mexicans, the subject is capable of the most irrational scepticism before the evidence for the simple fact that what he is doing is protecting a worldview, his ego or substitute parent. From this angle we can understand why even some Jew-wise racialists, as we saw in my post yesterday, don’t tolerate that one fails to honour the god of the Jews. That powerful archetype functions like a surrogate parent.

Arieti’s book is entitled Interpretation of Schizophrenia and, although it deals with psychiatric cases, as I read it I realised that it could apply equally to an enormous number of people who have never been diagnosed psychiatrically.

My father comes to mind. He was enthusiastic about the pious tale of the pope who made a king humble himself in Rome. Now many Americans, equally childish, desire a powerful father in the form of the State and are excited that the country of the First Amendment will soon repudiate that amendment. It doesn’t matter whether the defence mechanism is religious or political: the psychological need is the same. Just as Eddy’s disciple wouldn’t believe her eyes as Mrs. Eddy became a god-like figure, I have met people who deny the historicity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s crimes.

The drive that compels us—to quote the lyrics of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—to believe in ‘a loving Father behind the starry vault’ means that Beethoven had a drunken father who, as a child, often beat him. We are mammals and, as the monkey of the anecdote, the unconscious need to have a surrogate father once our dad fails is infinite: a Christian attempt to heal childhood traumas. But it is deceptive magic because Yahweh is not our father, he’s our enemy.

Those who haven’t read my essay ‘God’, a page from one of my eleven books, could read it now.

Categories
Hate Mainstream media Racial right

Part of the problem

Tucker Carlson spoke last night. The charlatanism of the so-called white nationalists can be seen in a simple anecdote. Carlson’s monologue yesterday (see, e.g., the minute after this moment) has been one of the most powerful in MSM. I have often said that what the white race needs first is a baby-step: moving from happy mode to angry mode. And Carlson’s anger contrasts with the even tone of the articles that can be read these days in American Renaissance, The Occidental Observer, Counter-Currents and others. Not even in the recent podcasts of Richard Spencer can we listen any anger. How is that possible?

Basically, because people who had Christian parents in the United States (often Protestants) are prohibited from hating, or even uncovering the most legitimate emotions. As many of my visitors know, my specialty is not racial issues but the trauma model of mental disorders. And if there is one thing that follows from this model, it is that repressing our early traumas is what causes psychosis. It is true that when we were at the mercy of our abusive parents we could not explode our feelings. But if as adults we don’t report what they did to us, the result is a one-way ticket to any point among the entire range of dysfunctions that go from the simplest neurosis to the most serious psychoses.

There is no point in linking my recent posts about the situation in the US: the visitor can simply scroll down to read them. In short, it is unbelievable that a normie anchor like Carlson is already capable of handling the most elementary emotions while the racialists continue in that academic tone that is not going to lead the race to any revolution.

If you are white and your blood is not boiling over what is going on, then you are either asleep or part of the problem.

Categories
Chess Feminism Infanticide Mainstream media Metaphysics of race / sex

On Beth’s cute tits

Beth dancing to a degenerate piece of music
that was a hit when I was pubescent, with trophies
from all the chess tournaments she had won.

As a teenager I was a big fan of chess, and even in my early twenties I played daily in a park visited by middle-class chess players (I recount my adventures in Spanish: here).

The Queen’s Gambit is an American TV miniseries based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, starring Anya Taylor-Joy in the role of Beth Harmon. It was directed by the Jew Scott Frank and the script was written by a gentile, Allan Scott. The Queen’s Gambit was released on Netflix last month and has now concluded.

The past few days I watched The Queen’s Gambit. From one of the first episodes, when Beth approaches the camera showing the shape of her beautiful boobs under her clothes, I realised the impossible chimera of this series that is causing a sensation in the world. But first of all I must speak a little about female tits in our species.

Decades ago, the biggest surprise I came across when reading The Naked Ape was discovering why men crave women. If we consider the shape of a baby bottle for milk, that is exactly the shape female teats would have if the objective were purely functional for baby sucking. But women’s breasts are completely different. Zoologist Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape, explains the phenomenon of ‘self-mimicry’ in other species of apes. In these species, natural selection favours females to imitate their buttocks with their coloured breasts, in order to shift the aggression of the males to a more erotic channelling.

I was shocked to discover that my own species is a more aesthetic version of the same phenomenon of self-mimicry! But that is exactly what it is when we see the ape we are with a naked eye: the needs of the baby are secondary to the trick that Nature does to us so that we impregnate our females. Nature makes them absolutely irresistible to our instincts in order for the human species to breed.

But our species is also governed by the concept of the trade-off, and I will have no choice but to speak scientifically for a few paragraphs.

Why can’t there be a species that is a mix between a super-poisonous bug and a winged, big, beautiful and highly intelligent creature? In a fantastic world just imagine what power such a creature would have. In my science course at the Open University I learned about the concept of a trade-off between one aspect of an organism’s biology and another. A trade-off is a situation where, to gain some advantage, an organism has to pay a price: to compromise. In our species big brains are a good example. Our huge frontal lobes are certainly nice to have but they are costly in terms of the energy they use up, and make childbirth extremely difficult.

As explained in my Day of Wrath (see sidebar), this is the main cause of massive infanticide of babies in past history. Extremely immature babies are bothersome. A unique feature of the human race—prolonged childhood with consequent long dependence on adults—is the basis for the psychodynamics of mental disorders. The long childhood of Homo sapiens lends itself to parents abusing their young. After all, premature birth was Nature’s solution to the trade-off of bipedalism and the limitations of the pelvis of hominid females in our simian ancestors. (If Homo sapiens weren’t born so immature, we would have to stay within our mothers’ bodies for about 20 months.) The ‘long childhood’ lays a solid foundation for understanding the abuses committed by parents in our species and, therefore, the mental disorders suffered by the progeny. But that’s the price we have paid for our big brains!

Body size is another example of trade-offs. In the animal kingdom being big gives you some advantages against predators but it also means you need more food. Being small means that you don’t need much food but it makes it easier for another animal to hunt you. That species can’t gain an advantage without having to pay a price means that there will be many ways to survive and prosper: and explains why there is so rich diversity in the animal kingdom.

In my Open University course I had to answer this question: Why a bird with a complete set of the five potentially very successful traits (a species of bird whose individuals lived a long time, reproduced repeatedly and at high frequency, and with large clutch sizes) doesn’t exist? The answer is because of trade-offs. A bird that produces large clutches cannot reproduce frequently because the production of each clutch requires a lot of resources. Also, large clutches require more looking after because in due course there are more mouths to feed. Large clutches are therefore likely to suffer higher mortality than small clutches while adults are absent from the nest.

The same applies to the surreal example of the impossible chimera I imagined above. Having assimilated the concept of trade-offs, let’s now remember old Schopenhauer:

at the expense of the whole remainder of her life, so that during these years she may so capture the imagination of a man that he is carried away into undertaking to support her honourably in some form or another for the rest of his life, a step he would seem hardly likely to take for purely rational considerations. Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy [my emphasis—a trade-off].

The media lie is equivalent to ‘filming’ those flying and poisonous bugs which, in turn, are smart as humans: impossible chimeras.

In previous years I insisted a lot on how the most popular series of all time, Game of Thrones, made us see several female characters as brave warriors: something that never existed in the Middle Ages or in old-time chivalric novels (Brienne of Tarth, Yara Greyjoy, the wildling Ygritte, the masculinised female warriors at Dorne) or queens without a king to control them (Daenerys Targaryen and Cersei Lannister). Worst of all was that a girl (Arya Stark) killed the bad guy of the series, the Night King, in what I consider to be the climax of the whole series (Theon Greyjoy should have killed the Night King). In real medieval times, and in chivalric novels, all these women would have been similar to Lady Sansa, the only character who played a feminine role in most of the seasons of Game of Thrones (except for the end of seasons 6 and 8).

The goal of Hollywood and TV is to brainwash us by reversing sex roles to exterminate the white race. And it is a disgrace that even the greatest white nationalist novelist of the 21st century, the late Harold Covington, fell for this feminism in his most voluminous novel (see ‘Freedom’s Daughters’ in my Daybreak).

HBO produced Game of Thrones. Netflix has produced The Queen’s Gambit. HBO wanted us to believe that women can compete with men, and even surpass them, in matters of what used to be called the knight-errant. (Remember how Brienne of Tarth beat the very tough Hound in the last episode of the fourth season of Game of Thrones.) Now Netflix wants us to believe that in matters of the intellect a woman, Beth Harmon, can beat the toughest chess players and even the very world champion (Vasily Borgov in the TV series: Beth’s strongest competitor).

Some people in the media are publishing articles with titles such as ‘Is The Queen’s Gambit a true story?’ They claim that the series was inspired by the woman who has reached the highest when competing in chess tournaments: the Hungarian Judit Polgar, now retired from the competition although she continues to comment on professional chess games. But Polgar’s life was quite different from the fictional Beth Harmon whose photo appears at the top of this entry. It is true that in real life Polgar once beat the world champion of chess, Garry Kasparov. But what the Netflix series omit is the score of all their confrontations. In real life, Kasparov beat Judit Polgar 12 to 1, with 4 draws!

It seems important to me to present the scores of the best female chess player in history, Polgar, in her games against the male world champions (to date, no woman has been crowned world champion of chess). The source for the list below is Chess Life:

Kasparov – Polgar: 12-1
Carlsen – Polgar: 10-1
Anand – Polgar: 28-10
Karpov – Polgar: 20-14
Topalov – Pogar: 16-15
Kramnik – Polgar: 23-1

As we can see, Polgar is at a disadvantage against all of her contemporary world champions. The only world champion with whom she maintained an almost even score was Topalov. Her score against Karpov was not bad, and although her disadvantage against Anand is wide, her results are noteworthy. But against Kasparov, Carlsen and especially against Kramnik, Polgar took real beatings.

These are the pure and hard facts of real life that more HBO or Netflix feminist series won’t change. They want us to believe that women are interchangeable with us in matters of physical activity and, now, intellectual sports!

Nature has endowed the woman with feminine charms so that a man may impregnate her thanks to her inviting tits, and support her for the rest of her life. Nature didn’t give her muscles or brain-power equal to the man. We have more cranial capacity than women. Anyone who hasn’t read pages 99-116 of On Beth’s Cute Tits should read them now. It is the best way to understand not only our sexuality but also the sexuality of the fair sex.

Beautiful tits that enchant us cannot go in the body that houses, at the same time, a superior brain of those whom her tits seduce: an elemental trade-off.

Postscript of 2021: Desmond Morris’ exact quote appears in the first indented paragraph: here.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Nobody wanted to listen, 10

The pathetic survivors

Finally, I can be told that since the mental health professions are inherently corrupt, I shouldn’t have considered even anti-psychiatrists but only survivor groups. Common sense tells us that, unlike the professionals who are part of the system, in self-help groups we will find the much sought after help. But let’s remember what happened with those filmmakers when I said that the Alcoholics Anonymous therapies were skin deep because they omitted the issue of parental abuse. This omission is endemic in self-help groups and even in less superficial associations than AA and its countless imitations of the twelve steps. For example, in the texts that are circulated in a group called Co-counselling I was stunned by the absolute omission of the role that parents play in the emotional problems of their children. Nothing is more alien from the ideology of this group than to fight for the legislative milestones of those countries that have prohibited corporal punishment of children. And exactly the same can be said for any other self-help group. Needless to say, not attacking the root cause is, as I told the AA believer who went mad at me, an epidermal remedy.

Laing was a philosopher of disturbed minds. But philosophical sophistication often serves as a smokescreen to hide the mistakes of a thinker. In psychiatric survivor circles it is common to hear that Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, published in 2001, is considered the most educational book against psychiatry ever written. Whitaker definitely gets off the philosophical tower of Foucault, Szasz, and Laing. But in his book, Whitaker doesn’t say a word about whether parents could be the agents of trauma. Mad in America’s deficiency was exposed when a guest in the guest house I lived in, read some passages from the book in my library and came across a favourite Whitaker quote among psychiatrists themselves: ‘Little is known about what causes schizophrenia’. My friend repeated this psychiatric slogan, omitting my footnote: ‘It bothers me that, after quoting Modrow, Whitaker didn’t want to see that the cause of the insanity has been known for decades’. And that’s the ‘best critical book’ on psychiatry, written not by a mental health professional but by an acclaimed journalist.

A word now about the most structured organisation of survivors of psychiatry: Mind Freedom International, which has invited Whitaker to its events (I don’t take into account the activism of the Church of Scientology against psychiatry because it’s mixed with Scientology quackery). This organisation publishes a magazine that bears the same name, Mind Freedom. In its winter 2002 issue, which features a photograph of Breggin on the cover, the magazine listed dozens of books critical of the psychiatric profession. But in the review of Modrow’s book it omitted to mention his central thesis: extremely abusive parents can cause ‘schizophrenia’ in the child. What has Modrow opined about such omission? It is pertinent to point out that, although I have consulted the Mind Freedom page many times, I have never come across a phrase that affirms that parental abuse may be involved in the child’s crisis. This is surprising when you consider that David Oaks, the director of the organisation, had a psychotic breakdown when he was in his twenties; and it is also surprising because a grassroots movement like Mind Freedom doesn’t have to comply with the political correctness of the most academic authors (the contributors to Simon’s journal for example). When I confronted Oaks about this omission, like Breggin he hid behind a wall of silence.

I must say that one of the aspects of Mind Freedom that caught my attention is its insistence on speaking of insanity as something to be proud of: similar to, say, the sexual identity advocated in the so-called gay movement. In fact, from the correspondence he sends me, I realised that Oaks is very interested in having the idea of ‘Mad Pride’ promulgated, including parades, imitating those of ‘Gay Pride’. This is a grotesque idealisation: we can already imagine Modrow feeling proud in 1960 because he was John the Baptist! With honourable exceptions the survivors of psychiatry, including those who demonstrate on the street, appear pathetic. In some internet reviews I recommended books by Szasz, Simon’s journal that Breggin originally created, Whitaker’s Mad in America, and Mind Freedom’s web page. Now I’m not so sure of the wisdom of these recommendations. None of them have dared to see the most terrible event in life: the maddening panic of a child assaulted at home. It is a splendid irony that, like their psychiatric foes, parental toxicity is a taboo subject for many anti-psychiatrists.

In How to Murder Your Child’s Soul I tried to cut a weed at ground level. But the extirpation that I do here reaches a root untouched in my previous book. In our culture it is strictly forbidden to get to the root of evil in the world. Breggin has written that we have to wait for the moment when critics of psychiatry are able to galvanise public opinion. He doesn’t realise that for that moment to come, Miller’s revolution in psychology must first be consolidated. Psychiatry doesn’t re-victimise children who are beaten at home by accident. It does it out of necessity. It is just one of the most recent institutions of an ancient social heritage that recreates evil in each generation. Psychiatry is part of an ancient cultural fabric: from the biblical ‘wise’ Solomon who advises beating the child, to the ‘educator’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau who abandoned his babies in an orphanage. Laing himself abused his family terribly. What people like Breggin don’t want to understand is that it is impossible to convince society of the falsehood of psychiatry if his editors don’t even tolerate the word ‘trauma’ in the manuscripts that come to them. Some of that trauma can be glimpsed in the TV talk show subculture with all the simplicity and vulgarity that these shows represent. But there is no chair in any university in the world that formally addresses the subject.

This is the most astonishing fact that I have come across in Alice Miller’s work.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry Sigmund Freud

Nobody wanted to listen, 9

Ronald Laing and anti-psychiatry

What’s written above leads me to a corollary to my book How to Murder Your Child’s Soul. The universal stubbornness or blindness about the ravages resulting from parental abuse is the cause of the existence of psychiatry. Because parents are taboo, for more than a century the profession has tried to find the source of mental disorders on the wrong side, the body. Parents are not only publicly untouchable: we are not even allowed to see their actions in the solitude of our bedrooms. So, when uncontaminated by social underpinnings, a child dares to say that his parental kings go naked, society completely loses its cool and labels the sane one who has told the truth as crazy. Through the involuntary administration of drugs it assaults the brain not of the disturbed parents, but of the child (analogously, in the former Soviet Union it was the sanest people, the dissidents, who were injected with antipsychotics). This was the tragedy that I tried to denounce in my previous books, and it is perfectly explainable if we start from the fact that the whole society strives to be blind on this matter.

A world that insists on seeing things in photographic negative can only (1) attack the child victim, or (2) ignore the adult in a literary search for his lost time. If such a vision in photonegative didn’t exist, bio-psychiatry wouldn’t exist: our eyes and hearts would make us see the toll that abuse entails. Psychic disturbances would be the province of the psychologist, and it would be seen as nonsense that they would be the province of the physician. It is more than ironic that the greatest critics of psychiatry have contributed, with their blindness, to perpetuate the pseudoscience they try to debunk.

To explain this situation, I would like to mention that in 2005 an American wrote me a letter. After reading ‘Why Psychiatry is a False Science’ published as an appendix to my previous book (the article that Laurence Simon refused to publish), he complained that after so many decades of activism critics of psychiatry hadn’t made a dent in the public conscience. The key to understanding this is that the critics themselves suffer from a blind spot in the centre of their vision: something similar to the black strip that appears on pay-TV channels. If the critics refuse to see what is central, that parental abuse causes neuroses and psychoses, and if it is from this black strip that it is intended to enlighten others, it shouldn’t be surprising that the public conscience hasn’t awakened.

______ 卐 ______

 
Interpolated note for this site:

Exactly the same happens to white nationalists, as Mike has told us on this site: ‘Whatever you want to call it, thinking you can aid in saving the white race while, at the same time, bending the knee to Jewish deities (Yahweh and Yeshua) is some kind of combination of insane, dishonest, cowardly, naive, or very stupid. To bottom line it, it won’t and can’t work’.

I used Mike’s words to debunk MacDonald at the end of my Daybreak.

______ 卐 ______

 
To clarify this point, I will now refer to those professionals who didn’t suffer from this blind spot. Unlike Szasz and Breggin’s epigones, Lidz, Laing, Arieti and others pointed to parents as responsible for the psychoses in their patients. But even these and many other psychiatrists didn’t sympathise with the victim with the integrity and empathy that Miller and I do. For example, in the Letter I quoted Theodore Lidz:

I also find it very distressing that because the parents’ attitudes and interactions are important determinants of schizophrenic disorders, some therapists and family caseworkers treat parents as villains who have ruined the lives of their patients.

Although I barely caught a glimpse of it when I wrote the Letter, now I clearly see in this sentence the typical fears to speak, without mincing words, of parental guilt. By resisting saying that abusive parents are what they are—the villains in the child’s movie—Lidz advised taking the victim away from his parent. The difference with Miller cannot be greater, who advises keeping the aggressor away from home. What’s the point of moving, say, a pubescent girl raped by her father if the aggressor stays at home, waiting for the next little sister to grow up to molest her too? But sexual abuse isn’t the most common.

At the time of reviewing this chapter, as of mid-2008, twenty-eight nations have prohibited corporal punishment of children. The dates indicate the year the legislation came into force, starting with the country that provided the example: Sweden (1979); Finland (1983); Norway (1987); Austria (1989); Cyprus (1994); Latvia (1998); Croatia (1999); Bulgaria, Israel and Germany (2000); Iceland (2003); Romania and Ukraine (2004); Hungary (2005); Greece (2006), Chile, Holland, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela (2007); Costa Rica, Italy, Japan, Malta and South Africa (2008). In Iceland, a country that illustrates Miller’s advice, the penalties for parents go up to three years in prison or a high fine. Note that these countries have omitted to include psychological and emotional abuse, which can be equally destructive, or even more so, since all bruises are internal (think of the Helfgott case and countless other schizogenic parents). Despite these legislative advances, these societies still cannot see other forms of undermining the emotional integrity of the children. Laing, who did focus on internal injuries, was closer to Miller than Lidz when he came to blatantly blame the maddening parents. But like Szasz, Laing philosophised from an ivory tower: cold and distant reason from the victim and his feelings, as was fashionable in the existential philosophy of his time. Much more reached the real person those who, without any philosophical ballast, addressed the issue of domestic violence: a revolution in psychology that began in the 1970s and 1980s and isn’t yet over. In the first chapter of The Divided Self (1960) entitled ‘The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons’ Laing wrote:

It seems extraordinary that whereas the physical and biological sciences of it-processes have generally won the day against tendencies to personalize the world of things or to read human intentions into the animal world, an authentic science of persons has hardly got started by reason of the inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons.

Laing refers to mental health professionals in particular and the social sciences in general.

If it is held that to be unbiased one should be ‘objective’ in the sense of depersonalizing the person who is the ‘object’ of our study, any temptation to do this under the impression that one is thereby being scientific must be rigorously resisted. Depersonalization in a theory that is intended to be a theory of persons is as false as schizoid depersonalization of others and is no less ultimately an intentional act. Although conducted in the name of science, such reification yields false ‘knowledge’. It is just as pathetic a fallacy as the false personalization of things.

In philosophising about the autobiographical genre, I came to these conclusions on my own. Animism and bio-reductionism are antithetical psychopathologies, one primitive and tribal and the other sophisticated and urban. And this objectifying people reminds me of the dehumanised language of the analyst Solbein: ‘Those are common clinical experiences’. [Interpolated note for this blog: See also Krist Krusher’s recent comment on this site.] Laing continues:

It is unfortunate that personal and subjective are words so abused as to have no power to convey any genuine act of seeing the other as person (if we mean this we have to revert to ‘objective’), but imply immediately that one is merging one’s own feelings and attitudes into one’s study of the other in such a way as to distort our perception of him. In contrast to the reputable ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’, we have the disreputable ‘subjective’, ‘intuitive’, or, worst of all, ‘mystical’. It is interesting, for example, that one frequently encounters ‘merely’ before subjective, whereas it is almost inconceivable to speak of anyone being ‘merely’ objective.

So far I’m in perfect agreement with Laing. Remember the passage of the two universes, the empirical and the interior; and that the existence of the subjective universe is so real that it is enough to think about our death to verify it [mentioned in the first part of the book]. However, Laing adds:

The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the ‘Underworld’ and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone. We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge he brought back with him and conveyed to us.

As I pointed out in my previous book, for Jeffrey Masson psychoanalysis was born as a betrayal of women. The Oedipus complex was nothing more than a grotesque attempt to cast guilt on the victims who came to Freud’s office to tell him stories of incest. Analytic theory is the diametrically opposite of wielding the head of the Medusa. If there is such a thing as the antithesis of the hero, that was Sigmund Freud: an ethnic Jew who, although he reached the threshold, was afraid to enter the Underworld and face pure terrors (remember my dreams when commenting on Giorgio de Chirico’s painting). Laing, an idol in my twenties, portrayed Freud in photographic negative and saw the dark as bright. Like many intellectuals of his day, Laing was seduced by the apotheosis of the Vienna quack, something in which Szasz was much more cautious.

When I reread Laing, I did so with a renewed mind after reading Masson, Szasz, and other critics of the psychoanalytic movement. In my rereading of the last chapter of The Divided Self I realised that Julie, one of Laing’s patients, was admitted to a psychiatric ward for almost a decade. If Laing himself hadn’t suffered from the scientific objectivity that he criticises, he would have empathised with Julie denouncing those who locked her up. True, in stark contrast to Szasz and Simon, Laing blamed mothers like Julie’s for their daughter’s psychosis. However, in The Divided Self he never made it clear that the mere fact of locking her up could aggravate her condition. In what I am close to Laing is that when reading his essay one is left under the impression that Julie’s mother, more than psychiatry, ‘murdered a girl’. These are the words of Julie speaking parabolically about herself: she meant that her mother murdered her tender soul. Now, the person Julie, not the object of Laing’s essay, needed to be taken away from the psychiatric hospital and from the mother who committed her; to take her to live far from her ‘murderer’. When she began her psychotic crisis at seventeen years old and said ‘a little girl was murdered’ Julie thought that she should inform the police about the crime.

Her delirium was closer to Miller’s posture than to the psychiatric that locked her up. The laws of a nation should seek to lock up the maddening parent, not the victim (who, in a state of florid psychosis, would have to be cared for in a non-repressive enclosure like the one that Laing presided over). In a just society that doesn’t see reality in the photonegative, this would naturally be done through the police. But in her chapter on Julie, Laing never suggests this. In fact, both the word victim and an exhortation of justice are the great absent in The Divided Self. Also, Laing doesn’t denounce the psychiatric re-victimisation of other women clearly maddened by their family. In another of his famous books, The Politics of Experience, he limits himself to reproaching society for misunderstanding psychoses. Sometimes Laing even seems to participate in the universal fear of touching the parent. Speaking of Julie’s mother, Laing mentions one of the fashionable concepts in the 1950s, the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ but is quick to add that, fortunately in his opinion, there was no other ‘witch hunt’ in history: an equivocal comparison with women labelled witches centuries ago. If there is one thing the world needs, through the law that Miller outlines, it is to bring to justice every parent who murders children souls. The basic pathology of our society is that this crime, and this crime alone, must remain not only unpunished but invisible. For example, Silvano Arieti, Laing’s colleague across the Atlantic, talked a lot about psychotherapy in Interpretation of Schizophrenia. But he never proposed any social engineering to redress the problem of maddening parents; and he didn’t do so despite the fact that Arieti blames them for the psychotic state of his patients.

‘To my mother and father’ reads the dedication of Laing’s The Divided Self. ‘To my parents’, the dedication of Arieti’s Interpretation of schizophrenia (etymologically, schizophrenia means a divided self). Naturally, the most sophisticated thinkers of insanity also had parents. (In my next book we will hear a class about the problem of attachment with the perpetrator that explains the lukewarmness of Laing, Arieti and others.) Not until the middle of The Divided Self Laing speaks openly about abusive parents. In contrast, Miller and I do it from the first page of our writing, and passionately.

After reading The Divided Self, the best of Laing’s essays, I was convinced that there can be no such thing as a science of subjects. Seen from the outside, the subject inevitably becomes an object: an offense for those who want to speak with their own voice. This is precisely the foundational flaw of academic psychology. If science is the study of the empirical world there can be no such thing as a ‘science of persons’, only people writing about their lives. Although Laing had much more heart than Freud, and this puts him on a higher level to understand the tragedy of the person in crisis, he starts from the same objectivist position. His essays and those of Lidz are, at best, a solidary approach to the disturbed subject. It’s funny that in The Divided Self Laing quotes Sartre: ‘I am not fond of the word psychological. There is no such thing as the psychological. Let us say that one can improve the biography of the person’. I would go further. The direct study of a soul in psychotic hell can only come from the pen of someone who, like Modrow, speaks in the first person singular.

Categories
Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Nobody wanted to listen, 8

Peter Breggin and his editor

In my previous book I had said that the psychiatrist Peter Breggin has denounced the folie à deux between the parent who abuses his child and the psychiatrist who drugs not the aggressor, but the abused one. Unfortunately, like Szasz Breggin’s successors suffer from a dire blind spot.

Critics of psychiatry who flourished around the 1960s, and the paradigm would be Ronald Laing, saw the most important thing in their profession: the family is responsible for mental disorders. However, as soon as the embryonic anti-psychiatric movement proposed by Laing and others was conceived, it was aborted. Today’s critics are much more politically correct than those of the 60s, including the associations of survivors of psychiatry. Although they fight biological psychiatry, these professionals and survivors don’t want to see what’s in front of them: abusive parents are the number one cause of mental disorders. From this angle, the criticism of the profession by Modrow and Miller, who do not suffer from this blind spot, is far superior.

EHPP stands for Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry. When I learned that a journal that Peter Breggin created was challenging psychiatry, I was delighted. That’s what the world needed! Although already in my forties, with a youthful spirit I sent to the journal’s editor an original contribution to the academic critique of psychiatry (eventually published as an appendix in my previous book under the title ‘Why psychiatry is a false science’). I was very excited and fantasised about contributing various articles and reviews to Breggin’s journal. What would be my surprise when the new editor, a certain Laurence Simon, answered me saying that it was necessary to modify some passages related to the trauma model. The condition for publishing was to tone down the idea that abusive parents could psychologically harm their child. Simon’s request surprised me because Breggin had written some texts indistinguishable from Miller’s point of view; in fact, Breggin mentions Miller several times in his books. Laurence Simon, his new editor, had turned one hundred and eighty degrees on what the journal’s founder had written. In Simon’s email to me, the trauma model ‘has long lost credibility with the scientific community as have all the older analytic theories that blame poor mother’.

To the poor mother! Simon didn’t answer my question if he had read the researchers of the trauma model. Nor did he respond to another of my letters where I pointed out the existence of academic books on this model published in the new century. In one of his emails Simon even complained that I kept using the word ‘trauma’ in a modified version of my text. I still had hopes of publishing in Breggin’s journal and was willing to sacrifice a few paragraphs from my article. But Simon’s anti-trauma stance made me think that, like my attackers at the Cineteca, the new editor harboured deep-seated fears about something in his past. The old work of authors who studied cases of maddening parents was left out of my article. I relented on this point, but it seemed incredible to me that references to Theodore Lidz, Ronald Laing and Silvano Arieti, widely read authors in the 1960s and 1970s, would have to be censored in the journal that Breggin had created. Simon then revealed his true colours by insisting that all references to the trauma model, including contemporary authors, should be left out of my article.

I complained to Andrew Levine, the person in charge of responding to letters sent to the organization that Breggin founded, and to co-editor Johnatan Leo. None responded. I complained to Dominick Riccio, the director of international affairs. No reply. I complained to David Cohen, the editor before Simon and a close associate of Breggin. Cohen sided with Simon. I complained in several letters to Breggin himself, the director of the organisation that publishes the journal. Breggin hid behind in a wall of silence. I insisted and his wife, Ginger Breggin, wrote a few words in her own hand in one of my missives that she returned to me. Ginger simply claimed that her husband ‘no longer worked’ at the journal. But the truth is that Breggin continued to lead the organisation that publishes it, and his attitude seemed inconsistent with his previous position, if not cowardly.

Only now do I realise that, like Szasz, I had idealised Breggin. It was very hard for the idealist that I was to wake up to the fact that, although he has dedicated himself to denouncing what psychiatrists do with minors—an issue in which Carlos García so miserably cowed—Breggin hadn’t the stature I imagined. It is impossible to convey in a few paragraphs how confused I was by this little affair. I couldn’t believe my senses: that the most important thing of all had to be censored in the pages of the journal that Peter Breggin had created. In my private diaries of those days I wrote:

18 September 2003

It seems that my article won’t be published. See what Simon tells me this day, and my response.

I had to take another long walk in the street saddened by the resistance of the world even in those who professionally criticise psychiatry. As Miller says, the greatest resistance comes from the professionals themselves. Every time I run into a jerk like Simon I enhance the figure of this woman even more. I think I should try again with Cohen and Breggin but I highly doubt it will work. As always, Caesar, the people are incomparably more Neanderthalesque than you imagined.

Hopefully this is false and Breggin understands me…

He didn’t. Even two years after the rejection of my article, I still couldn’t believe my senses: that Breggin’s editor took a position contrary to something Breggin himself had written. So in September 2005 I made one last attempt at communication. To make sure my letter got through, I sent it to him through Federal Express. Somewhat edited for this book I quote some passages of the letter:

Dear Dr. Breggin:

I would like to thank you for your work. When I was a teenager, my mother ruined my young life by putting neuroleptics in my orange juice without my knowing it. Thanks to your work I now know that the hellish akathisia I experienced was the direct result of the drug. I am truly grateful for enlightening me on this issue.

I wrote you two or three letters in 2003 and 2004. Although none were answered, I hope this one is, and directly from you. The fact is that Laurence Simon contradicts what you say in chapter 2 of Toxic Psychiatry. Allow me to quote something from your book, which in my opinion is one of the best on the subject: ‘More than one patient of mine has begun with just such anguished fragments of memory before discovering the agony of his or her abusive childhood and its relationships to current entrapments’ (p. 24). Then, saying something very similar to what Laing used to say, you wrote:

Mad persons are victims of a corrupt upbringing: Behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invented in order to live in an unlivable situation [your emphasis]. What’s wrong is not “in the patient,” but in his family and society [p. 31].

You made many other similar pronouncements in the chapter on schizophrenia under the headings ‘The Family,’ ‘Envy and Shaming in the Family,’ ‘Blaming’ and ‘Should Parents Feel Guilty?’ In fact, the view you present on what is labelled schizophrenia is identical to mine. This is why I am so puzzled that your new editor takes the opposite position: that the aetiology of psychoses is a mystery.

I am about to finish a book that includes extremely harsh criticism of Laurence Simon and EHPP because Simon’s ‘poor mother’ stance is an insult to people like Modrow and many others who have had terribly abusive mothers (and fathers alike). I would like to spare you from such criticism. Those passages above show that you are—or at least were when writing Toxic Psychiatry—a very understanding person towards survivors. They also show that you believe there is some truth to the claim that some parents drive their child mad.

So please reply to this letter. How was it possible for your editor to take exactly the opposite position from what you say in your most important book? If the topic of parental abuse is central to understanding mental disorders, why haven’t you fired him?

Respectfully,

C.T.

The years that followed the editor’s rejection and the wall of silence behind which Breggin hid from me represented a great confrontation with reality. In addition to resigning myself to publishing my article not in a specialised journal but as an appendix to my previous book, I had to swallow the bitter drink that critics of psychiatry suffer from the same fears as psychiatrists, analysts, and psychologists. To give just one example: the EHPP editors failed to publish an obituary, or even better a tribute, to Theodore Lidz: one of the most prominent Americans in the trauma model of schizophrenia in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety (I talked to him over the phone when I lived in Houston). Even when Breggin and Cohen were EHPP editors, I didn’t find a single article in their journal about the work of Lidz or other authors of the trauma model, not even a critical one. Just as psychiatrists do, for these ‘anti-psychiatrists’ the trauma model is not even mentioned. Clearly, in recent decades there has been a failure of the nerve among critics of psychiatry.

Categories
Hojas Susurrantes (book) Psychiatry

Nobody wanted to listen, 7

Szasz and Shirley MacLaine

Now some will tell me that it is neither the psychiatrists nor the psychologists nor the psychoanalysts, but the critics of the mental health professions with whom I should have tried to communicate.

Another myth. At the beginning of the century, the activist Carmen Ávila directed me to investigate Mexican psychiatry. Although she praised my Letter, she advised me the same as Dr. García: to rewrite it with pseudonyms. Ávila repeatedly insisted on this advice without realising that caring for the interests of a family that, without repenting, will take their sin to the grave offends the victim of that family. Anyone who has not been educated in poisonous pedagogy doesn’t object to denouncing a case of abusive parenting in the public light (although I admit that understanding it cost me long agonies).

Mrs. Ávila specialises in the abuses of the medical profession with children and campaigns against the psychiatric drugging of those labelled as ADHD kids. Unlike García, Ávila has enthusiastically celebrated my public denunciation of Dr. Amara, who has persistently been promoting the drugging of children on the radio. Since we have both battled psychiatry, Ávila holds me in high regard. However, like the rest of humanity, the will to denounce the figure of the mother frightens her.

You might think that Ávila advised me to rewrite my book because she is a grandmother—literally—who sometimes takes on the role of a mother. But when you take note of what the most eminent critics of psychiatry write, worse attitudes remain to be seen.

In his book Cruel Compassion and at a conference in Los Angeles that Ávila attended, Thomas Szasz denounced the collusion between abusive parents and psychiatrists. However, the dean in the civil war against psychiatry omits the fact that these parents can drive a child mad. The omission is evident throughout his work, and the reason is exposed in The Meaning of Mind. In that book, Szasz states that adult misconduct cannot be traced ‘to child abuse or sexual abuse’. In contrast to that statement, for Richard Rhodes and his biographee, the criminologist Lonnie Athens, every criminal had a harrowing childhood or adolescence (which does not mean that all the abused automatically become criminals, since some of them had helping witnesses, or developed neurotic defence mechanisms). But Szasz goes further. Speaking as if he were a typical American Calvinist he writes that the poor are guilty of their poverty, and as if that weren’t enough, at the end of his book he quotes one of Sartre’s stupidest remarks: that one deserves his own destiny. Sartre’s statement isn’t only ideological madness: it is perverse for having been uttered in a century as genocidal as the 20th century. Reading Szasz’s book motivated me to part ways with a book review that the thoughtpolice on Amazon Books deleted, but which I would like to rescue, edit it and incorporate it within these pages:

Tom Szasz was a mentor in absentia for a long time. He made me see what involuntary psychiatry and so-called free societies are. His analysis of the psychiatric newspeak, his concept of the Therapeutic State, his stance against both psychiatric bio-reductionism and Freud, and especially his moral calibre and love of freedom, have made their mark on my thinking. Anyone who wants to meet a dissident of the system should read Szasz. The Manufacture of Madness is a good starting point.

But my dear mentor has gone astray in some passages of The Meaning of Mind. Szasz simply doesn’t understand what goes on in the heads of those who have gone through psychotic breakdowns. He makes the same mistake as psychiatrists: ‘Don’t listen to them!’ There is a way to understand people who have been through a crisis: read what they have written. For example, How to Become a Schizophrenic by John Modrow is a window into the author’s mind and the dynamics of abuse that temporarily drove him mad. As Modrow sent the manuscript of his book to Szasz, and as he read it, there is no excuse for those passages in The Meaning of Mind where Szasz blames the victims for his hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and other ravings. Szasz even blames poor Virginia Woolf for the voices she heard!

Szasz is unconcerned about what a person feels when she has a panic attack and loses her sanity. He approaches the process of going mad as if it were an everyday experience that can be understood with the most common of the senses. But Szasz has never had a psychotic break. Modrow has had it. Modrow holds the key to understanding the world of madmen. Szasz doesn’t have it.

Anyone who really wants to know something on the subject should read not only Modrow’s study but also the writings of Alice Miller. The trauma model of mental disorders is the only rational alternative to the psychiatrists’ medical model. Amazingly, hardly anyone has heard of it. Parental abuse, conscious or not, is the primary cause of disorders in human beings, even in the neurotic adult. Szasz makes the incredible pronouncement that ‘child abuse, sex abuse, ignorance, poverty’ are not causative factors (p. 37). Furthermore, Szasz states that ‘autism is a poorly understood (perhaps genetically caused) condition’ (p. 56). This is an incredible claim to have come from the pen of one of the greatest enemies of biological psychiatry (autism is a condition likely caused by a mother without empathy with the baby).* Here is another statement from Szasz that I find incredible: ‘However, many hallucinating persons refuse to take antipsychotic drugs voluntarily, preferring the company of their “voices”…’ (p. 131).

Wow! Was this written by the great Tom Szasz or is it an advertising slogan of Big Pharma? ‘As I already suggested, the schizophrenic patient who “hallucinates” or has “delusions” is profoundly dishonest with himself’ (pp. 129f). It is unnecessary to continue to quote these incredibly stupid pronouncements. Suffice it to say, Szasz is absolutely ignorant about what mental hell is. I never tire of repeating that, since the process of going mad is a subjective experience, both Szasz and his enemy, the orthodox psychiatrist, have no right to interpret what is going on in the minds of those who suffer from it. Let those who have gone through these crises speak! Let us read, for example, page 23 of Modrow’s book, whose abusive parents were internalised in the poor boy he was: ‘After each assault by these “internal persecutors”, the individual’s ego retreats more and more behind a fortress that becomes increasingly empty, until at last, in the words of C. Peter Rosenbaum, “The moat is empty; the bridge is down; the sentinels fail to stand guard. The unconscious storms into the consciousness, and the walking dreamer of Jung is to be seen”.’

As for many years Szasz used to be a therapist, if Modrow had come to see him, perhaps Szasz would have offended him like those New Age folk who preach that you must blame yourself for what happens to you. The fact that Szasz has quoted Sartre, that in capitalist America he has blamed the poor, and the disturbed persons for their condition, is alarming. The pronouncements of the most serious philosophers are often indistinguishable from the silliest claims of the New Age. The stance of Szasz and the above-mentioned Elsié, identical to Shirley MacLaine’s nonsense (‘You create your own reality’), may seem laughable. But as we are about to see, other critics of psychiatry who don’t make these kinds of pronouncements are also blind to the psychic toll that family violence causes.

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(*) I have corresponded with Dr. Jay Joseph, a critic of the fashion of blaming genes for various psychiatric disorders. This fashion is immensely popular precisely because it exonerates the mothers of autistic children. In 2006 Joseph published The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes in which he refutes the genetic theories of autism.