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Alice Miller Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 4

A supposed great friend

You could tell me that I had the folly to confess to casual acquaintances; that if I had opened my heart to my closest friends, say a compassionate woman, I would have been listened to. Sadly, that is not true. In the middle of my life I know that many people who in my twenties I thought were friends offended me even more than the Cineteca acquaintances. It took me a long time to digest this bitter drink, and only thanks to my discovery of Miller. For example, a close friend named Regina told me the following (I quote from my 1998 diary): ‘“You blame everything on people and your parents. No, Caesar, no. You don’t see yourself in the mirror. You are responsible”. That was yesterday on the phone so the memory is fresh. And she even told me that David Helfgott didn’t blame his dad!’

In my discussions I frequently refer to the film Shine about David’s life, as I did in the filmmakers’ gathering, to show an extreme case of soul murder: what psychiatrists stigmatise with the term schizophrenia. Regina didn’t read Gillian Helfgott’s book where the disturbed David told his wife ‘It’s all daddy’s fault’ talking about his mental condition. Not that Regina shared the New Age philosophy that would have dwarfed the philosophers of classical German idealism (the crazy things I heard at the Cineteca for example). However, her words that ‘one is responsible’ are very common cliches in today’s culture.

In the mid-1980s, without a career or profession to face society, I took refuge in the house of Teresa Moreno: the lady who, in the narrative part [of this book], told me that she never denied the mythopoetic imagery of her children. It was Tere who would introduce me to Regina. I had known Tere since 1977 through her husband: one of the chess fans with whom I played chess in the park. Tere accepted me in her house as a Mother Teresa would accept an evicted person. At least that was the image that my friends took to be true. I don’t want to tell the story of my friendship with Tere; I’m just going to talk about how a young man can be deceived by seeing something that never was.

Before I drank from the true water of communication, as I’ll show at the end of this book, I used to see mirages in the desert. In my desperation to find a friendly ear, I imagined that just by having a few conversations with someone I could open my heart to them. Tere, as I said, sold the idea that she was compassionate with the miserable. Lots of people slept at her house and she and I had long, seemingly profound conversations. Over time, I was closer to her than to her husband. I lived with the Jiménez family for eight months in 1985. More than a dozen years later, when my unpublished autobiographical project was on track, I gave my old friend a copy of my Letter and other intimate writings.

In the case of Regina, to whom I had also given a copy of the Letter, the aberration was that that woman didn’t feel compassion for the teenager I was, but for my parents! But Regina belongs to the humble class and has a low IQ. Following the aforementioned quote from my diary about Regina, I wrote: ‘Let’s see if Tere, to whom I will deliver the manuscript soon, has compassion. Let’s see…’ When Tere read my writing she commented about our friend Regina: ‘She’s like your parents: they are the type of people who, whatever their parents do, you have to honour them’. But when we talked about what she thought herself—oh my! What better than to quote my diary again. A couple of days before I lost my thirties, I wrote:

August 10, 1998.

It was yesterday when I said goodbye to them. Tere had compassion not for me but for my father, whom she had seen the day before and, as she told me, she was ‘thinking all the time about my writing’. That the publication of my book was going to be a shock for him and that it could bump off the poor dad. Tere asked me ‘if I could forgive’ my parents and that despite being the aggressors ‘they were also victims as children’. She hasn’t finished reading my manuscript yet but stayed a few pages before the end. If she had compassion for my tragedy, she said it indirectly: ‘I will continue reading it until I feel stronger’, and that two or three times her eyes had clouded when reading it. In the end, she said that every time I went to talk to her, I ‘left her devastated’. Compassion is truly a gift that very few people have. Tere had already shown signs of lack of compassion with Sergio, whom I mentioned in the conversation yesterday.

The latter is a long and dirty story, and I will have no choice but to bring it out into the open to assess the strange morals of someone I considered a great friend.

Sergio, who had had psychotic crises as a result of being martyred at home, had been an intimate friend of Tere. His twin brother took advantage of Sergio’s relationship with Tere to woo the latter while I lived with the Jiménez family: times when the marriage between Tere and my friend Jiménez was unravelling. When I discovered that Tere preferred the twin, putting Sergio aside, her image of a compassionate and welcoming mother let me down. What shocked me was an occasion when, according to Tere herself, someone—she didn’t specify that it was Sergio—had grovelled before her in a tremendous plea not to leave him, but she coldly continued on her way. It shocked me because I guessed that this someone was Sergio, who had been driven mad by his family. Although that happened over a decade before I started my psychiatry research, I still thought it a crime for Sergio’s own monozygotic twin and ‘mother Teresa’ to betray him in such a way. Sergio was in an extreme situation. It was him, not his twin brother, who needed help. Now, having completed my psychiatry research I know that, well treated, he would have had a chance of recovery. But Tere, the twin brother and their father did the opposite (the twins’ schizophrenogenic mother had already died).

But you can’t learn from another’s mistakes. Even with such brutal evidence I didn’t eradicate from my mind Tere’s public image as a compassionate friend. Only by the end of the century, when I wrote the entry from the diary above and Sergio had already died, did I wake up to the fact that Tere was not the person I assumed to be. For example, when I was writing my diary I omitted to tell something of great importance for me. After Tere told me that she cared about my parents if I published the manuscript, we went to eat. Throughout our meal, with great and more than great expectation I waited for Tere to tell me something significant about what she had read! Quite apart from her concern for my parents, I expected her to tell me something concrete about the tragedy that I tell in the Letter. How I remember Tere’s smiles and her kindness to me while we ate: that character that has captivated so many. But the long-awaited comment didn’t come…

That day Tere died in my heart. And from that day on, not only would I not seek her friendship, but I also eluded her invitations, via third parties, to go to her and her new husband, the twin brother. Not telling me anything about what was most important to me exposed Tere as someone who had never been a true friend. Six years later, the year I sat down to write the analytical part of this book, something unexpected happened. Tere caught me in an office talking on the phone and waited to talk to me. Once again, I quote from my diary:

February 20, 2004. As much as I wanted to avoid her, she waited while I spoke and I had to let her in. Despite being so gentle, she has no empathy. Without me touching the subject, she spoke about my Letter to mom Medusa. And without me touching the subject, she again worried about the image of my parents if I published it!

She doesn’t seem to realise that just talking to my parents makes her my enemy. She even said that what they did ‘was not with bad intention’ and that her ideal was that I abandon all literary projects and resentments, and that that would be my salvation. She used completely different words, but that was her message. The poor thing doesn’t know that telling someone who has a career as a whistleblower, like telling Solzhenitsyn not to write about the Red Terror, is insulting; and although I wasn’t offended in her presence, at home I saw the absurdity of her position. Hers is none other than all that millenary ‘wisdom’ that has had human beings trapped in the sixth day of history.

Every time I see more clearly why I lost so many years of my life. I had no knowledgeable witnesses. Tere is so cute that the fallacies of her speech aren’t noticeable when being with her. But they are paradigms of pedagogical attitudes, as Miller would say, the most harmful attitudes in the world. Not long ago, as she confessed to me yesterday, she spoke to my mother. Tere told me that, since I didn’t visit my parents, my mother had told her that I was ‘very strange’, that that was my character. Although she said it with no intention of offending me, here I got her by the ovaries [vulgarism for ‘I got her’, more common in Mexico as referring to male balls]. It is clear that Tere doesn’t see my tragedy. She denies it. Her advice is not aimed at bullies to change their ways. They are aimed at the victim to try impossible oblivion…

Once again, ‘poisonous pedagogy’ in action.

—impossible because of the null employment opportunities after I lost my profession since the times of the abuse. Tere is asking me that, while her son in Switzerland is studying with his Aryan girlfriend, I, who haven’t even had a real partner, must ‘forget’ my destiny. Her anti-empathy, so evident in the fact that she sees my mother and they are friends, speaks for itself. Not only Tere lacks compassion. Look at the dirty way she treated Sergio. What she told me yesterday corroborates what I thought of her. Hopefully I won’t see her again. She is still on my blacklist and I hope she will have a place in one of my books. After reading Miller I see that people like Tere have played the role of villains in my life. Before Miller, people like Tere confused me greatly and were the cause of my stagnation in life, of not making contact with the feelings of the attacked, tortured and destroyed teen I carry inside. But the light has already reached me, and thanks to having unmasked people like Tere.

Seeing these passages published from an intimate diary will seem cruel to some of my readers. It won’t seem cruel, on the other hand, that someone who I considered my great friend has visited, over the years and behind my back, the person who destroyed me. As I said, in a world where everything is turned upside down, it is not the cruelty of parents to their children that causes scandal, but the denunciation of that cruelty and its accomplices.

Tere’s words move me to add one more page against forgiveness and forgetting. Tere had asked me if I could forgive my parents and commented that they too had been victims. This hasn’t been the first time that I have received this little piece of advice. As we saw on previous pages I have heard it from other people, including my cousin Carmina. The folly of this demand to the victim is already answered in what I wrote in my diary: Tere should have asked my parents to examine their conscience, not the victim to forgive those who avoid any examination.

The belief that forgiveness has a healthy effect is axiomatic in all cultures, and it seems so obvious that it is taken for granted. But the truth is that forgiving an unredeemed parent is psychological suicide. Miller presents a devastating argument: at the behest of the therapist, a man abused in his childhood forgave his father—a sadist—and later he committed an inexplicable murder. This is because the hatred towards the aggressor still dwells, unconsciously, in the forgiver. Hatred cannot be exorcised by force of will. Unilaterally, forgiveness is impossible. Authentic forgiveness is feasible only if the aggressor recognises his fault and does something very concrete to make amends to his victim: bilateral forgiveness. I never tire of repeating that this is impossible as long as the aggressor insists that he acted well. Poisonous pedagogy (*), and I’d venture to say pedagogical attitudes in general, are based on this inversion of the most elemental psychological reality. Ultimately, the values of the world’s cultures towards the victim of parental abuse must be transvalued. Miller’s argument against forgiveness in several of her texts is compelling: and those who believe that one-sided forgiveness has a salutary effect would do well to study the lives of serial killers. To illustrate this argument in less extreme cases, I will mention something that appears in Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents. To her clients who come to her office saying that they have already forgiven their abusive parents, Forward demands that they have to ‘unforgive’ them until they make contact with their unconscious rage. Otherwise nuclear hatred is still there, and like the subject who committed an inexplicable murder, the natural reaction is to displace it towards substitute people: their children or the partner.

Ultimately, no one has come as far as I have. I am the first to do so in eleven autobiographical books so that the subject of soul murder becomes as didactic as possible before an ignorant world. My friend Tere was unable to understand this new literary genre at a time when I was just writing my third book.

___________

(*) Literally translated from German, Schwarze Pädagogik would be ‘black pedagogy’.

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse Hojas Susurrantes (book)

Nobody wanted to listen, 1

One of the problems with translating fragments of a book is that you lose context. Strictly speaking, the ten chapters that I will translate from Hojas Susurrantes (Whispering Leaves), pages 378-430 and 443-444, can only be well understood after having read the previous three hundred and seventy-seven pages.

However, when I recently reviewed the syntax and edited that text, which I had not reread for several years, I realised that those pages were understandable if I translated them. Similarly, Day of Wrath (see the sidebar) contains translated pages 472-634 of my Hojas that, even in isolation from the rest of the book, make perfect sense.

So here is the first of ten instalments of pages 378-430 that I’ll be translating this month. It begins with some anecdotes that happened in 1976…

 

______ 卐 ______

 

NOBODY WANTED TO LISTEN

Hurt by my loved ones

In the most difficult moment of my life, my seventeen years, I fled to the house of San Lorenzo with my grandmother. A few days later there was a meeting at her home. Besides grandma Mecho there was also my grandma Yoya; I remember Aunt Esperanza and also Aunt Elsa: my father’s sisters-in-law, and I think my Aunt Mercedes was also there. As I tell in Letter to mom Medusa, at that time my character was extremely self-conscious because of what my parents had done to me. But despite my inhibition, I plucked up my courage and threw a comment on the table that was intended to reveal the tragedy at home. At that time they had just released One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I projected myself into the stuttering lad who commits suicide at the end. My mother, still at a distance, continued to harass me: now through the infamous Dr. Amara. In the film it is mentioned that the lad had a possessive mother. I projected myself because, just as in the movie the villainous nurse was an ally of his mother, that doctor was an ally of my mom. Thus, at dinner with my aunts discussing the film, in a moment of unusual courage I said to my grandma Yoya:

‘There are mothers like that with their children!’

I meant that there are mothers who destroy their children as in the film. Although I don’t remember my exact words, I said it not only with great emotion, but with immense anguish. When I write these paragraphs I have to get up from my desk to walk around in the modest study in which I live. The memory touches me so painful fibres that penetrate so deep in my being, that I need a little peripatetic comfort before I sit down again to write. Yoya perfectly got what I wanted to say, and what I am about to tell is what hurts me.

Here is a minor who, for mysterious reasons for her aunts and grandmothers, runs away from home to take refuge with his grandma. This boy is patently distressed, self-conscious, and in great stress when speaking. He makes a herculean effort and, using a movie, tries to talk about his own drama. Instead of his anguished comment marking the beginning of some serious communication with the family, Yoya, who has said that I was her favourite grandson, immediately turns to Aunt Esperanza with the words:

‘But Blanquita and other mothers aren’t like that, right?’

Yoya repeated the question (‘Oh no, of course!’ Esperanza answered) and mentioned my mother’s name in the second or third repetition. My grandma originally used my absent Aunt Blanquita to avoid mentioning my mother directly; and she meant that if these things happen in other families, never in ours.

The pain of which I speak has to do with the fact that it is this sort of axiomatic deafness, this root disbelief, this anti-empathy towards an extremely anguished boy who desperately needs a friendly ear, that destroys a life.

Anyone who has been the victim of their parents to the level that I was, suffers a panic that undermines his mind when, to boot, no one shows the least compassion; that is, when the kid lacks what Alice Miller calls ‘a helping witness’. I didn’t have a single person to comfort me when I was being attacked by my parents. On the contrary, the family and my friends put up incredible resistance (and let’s not talk about the analyst). As Jeffrey Masson wrote on page 17 of his anti-therapy pamphlet, ‘Whenever our own truth is denied, ignored or invalidated we experience the greatest fear we can ever know: the threat of the annihilation of our self’. For those who haven’t been victims of parental beating, it is impossible to imagine how the universe falls; how the sky breaks and the stars collapse when the child has absolutely no one who wants to hear his story.
 

After the turbulent years

If as a teenager it was a miracle that I made up my mind to denounce my parents, in my twenties I managed to do it more frequently. In the 1980s my adolescent agonies were distant. Years had passed and I was much more emotionally robust. So I criticised my mother in various conversations.

Hearing my criticisms in a conversation alone with Godmother at her cozy flat, whom I had dreamed of when I was very little in that beautiful dream in which she approached me happily dancing [a dream recounted in the previous section], she raised the palm of her hand as a sign of please stop my dear! In my late twenties her lack of empathy didn’t cause me the terrible panic I had suffered as a boy with the psychoanalyst. But it hurt me in such a way that I stopped talking to her for a long time: something that no relative had dared to do. Godmother, the sister closest to my grandma Yoya, was a respected figure in the family because as she stayed single she acted as a counsellor to the relatives. But like the deaf analyst, the family counsellor was unable to listen to any accusations about the parents, despite the fact that on one occasion she commented to me ‘If you could see what they come to tell me here!’

On another occasion, and also in the 1980s, my uncle Beto did something similar. He was the one who had rented us the house in Ermita, the place of my first memories, and with whom Elvira herself had worked after her stay in Palenque [recounted in the previous section]. When Uncle Beto heard my criticism of my mother, he raised his eyes to the ceiling as a sign that I had crossed the line into forbidden territory. Although Uncle Beto, Godmother and Yoya’s younger brother, didn’t enter into an argument about something so important to me, I didn’t get angry or stop talking to him. Not long after he would die. But the unspoken message from my great-uncles, grandmother, and analyst was the same: they weren’t willing to listen to something that touched parents.

It could be thought that only that generation of people wasn’t prepared for this type of revelations. Neither is mine. Not even my younger brother allowed me to communicate my views to him.

In 1998, without any inhibition and with a fully developed intellectual capacity, in a restaurant I quoted to Pablo some passages from a treatise by Silvano Arieti. The tract showed how paranoia was due to the stalking mother of his young female clients, and these passages surprisingly portrayed the delusions of one of our sisters. In a gesture that I felt rude, my brother closed the Arieti book that I had on the table between us. That aborted discussion marked the beginning of a total and absolute estrangement with my brother.

Pablo, the fifth of my siblings, at thirty years old didn’t want to know anything about the dark side of our parents because he wasn’t abused as a child. But the incredible thing is that I’ve also been hurt by my battered sisters when I wanted to communicate my findings. Since Genevieve follows me in age—the photograph in which she and I embrace as children is a treasure in my heart [photo that appears in the previous section]—she is the one I feel closest to. But by introjecting our mother’s paranoid vision of me since her teens, a phenomenon that Theodore Lidz once called folie en famille, Genevieve distanced herself from her older brother: something that has hurt me deeply. The only time in my life I asked to speak to her about the family, she refused. And when I put the manuscript of my Letter to mom Medusa on her bed a few days later, she returned it to me without having read it: a gesture that, like Pablo’s, naturally offended me.

From my family Genevieve has been the only one who has distanced from me of her own free will due to the discord that our mother sowed (‘… she took you out of the family and turned the whole world against you with pure lies’, my sister Korina wrote me in her own handwriting about our mother when I had gone abroad [an already quoted sentence in Letter to mom Medusa]). I would distance myself from others because of their lack of compassion, or in the case of Korina herself, because of her lack of empathy. As seen from the quote in this paragraph, Korina was the only one who made deep emotional contact with my adolescent tragedy. However, my sister believes that the family tragedy shouldn’t be made public, and has vehemently maintained the social convention that it is wrong to bring up the subject with others.

Humanity ignores that communicating one’s own tragedy to someone is essential to settle accounts with our past. Humans, in general, see reality backwards. For example, instead of trying to understand my autobiographical mission, throughout my adult life Korina has treated me with sobering attitudes. This is very ironic because in my family only she developed great compassion for me (which is why I had thought to dedicate my first book to her) and also because our mother martyred her. But Korina refused to read the manuscript of the Letter that I planned to dedicate to her when I lived with her and her little son. Even after I left her home, and despite my pleas for her to stop meddling in my confessional passion, she continued to bother me. Like the rest of humanity, Korina has a fear of radical soul surgery. For her, my initiative to speak out about my findings in family psychology isn’t intelligent behaviour: it is foolish behaviour before which the sister, assuming the role of a new mother, reprimands the memorialist. I quote the crucial passages from the last of her epistolary scolds without adding ellipsis between unquoted passages:

Caesar:

The other time I spoke with one of the Tort cousins and he told me that you had sent him part of your book and that it’s not the first time you do this. I know you want the whole world to read it or something like that since you worked so hard on it and it’s your life and what my parents did to you and all that, and believe me I understand you. But what you don’t understand, Caesar, is that people don’t like problems, let alone problems as big as yours, and even less if they are about the family. Also, think that even if people read it, that’s not how the world is going to be fixed, Caesar, that’s not how the Revolution is going to do you justice. The damage is done and only you can fix it.

And just think about this, I say in good faith Caesar, once more. People don’t like problems. If I weren’t your sister and I knew you, the third day you arrived and told me this, Caesar, I would dump you because what you don’t understand is that not all people in the world are therapists or psychiatrists or psychoanalysts and we don’t want to hear about problems, let alone such serious ones. We are normal people who run away from problems. We are not interested and cannot do anything about it.

If you need to get it out of your head, go with someone to tell them as many times as you need, and I’m not talking about a therapist, maybe a friend or someone who wants to hear from you. Remember when you told me that a married couple who had lived in a concentration camp [a fictional film: Left Luggage], that the lady no longer wanted to hear any of that afterwards because it hurt her a lot, but that it was good for the husband to talk about it because he took it out, it was like his therapy.

Well, if you understood that, I don’t know why you don’t understand that reading your book hurts me and a lot of people in the family.

Korina

My sister thinks that reading the book I was going to dedicate to her would hurt her. The truth is that my work would shine a light in her dark mind by understanding what happened in our family. Dark, I say, because she was the one I was talking about with my younger brother about her paranoid delusions: obvious delusions for all her distant friends and close friends. (To give just one example: once Korina told me, crying with extreme anguish and expelling me from her house, that I was part of a plot led by our mother to put poisons in her food.) Furthermore, Korina is wrong in believing that ‘the world won’t be fixed’ if others read my tragedy—or hers—and she also errs that ‘only one can fix’ the damage caused by parents. Like the rest of humanity, my sister is seeing things backwards, in a photographic negative. I don’t want to get my past out of my head. I want to get it into others with my writing. Taking it off leads to psychoses, like hers. Instead, making people aware of the hell caused by parents like ours prevents them.

‘We are normal people who run away from problems; we are not interested and cannot do anything about it’. What Korina and humanity see as normal, in my eyes is the behaviour of a very primitive dude, a Neanderthal. If my sister were correct that it’s healthy not to talk more about the problem, as she advises me in a paragraph that I omitted from her letter, she herself wouldn’t suffer from delusional ideas. On the other hand, I don’t suffer from the slightest mental disorder, not even addictions; but the aforementioned cousin that Korina mentions in her letter did (he once confessed to me and my brother that he was addicted to cocaine). The accepted wisdom in our society is what Korina believes: that burying a tragedy is the correct mental practice. I never tire of repeating it: repression and denial are the royal road for crime and mental disorders.

Korina, who watches soap operas and doesn’t like reading, reproaches me in her letter that ‘I want everyone to read me’. She ignores that we have an obligation to listen to the tragedy of the brother because only that can heal his soul. But at seventeen I didn’t need everyone, just one person. To take the most dramatic example that comes to mind: If, dismayed by my attempt at communication, Yoya would have called me to speak privately during that 1976 family dinner, she could have saved me. A single friendly ear would’ve led me on the right path in life. I wouldn’t have sought my salvation for so many years in stupid cults that alienated me and prevented me from pursuing a career. Although I didn’t respond to my sister’s letter, I can do so in an open letter: What hurts, Korina, isn’t digging up the past, but hiding it under a mountain of cakes. It seems to me that in Left Luggage the adult was the man, and the mental infant, his wife; and it is the man who scolds her for her childish defence mechanism, the pastry. But you, who try to avoid the mourning over our parents in inane distractions, are the one who thinks you are the adult. How daring of you to scold the digger as if he, not the pastry chef, were the child.

In other words, I’m not the one who should change. My family and relatives, Korina and company, are the ones who have the obligation to emerge psychically. Jung saw it clearly: enlightenment isn’t achieved by imagining figures of light (which Korina has tried for decades). It is achieved by analysing our darkness, our own shadow.

Categories
Psychohistory

Trauma model of mental disorders

The following is my response to what Joseph Walsh just told me: here.

But I sense you seem to think that because you had a troubled relationship with your parents which caused you much mental anguish, that all illnesses of the mind are due to the behaviour of one’s parents?

Have you read my Day of Wrath, or at least the Wikipedia article ‘Trauma model of mental disorders’ that I started the previous decade (or even my May post ‘On depression’)? Day of Wrath, by the way, is not autobiographical.

I could be mistaken but if that is the case that seems like a massive case of projection. Not only do you seem to think all mental illness is due to parental abuse but you’ve extrapolated that the near-extinction the white race is facing is due to erroneous white parents-white child relationships.

Please note the Schopenhauer quote in my previous post today, ‘Elemental psychology’, that people learn religions like they learn languages. That is, we have been programmed. You cannot think in Spanish or Greek however hard you try, and the same is true with religion. You can only learn Buddhism as you can learn a second language, but the whole matter is artificial and you end up thinking in your native language. Perhaps the best analogy is diseases that are transmitted through human contact, such as viruses.

The thing is, for two millennia, many white parents have been forcing their white children to worship the god of the Jews. I call that child abuse. And it is easy to see it as child abuse if we compare the religion of eternal torture even of unbaptised babies (a doctrine that Luther believed!) with the incredible beauty, majesty and nobility of classical religion.

If you know the book by Catherine Nixey that I quoted today in ‘Elemental psychology’, a woman who is your fellow citizen, you will see that what happened from the 4th to the 6th century was an astronomical trauma for converted whites: a trauma that the race has yet to heal to this day. In fact, all Christendom has been nothing other than suffering from a mental illness, analogous to how those diagnosed with schizophrenia suffer symptoms that can be traced to a very specific form of parental abuse that crashes the spirits of their children (see also Modrow’s book that I mentioned in my previous post).

But going back to Christianity and neochristianity. They are transmitted via parents. Without the malware within the operating system that abusive parents implant—that is, parents who install the Jesus archetype as a paradigm to follow (and add to it the secular programs that such operating system facilitates in schools and the media)—there is no ethno-suicidal drive.

In other words, in this secular phase of the red giant of Christianity, whites are burning in earthly purgatory for having committed, seventeen hundred years ago, the mortal sin of abandoning their Aryan gods to honour the Semitic god. And everything has to do with introjects as the infection has passed from parents to children for two thousand years…

Trying to break the chain of parental introjects is the job of the priest of the 14 words, even assuming that whites don’t want to listen to him and avoid his antivirus programs that could heal them of this age-old psychosis.

Regarding what you tell me about talking about this on Skype, I also dislike writing and prefer the spoken word (which is why my articles are so short). But that would only make sense if you read at least my book Day of Wrath. Otherwise, I would have to explain my intricate appropriation of Psychohistory through the spoken word: a miserable task considering that English is an artificial language for me.

Categories
Homosexuality Pseudoscience Psychiatry

On depression

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

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

Andrew Solomon✡

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

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

An American pandemic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave new world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘unacknowledged revenge’ on mother

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In his autobiographical novel, my antipode Solomon wrote:

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

This was reinforced by the family dynamics:

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

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

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

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

The daimon

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

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

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

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

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

 
Œdipus’ struggles with the daimon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Recommended readings:

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

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

On the importance of vindictive autobiography:

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

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

On psychoanalysis and all sorts of psychotherapies:

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

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

On the pseudoscientific nature of biological psychiatry:

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

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

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

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

Note of 2020:

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

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

Categories
Hojas Susurrantes (book) Racial right Tree

Weirwood tree

I have said that the greatest of the taboos is not the racial question, something that only became taboo after the Second World War; not even the Jewish question, which was also discussed before WW2, even in the press. The biggest taboo is to talk about what destructive parents have done.

Stefan Molyneux has just spoken about his father’s recent death. He almost cried as his father not only didn’t defend him against the Jewish mother who abused Stefan as a child, but he never apologised, as an adult, for not having rescued him.

Why, among the alt-lite or the alt-right folk, does someone with kike blood is the one to speak out? Why haven’t white advocates who are pure Aryans said anything in online forums? I already quoted these words of mine last month but it’s worth reciting: ‘I am not asking my audience to read Miller. But my writings translate, and expand considerably, her findings for an Aryan audience. It is a very important subject for the simple reason that mental health matters, and racialists who have had mental issues are generally clueless about what caused them’.

Indeed: it is necessary to present the trauma model of mental disorders without having to read texts by an ethnic Jew like Alice Miller or watch videos by another ethnic Jew like Molyneux. That is why last month I also published the translation of the first book of my series, although it is in the sixth book where I touch on the subject of what it feels like when a father dies without having made amends with his victim.

I also have a YouTube channel where the previous decade I spoke out about the tragedy in my family: something much more destructive than what Moly has recounted. But I had to make it private because people began to misuse those confessions.

When I see white advocates blaming liberalism for the state of the West these days, I can’t help but think that their early traumas are unresolved, which involves judging not only their parents but their parents’ religion. In other words, not seeing that Christianity is behind the fallen state of the West and not seeing the behaviour of our parents are two sides of the same coin.

I freed myself because, after chasing the love of his wife, my father threw me from the high tower and I became disabled like Bran (so to speak). I had no choice but to get entangled in the tree of the past, for decades, to understand why that had happened. In no way have white nationalists, or human beings in general, gone through such a process of insight. But the serious thing is that they don’t even seem interested in listening to what the tree’s whispering leaves want to tell them, despite the fact that some of them still suffer from late symptoms of early traumas. The greatest of taboos cannot be broken because it hurts so much to take a retrospective dive to the core of our being: a being that our parents precisely formed. As Solzhenitsyn put it:

Bless you, prison!…

In prison, both in solitary confinement and outside solitary too, a human being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, to familiarise himself with it, to digest it…

This is the highest form of moral effort, which has always ennobled every human being. A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral work and a path upward… if you can climb it.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Racial right

Very important subject

I am perfectly aware that virtually all people of white nationalism, or even the alt-lite, are unaware of the psychic havoc caused by abusive parents. The exception, as I have said more than once, is Stefan Molyneux as we saw not long ago in his review of Joker.

What bothers me is that Molyneux’s mother is Jewish, and one would expect a non-Jew of the alt-lite or white nationalism to venture into a subject that I consider fundamental: the actual aetiology of mental illness (as opposed to the psychiatric lies that we hear in the universities).

If the Aryan world shakes off all Jewish influence, beginning of course with a rejection of Christianity and its secular offshoots, over time it will ‘translate’, into Aryan language, the most relevant findings of Jews on the trauma model of mental disorders. In the introduction to my work for a racialist audience I recently wrote for this site:

For now, suffice it to say that Alice Miller continued to mention Hitler under the influence of the official narrative in almost all of her texts, so I currently do not recommend any of her books. It is not that I have repudiated Miller’s findings: a Jewess who, although she suffered as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, after changing her Jewish surname she never wanted to return to the shelter of her mother’s religion. But I must say that Miller’s psycho-biographical analysis of Hitler is based on the great lie of our times. The Swiss psychologist never considered such elemental issues as the fact that the Holocaust of millions of Ukrainians, largely perpetrated by Bolshevik Jews, caused the legitimate fear, and eventual reaction, of the German state.

But that is a separate matter. The issue that concerns us in Whispering Leaves is very different: the Dantesque hell that some parents put their children in: something that Miller got right.

The issue of abusive parents is not only taboo in all societies, as almost no one connects the dots between mental disorders and poor childrearing. Like the racial issue or the WWII theme, as to mental health the values have been completely reversed.

For example, two years ago, in March 2018, a commenter told me: ‘I have since forgiven my father and every other person of note in my life needing forgiveness’. But forgiveness is a Christian doctrine, although many secular psychotherapists also subscribe such unhealthy way of treating their patients. I answered: ‘I cannot speak for you because I ignore the full story. Generally, for an adult child to forgive a parent who never recognised his fault is psychological suicide. Alice Miller said that a child can excuse his parents, if they in their turn are prepared to recognise and admit to their failures. But the demand for forgiveness that we often encounter can pose a danger for healing. These are some quotable quotes from her’:

• It is the resentment of the past, we are told, that is making us ill. In those by now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well. Even if both your parents were alcoholic, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive.

• The majority of therapists work under the influence of destructive interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught in the vicious circle of pedagogy. For forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but rather covers them up in a very dangerous way.

• In my own therapy it was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness —namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents’ destructive opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs— that ultimately freed me from the past.

• By refusing to forgive, I give up all illusions. Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What’s the use? Whom does it help? It doesn’t help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely.

• I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command “Thou shalt not be aware” [of the cruelty your parents inflicted to you] and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation.

I’ve added italics in the above quotations.

Again, I am not asking my audience to read Miller. But my writings translate, and expand considerably, her findings for an Aryan audience. It is a very important subject for the simple reason that mental health matters, and racialists who have had mental issues are generally clueless about what caused them.

Categories
Goethe

Goethe quote

The common Westerner, and especially the common American, fancy themselves as free men when in reality they are enslaved in a matrix of lies. ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’, said Goethe.

Take for example the case of the root cause of mental disorders. Almost every Westerner believes in the pseudoscience of psychiatry, which blames the victim’s brain, when in fact the cause is the hells that parents put their children in (the subject of my series of books, of which Letter to mom Medusa is just the first).

Another matter: I have had fatty liver and when I was living in Spain a state doctor asked me if I missed my drinks, though in fact I’ve never been a heavy drinker. Only to this day did I find out, thanks to a YouTuber whose videos I recently linked on this site, that fatty liver is due to an excessive intake of sugars.

In economics we have the same situation. The common normie doesn’t even know the difference between money and currency. What better than to pass the microphone to Mike Maloney to explain this subject: ‘Money must be a store value. Gold and silver have maintained their value throughout the centuries and so they are the only currencies we call money. Fiat currency is not… has never been… and will never be… money. Treat this truth as gospel, and you’ll be ahead of 99.9 percent of the population’.

Silver and gold are running out because wise people (0.1%) are preparing for the coming debacle. Are you in that category?

Categories
Autobiography Child abuse

Aborted prologue to the English edition *

My books deal with a subject that is the greatest taboo of all. Throughout human history no society has awakened to the fact that, in our species, some parents drive their children mad. Demonstrating this requires not only the creation of a new literary genre, but that dense autobiographies such as this one multiply in posterity.

That said, I must confess that I didn’t fully understand what had happened in my family until, at the end of 2008, I finished Hojas Susurrantes and in my researches I changed the subject radically: from child abuse to mass migration of Muslims into Europe. It was only in the following years when, after discovering racialist intellectuals on the internet, I located the tragedy of my family from a new paradigm. The best way to crack an annoying cipher is to abandon it for a good season and re-approach it from a broader meta-perspective on what is happening in the world.

My fundamental discrepancy with the internet movement known as ‘white nationalism’ is the diagnosis of the darkest hour in the West. White nationalists blame the Jewish quarter of white decline. I blame the Aryans themselves who let Jewry appropriate their media and a good part of the academic and financial sectors of the West, especially in the United States.

The tragedy in my family began when, during my adolescence, my mother went crazy and began to think and say crazy things about me. But that was not what destroyed the teenager I was. What destroyed him was that, over time, my father began to believe those slanders to the point of traumatising me in the most heartbreaking way you can imagine. Over the years, my parents would do the same to my sister, who now rests in peace.

Similarly, white people began to believe the lies of the New Testament two millennia ago, a process that culminated in the destruction of the classical world and, even after the Middle Ages, in an inverse narrative about who were the martyrs and the perpetrators. (See the literature that I mention in the Introduction after this foreword.) What I want to arrive at is a very simple concept. We should not blame St. Paul so much for having burned ‘pagan’ books in Ephesus but the imbecile whites who followed his example to the degree of destroying, from the 4th to the 6th century, the Greco-Roman world. If the traitor is worse than the subversive, in our times the Aryan who subscribes to the axiological system of the Bible—ethnocentrism for me but out-group altruism for thee—is worse than the Jew.

The following is the scheme of how some parents drive their children mad. On the one hand, there is the donor who provides a delusional system (your son is the devil); on the other, the receiver that over time subscribes to such a system. In my family the great crime was committed by my father, for having swallowed a slanderous vision of his eldest son. In this dynamic of folie à deux the role of the receiver is what counts most. Otherwise, the spouse who raves about her child would simply be considered the nutty of the family. Although having such a mother would harm the son’s morale, she wouldn’t destroy it by herself. It is the shared madness between wife and husband that makes the couple soul murderers.

In the same way, Jewry alone would not be able to destroy the West. The Aryans are responsible for believing the lies of the Jews, beginning with the ethics advocated by the New Testament (out-group altruism) and ending in the secular subversion we see in Hollywood and the American media.

Remember that I didn’t fully understand what happened in my family until I abandoned the subject for a few years, to reopen it after I became much more mature. I suggest that the nationalists read my texts to find, in them, a kind of microcosm of what has been happening, on another scale, in the West. Just as I didn’t understand myself until I turned to other interests, the nationalists would understand better if they could take an intellectual vacation. By reading my eleven books, they would learn that what happens in some families is worse than the Holocaust tall stories with which the Jews have demoralised us.

___________

(*) Today I declined to include, in my translation of the first book of Hojas Susurrantes, this text and preferred to put it here.

Categories
Child abuse Film Psychiatry

Joker, Molyneux and CC

Or:

An opportunity to present the trauma model
 

In recent years I don’t usually go to the movies. If there is something I say to my nephews when I see them it is that, in the media and the cinema, all the messages are bad. But yesterday I broke my habit after watching Stefan Molyneux’s video about the Joker movie.

I am glad that, as Molyneux confessed in one of his latest videos, eighty percent of his audience dropped last year. Is it because of his dishonesty about the JQ? Whatever caused the drop, from alt-lite to neo-Nazism, passing through white nationalism, Molyneux is the only notable personality in our underworld who has consistently talked about child abuse.

As the visitors of this blogsite know, I spent more decades investigating child abuse than the single decade I’ve dedicated to investigating the darkest hour in the West: whose report, The Fair Race, now appears as a free PDF. Since my oldest specialty is the subject of child abuse I must say that what Molyneux tells us in his one-hour video is, in general terms, correct.

The video revolves around the character Arthur Fleck / Joker, a mentally-ill man who dreams to become a stand-up comedian but so disregarded by a hellish and diverse Gotham City that decides to become a criminal. Curiously, the actor Joaquin Phoenix did not look to previous Joker actors for inspiration: he simply read some reports about political assassinations.

Hollywood movies usually lack psychological realism. For example, in the 1989 Jack Nicholson movie the Joker origin story simply falls into a vat of acid. The 2019 movie, on the other hand, gives its central character a plausible origin. So plausible that the film has been described as reminiscent of mass shootings in the US, and the incel community loved it. What’s more, some people from the establishment have expressed concern that Joker could inspire real-world violence.

In a moment of the first minutes of his video, Molyneux confesses that he has received horrific verbal abuse just for mentioning the naked facts of his own childhood, and that hostility toward those who were abused as children or teenagers is not uncommon if the adult victim dares to open his mouth.

At this point I would like to distinguish between dysfunctional parents and schizogenic parents, that is, parents who literally murder their children’s souls. While almost everyone I know comes from family dysfunction in one way or another, the category of schizogenic parents simply does not exist in our society. Since the 1950s the Big Pharma has ensured that civil society does not find out that there is a trauma model to understand the mental disorder that competes with its profitable medical model.

But what does all this have to do with the recent film Joker? As can be deduced from Molyneux’s video, and regardless of the sinister motivation of its Jewish creators, the film could be used, by us, to present the trauma model to the public. I was the one who started this Wikipedia article on the trauma model, an academic text that appeals to the left hemisphere of our brains. He who wants to delve deeper into this research line, and in a more literary way, can read my book Day of Wrath. On the other hand, he who prefers a personal testimony that presents the trauma model appealing to our right hemisphere could read John Modrow’s touching autobiography, How to Become a Schizophrenic.

Furthermore, he who is unwilling even to read any the above literature, but willing to educate himself on the subject having some fun, could see the films Shine (1996), Monster (2003), The Piano Teacher (2001) and even Artificial Intelligence by Spielberg, which can be used to grasp what proponents of the trauma model call ‘the problem of attachment to the perpetrator’.

Although it may seem incredible, sometimes fairy tales portray the destructive interaction of parents with their children. In almost all fairy tales, including modern fairy tales like Kubrick/Spielberg’s A.I. or Harry Potter, the parental figure is substituted so as not to touch it directly. In the case of the Potter series the abusers are Harry’s uncle and aunt. As to David, the child robot in A.I., obviously he had no biological parents but Monica functions like a substitute mother. But sometimes the storyteller sneaks parents directly into the story as the villains who abandon their children (for example in Tom Thumb).

But there are more serious forms of abuse than abandoning your child in the woods, what also happened to David. What Molyneux says about not forgiving schizogenic parents is true. I would go as far as to claim that to forgive such parents is the most toxic thing for the mental health of the victim. Mine is an opposed claim to what the establishment wants us to believe.

Why is the forgiveness that religionists and therapists preach so toxic? Because it is the abusive parents and society the ones who are currently murdering young souls. As the Armenian lawyer said in Spotlight, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2015: ‘This city, these people [Boston people] are making the rest of us feel like we don’t belong. But they’re no better than us. Look at how they treat their children. Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes [another Armenian]: If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one’ (emphasis added).

For the victim, unilaterally forgiving the perpetrator or a society that never accepts its soul-murdering sins is simply a betrayal of oneself and the other adult victims, now suffering from mental stress and even disorders.

In addition to the first minutes of Molyneux’s video, using as a paradigm the Joker’s abusive interaction with his mother Penny in Gotham City, Molyneux advances ideas analogous to what I have known for a long time. Watch also the segments after minute 35 of his video: how female evil is still taboo in the film industry.

It is curious to note the chasm between those who, like Molyneux and I, have investigated child abuse due to our past, and those who did not have such destructive parenting.

Greg Johnson for example is a Batfan. In his recent review of Joker, which he writes under the penname of Trevor Lynch, Johnson prefers Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 The Dark Knight than the Joker of the movie released this month. Johnson expresses very derogatory of this latest Joker: ‘You’d want to squash him like a bug’. ‘Ledger’s Joker launched a million memes, both because of his character and his lines. Phoenix’s Joker will have no such influence. He’s a pathetic nobody with nothing to say’. ‘Arthur [the Joker] is entirely absorbed in self-pity’. ‘Joker is a boring movie about a disgusting loser’.

Well, it didn’t look boring to me… But the commenters on Counter-Currents who opined about Johnson’s review said very similar things: ‘People like him deserve to get left behind by society, and the true tragedy of this movie is that successful, well-adjusted men like Thomas Wayne insist on trying to love the Arthur Flecks of the world and take care of them’. Really? The conservative commenter also said: ‘The defects like Arthur would be put in mental asylums and [eugenically] sterilized’. [1]

Such commenters remind me that, in the movie, Thomas Wayne, the billionaire father of the future Batman, labels those Gotham residents envious of the wealthy as ‘clowns’, not only the Joker. I don’t know how many viewers enjoyed the moment when, by the end of the movie, a rioter corners the Wayne family in an alley and murders Thomas and his wife sparing the child Bruce. Another commenter said: ‘One of the great things about Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is that he does not have an origin story’.

I dare not judge the Marvel universe as I feel deeply revolted by it. But in the real world, isn’t it good to know, say, the psychopathological motivations of those women in the Charles Manson family? But the commenters’ lack of elemental compassion is even noticeable about the previous Joker represented by Heath Ledger, an actor that incidentally has already passed away. In one of the dialogues the now dead Joker explains his scars. He said that his father ‘comes at me with a knife. “Why so serious?” He sticks a blade in my mouth. “Let’s put a smile on that face”.’

This father strikes me as ‘soul murderer’. Note this other phrase from the CC commenter: ‘Arthur [the Joker who’s alive] is far too damaged for any regular person to identify with him’.

How will a normie commenter identify with him if only one percent (or less) of Westerners have endured schizogenic parents?

Incidentally, last night, as I watched the psychological thriller, there were times when I laughed (as the character does in the film) when the audience was serious and nobody laughed. That happened to me, yesterday, in the climax of the film when the Joker kills the establishment character that Robert de Niro represented.

As I said, I usually don’t go to the movies now. But decades ago the same phenomenon occurred to me with some films by Luis Buñuel, whom I met personally, in which nobody laughed. It also happened to me when I watched Dr. Strangelove by Kubrick on the big screen. I laughed at the black humour in which the nuclear extermination of humanity was at stake while the hundreds of people watching the movie with me were quiet in the theatre. Only when I read a Kubrick biography by Vincent Lobrutto did I find out that Kubrick had a very black sense of humour. Then did I understand me and the non-laugher spectators of Dr. Strangelove!

Joker ends when Arthur laughs and tells a psychiatrist that she would not understand the joke…

_____________

[1] In the comments section on Joker in Counter-Currents Johnson shows how ignorant he is about psychiatry: a supposed branch of medicine with as little scientific basis as parapsychology or the study of UFOs, as shown in my writings (for example: here). Johnson wrote ‘If Arthur is adopted then his mental illness cannot be inherited from this mother’. This is a credulity stance regarding the psychiatric allegations that mental illness is genetic. Apparently, Johnson forgot what I said in one of my articles in which he himself corrected my syntax (see this piece which appears in my Hojas Susurrantes).

Categories
Child abuse Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Brief definition

I have been receiving some email feedback for my latest anti-psychiatric post and instead of posting this entry on Friday, as I had planned, I’m doing it today. At the beginning of the century, in another language I wrote the below conclusion of an online book:

The thought of [Alexis de] Tocqueville and [John Stuart] Mill provides the conceptual platform for understanding [Kingsley] Davis’s articles and [Michel] Foucault’s study; and it moves me to try a definition of the mental health movement that, in addition to what has been said in previous chapters [not translated for this site], takes into account their observations.

From the point of view of science, and specifically on the basis of the litmus test that distinguishes between science and pseudoscience, psychiatry, a supposed medical specialty, is not a science. The central concept in psychiatry, the entity called mental illness is not defined in biomedical terms but in political terms; and the so-called biological psychiatry has not presented its theories in a testable or falsifiable way: an unmistakable sign of pseudoscience.

From the point of view of politics and law, psychiatry is an organ of society that, from the family, regulates human behaviour. It is a paralegal institution of penalties in democracies. With drug-based technologies it controls deviant individuals: especially those who are either genuinely disturbed or have been abused by their parents. People stigmatised by psychiatry have not broken the law. Through this medical specialty, the System conceals the fact that some parents destroy the mental health of their children. In the case of the sane population, which is considerable—think of the millions of children and adolescents drugged at the initiative of their parents and the school—, the individual initiative is eliminated.

The ultimate truth about this matter is that the System has created an entire profession with the express purpose to blind the whole society to the truth discovered by dissenting psychiatrists: that some parents drive their children mad.