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Pseudoscience Psychiatry

Robert Whitaker

Before blogging in English I used to write about the trauma model of mental disorders, which includes exposing a fraudulent profession taught at the universities: biological psychiatry.

There are two areas in which white nationalists are as integral part of the System as the common normie: economics and the so-called mental health professions. The truth is that the economics taught in the faculties of economics—the Keynesian model—is as pseudo-scientific as the medical model of mental disorders taught in medical schools.

On Fridays I’ve been adding chapters by Mike Maloney on why the Keynesian model will lead the world economy to a financial crisis. But the last decades I studied psychiatry intensely, and the product of my research appears in a site in Spanish. In addition, one of my writings demonstrates that psychiatry is a false science. That paper appears in the only book of my authorship that I have published in English.

Some visitors will find it rather incredible that what the System teaches as legit economics and mental health are two pseudo-scientific areas analogous to, say, parapsychology or the study of UFOs. They would do well to study the links I have been putting on this site. Although in The West’s Darkest Hour I’ve spoken relatively little of psychiatry (see e.g., the second link in my previous paragraph), the curious reader might start by watching this video of Robert Whitaker:

Robert Whitaker should not be confused with Robert W. Whitaker who died last month: the creator of the most famous mantra in white nationalism. The Robert Whitaker I am referring to is a journalist on medical matters. Although he is liberal in social affairs (cf. his ecumenism in the final part of the above interview) he is a very good communicator as to how the official psychiatric narrative is unscientific.

Categories
Alice Miller Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche Music Pedagogy

“Her little child”

Excerpted from Werner Ross’s Der ängstliche Adler
– Friedrich Nietzsches Leben
(1980):

carl_ludwig_nietzsche

Carl Ludwig Nietzsche,
Nietzsche’s father

The boy does not remember the Röcken home dominated by women, but only the image of the father, idealized on par as it gradually fades out. The pious rural cleric remains completely safe from the uprising against Christianity, which would be the true mission of Nietzsche from his eighteen years. Since then, his father is for him an “ethereal angel.” One of the qualities that he has inherited from him is the kindness, the renunciation of revenge for nobility. So in the late self-portraiture of Ecce homo we read that, in case of offense, Nietzsche prohibits himself “any retaliation, any measure of defense.”

[Chechar’s note: Those who have read the passages of Alice Miller in The Untouched Key as to why Nietzsche went mad—just imagine a self-proclaimed Antichrist who, simultaneously, never defended himself before the father clergyman!—would treasure passages such as these.]

Another inherited quality is the love of music. In a postcard to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] of the time of Zarathustra an observation is included: “It is raining in torrents, music gets me away. I like that music and the way I like it is something I cannot explain based on my experiences: rather based on my father. And why should not…?”

The phrase is cut, but can be completed with another of Ecce homo in which he says: Why should not I continue to live in him and he in me after his untimely death?

And he was no less mystical in his later years, when he conceived the doctrine of eternal recurrence, so he could skip the generational order to become a descendant of Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander. But the same process also allowed otherwise: the mysterious identification with the father, either in the agonizing fear of premature death and madness, either in the gut, not even confessed to his friend Gast, that having survived the fateful thirty-third year of his life he would merge with his father to form a single figure with him.

The family was assured that Fritz (short for Friedrich) would be clergyman as the father. His mother, who was not limited to accompany him to the bed but every night carried him into it, panting said, “If you continue like this I’ll have to carry you up to bed until you study theology.” Fritz, meanwhile, was a precocious and obedient child; knew by heart passages of the Bible and religious songs so that their local school classmates called him the little shepherd. He was no friend of other children, and in school they laughed at him but then, at home, spoke wonders of the little sage.

Young Nietzsche, whose strange factions made one think of an owl, had an excellent performance. An anecdote belonging to the repertoire of Elisabeth [Nietzsche’s sister] tells us that, at one point, it started raining and as everyone ran from school to their homes, he continued to walk at a leisurely pace with the board over his hat and scarf on the blackboard. When Nietzsche got home was completely soaked. That why he had not run like the others? Well, because the school regulations say that, after school, children should go to their houses quietly and politely. The story seems credible; it was not normal behavior, but a show of obedience directed against his classmates’ behavior.

The little shepherd never tires of reciting pious maxims, edifying virtuous desires and prayers. Words like purpose, wise decision of God, beneficent hand of God, heavenly father come out of his lips with astonishing naturalness.

The strongest impressions were those that religious music gave Nietzsche. In the misty autumn evenings, the boy came sneaking into the cathedral to witness the rehearsals of the Requiem for the day of the dead; he was overwhelmed to hear the Dies irae and was deeply delighted with the Benedictus. It was not just a childish impulse that led him at fourteen, in Schulpforta, to write in all seriousness motets, chorale melodies and fugues and even try a Missa for solo, chorus and orchestra. At sixteen Nietzsche outlined a Miserere for five voices and, finally, began a Christmas oratory on which he worked for two years.

At seventeen, the son of the pastor received confirmation. His classmate Deussen, also a son of pastor says the two maintained a pious attitude, away from the world. They were willing to die immediately to go to meet Jesus. When his friend Wilhelm Pinder received confirmation, Nietzsche wrote: “With the promise you walk into the line of Christian adults who are considered worthy of the most precious legacy of our Savior, and through their enjoyment of life, achieve happiness of the soul.” Not even from the pastor’s pen would have come such pious words.

In High School Nietzsche had an “excellent” in religion. The commentary reports confirm that the student has shown, along with a good understanding of the New Testament, a keen interest in the doctrine of Christian salvation which he has easily and solidly assimilated, and is also able to express himself clearly on the subject.

The above was extracted from one of the first chapters of Ross’ book. Unlike Curt Paul Janz, hundreds of pages later Ross only dedicates a few paragraphs to Nietzsche’s life after his breakdown. He writes:

 

Nietzsche’s biography ends in the early days of 1889, although his life was extended until August 25, 1900. Paralyzed and demented, he died of pneumonia.

On August 10, 1889 Nietzsche entered the psychiatric clinic of the University of Basel; a week later he is taken to the Jena University Clinic where he remains for about fifteen months, and on March 24, 1890 he is discharged in writing and sent home. Nietzsche remains under the care of his mother until her death in 1897. In July 1897 the sister purchases a Weimar villa, “Silberblick,” for the Nietzsche Archive and in it she installs the patient.

About the demented Nietzsche several persons issued reports: (1) Turin dentist, Dr. Bettmann, who with Overbeck brought Nietzsche to Basel; (2) the diaries of Basel and Jena for the sick by the physician (and later professor) Ziehen; (2) the mother in his letters to Professor Overbeck, and (4) friends and visitors, from Gast to Deussen and from Overbeck to Resa von Schirnhofer.

The extracts that follow from 1889-1892 show on one hand the state of the disorder, but on the other they shed light on the “healthy” Nietzsche, specifically those oppressed and repressed aspects that madness liberated.

Dentist Bettmann’s opinion, in Turin:

The patient is usually excited, he asks much food but is unable to do something and take care of himself. He claims to be a famous man, and constantly asks a woman for him.

Basel journal for the sick, January 1889:

He only answers partially and incompletely or not at all to the questions addressed to him, insisting in his confused verbiage nonstop.

First day at Jena, January 19, 1889:

The patient walks on the department with many bows of courtesy. With majestic step, staring at the ceiling, enters the room and gives thanks for the “great reception.” He doesn’t know where he is.

Extracts from the diary for the sick at Jena, from January to October 1889:

He wants his compositions to be premiered. He has little understanding or memory of ideas or passages from his works. He always identifies the physicians correctly. He proclaims himself now Duke of Cumberland, now Emperor, etc… “At last I have been Frederick William IV,” “My wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here.” “At night they have uttered curses against me, have used the most horrible mechanisms.” “I want a gun if there is any truth in the suspicion that the very Grand Duchess commits these filthy acts and attacks on me.”

At night we always have to isolate him. He often smears himself with excrement. He eats excrements. He urinates in his boot or glass and drinks the urine or smears himself with it. Once he smeared a leg with excrement. He wraps excrements in paper and puts it all in the drawer of a table.

The mother to Overbeck, April 8, 1889:

About an hour ago my son has been taken to the department of the peaceful sick… The greatest joy you can provide is to speak in Italian or French to him… Gone are the ideas of grandeur that initially made him so happy…

On March 24, 1890 the mother takes Nietzsche out of the center to live with him in Jena. On one occasion Nietzsche undresses in public with intent of swimming and a guard is hired, who follows at a distance mother and son when they go for a walk. On June 17, 1890 she writes to Overbeck:

He plays a little of music every day, partly his small compositions or songs of an old book of songs… The religious sentiment is asserted more and more in him. During Pentecost, when we were sitting quietly in the balcony with me holding an old Bible [he says] that in Turin he had studied the whole Bible and taken thousands of notes, when I read this or that psalm; this or that chapter, I expressed surprise that he knew the Bible so thoroughly.

From 1892 Nietzsche can no longer feed himself. He has to be washed and dressed. The walks have to be abandoned because Nietzsche shouts and hits everything on his way. In 1894 Nietzsche recognizes Deussen, but in 1895 he no longer recognizes Overbeck.

In madness it clearly appears a regression to infantile and juvenile stages. In the time of megalomania Dionysus and Zarathustra are totally excluded. Instead it reappears Frederick William IV [discussed in Ross’ earlier chapters], and Nietzsche says to his mother he is twenty-two. The last letter to Jacob Burckhardt is written by a “student.” His fears (the light should remain lit at night, the door must be closed) belong to an early childhood stage, like the “magic of the pieces of glass.” It is also noteworthy the return to the old religion and a fearful, even radical avoidance of everything philosophical. As a sick man Nietzsche is an obedient or uninhibited child.

At the end he completely sinks into apathy.

nietzsche_dementedThe mother, fearful, “limited” (as seen in the Basel clinic) was at first mean, although she continued to receive Nietzsche’s pension. But when he was with her she cared for him, protected and looked after him with motherly love. Friedrich then again became what in her opinion should have always been: her little child.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche

Curt Paul Janz on Nietzsche, 2

nietzsche_after_catastropheExcerpted from Curt Paul Janz’s last volume of his biography, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie. Band 3: Die Jahre des Siechtums, Chapter “The Catastrophe”:


On Sunday January 6, 1889 Jacob Burckhardt received a long letter from Nietzsche. While it is true that, from the Genealogy [On the Genealogy of Morals] at least Burckhardt had not followed Nietzsche’s philosophical way, he did continue to be humanely united to his former colleague. For long Burckhardt had watched with concern his state and inquired about it, but this turn towards mental disturbance surprised and deeply affected him.

Burckhardt did immediately what was in his hand: he went immediately with the letter to see Franz Overbeck, whose close contact with Nietzsche he knew. Although their houses were not far apart—from the suburb of St. Alban to the Sevogelstrasse there are only a few hundred meters—, Burckhardt had never felt moved to walk that way. But now, the terrible impression he received prompted him to overcome that barrier. Also for Overbeck it was an alarming surprise to see Jacob Burckhardt into his home.

Following a review of the two letters to Burckhardt and Overbeck, Wille [Prof. Dr. Ludwig Wille, a psychiatrist] had no doubt about how he had to try the case and what they had to do. He urged Overbeck that, without loss of time, to bring the friend from Turin to Basel, before he disappeared in any one of the dubious Italian centers.

Overbeck immediately followed the advice, which seemed more like an order. By doing so he had to weight two considerations: firstly the question of costs. Neither he nor Nietzsche were doing well economically. Professorial fees were then rather scarce. And besides, surely it was not easy to a conscientious teacher to leave without official dispensation for a few days.

In spite of everything, in the night of January 7 he parted to Turin, where he arrived the next day around 2 pm. Given his perennially poor health, the feat demanded a great effort from Overbeck, especially in the middle of winter. 18 hours in those times when trains, insufficiently heated or not heated at all during the night (no sleeper), meant a real sacrifice. But the worst still awaited him.

By his own efforts Overbeck found Nietzsche’s housing in a city unknown to him. The landlord, Fino, was absent. Nietzsche, with his behavior, had finally put Fino in a state of despair, and he was now seeking help from the German consulate and police. The whole family was scattered so that it took some time for Overbeck to find the wife. Only then he approached his friend. In his letter of January 15 to Köselitz he narrates the encounter:

It happened in the last time when it was still possible to get him without official impediments, except his own state. I pass over the moving circumstances in which I found Nietzsche as a pupil of his landlords; which seem to be also characteristic of Italy in general. With the terrible moment as I saw Nietzsche I come again to the principal issue: a terrible moment like no other, and totally different from everything that happened afterwards.

I see Nietzsche in a corner of the armchair, curled up and reading—as it was apparent later, the latest proofs of Nietzsche contra Wagner—, tremendously deteriorated in external appearance. He sees me and rushes towards me, recognizing me he hugs me tightly, and becomes a sea of tears. He goes back then, in convulsions, to sink himself into the armchair. Neither do I find strength, because of the shock, to pull myself on my legs. Did it open at that moment the abyss in which he finds himself, or better, into which he has fallen? In any case, no such thing has been repeated. All of the Fino family was present.

Just as Nietzsche returned to rest there, moaning and with convulsive contractions, the watered bromide that was on the table was given to him. Instantly he relaxed, and, laughing, began to talk about the great reception that was prepared for him at night. Thus Nietzsche moved in a circle of delusions from which he never came out after I lost sight of him; being always clear of mind about me in general and other people, but caught in a full night about him. It happened that, exalting himself without measure, and with strong songs and frenzies on piano, shreds of the ideas were recovered from the world in which he had lived lately.

Then, in short sentences, uttered in a tone indescribably flat, he had us hearing sublime, wonderfully visionary things and unspeakably terrible about himself as the successor of the dead God, tapping all, so to speak, at the piano. Afterwards the convulsions and fits of indescribable suffering returned. But, as said, this only happened in rare and fleeting moments. While I was present, generally the profession statements that he awarded himself dominated: to be the jester of the new eternities, and he, the incomparable master of expression, was unable to represent the enthusiasm even from his joy otherwise than through the most trivial expressions or by a ridiculous dancing and jumping.

Overbeck’s report in his memoirs and letters to Köselitz is very summary. Carl Albrecht Bernoulli was able to complete it:

He then wrote to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] everything that happened in Turin during the terrible encounter; his hand refused to transcribe to paper the latest and most sordid details. Although occasionally he alluded to this in the most intimate circles, and to me personally he completed by word the description.

Overbeck was also more forthcoming with Möbius, who visited him on April 10, 1902. Möbius informs us:

In Turin he met a Jewish man who volunteered as a caregiver of the crazy (but he was not) and that with the help of his intervention they carried out the risky venture. Nietzsche was in bed and refused to get up. The Jew told him that they were prepared for large receptions and festivities, and Nietzsche got up, dressed and went to the station with them.

There he wanted to embrace all people, but the companion explained him how it was not appropriate for such an important man: and Nietzsche calmed down. Using large quantities of sleeping pills the patient remained quiet during the trip, and thus came the three happily to Basel.

Another visitor to Overbeck, the writer Eduard Platzhoff-Lejeune, based on an earlier conversation with Overbeck, presented the episode thus:

The Turin police was already aware, and only a true kidnapping could prevent a forced entry into a center of that place.

Then, miraculously, a stranger, a German Jew, apparently offered himself [for a fee] to transport the sick. Overbeck agreed and did not repent of his acceptance. With surprising touch the stranger immediately got influence on the wayward sick, something that the friend was not able to.

Nietzsche obeyed as a child, left the bed and dressed. A new outburst became a torture for Overbeck on the way to the station. Shouting and chasing them, Nietzsche was addressing the curious crowd, at the point of nearly thwarting the traveling. The train left while Nietzsche sang a fishermen’s Neapolitan song [?]. That deeply touched the excited friend. The caregiver tried a suggestion: “You’re a prince. In Basel station a festive crowd is expecting you. Come in before it without greeting to the car that is waiting to you!”

The trick worked better than expected. The morning of January 10, 1889, around 8, Nietzsche and his caretakers arrived to Basel. A ready-cab took them to “Friedmatt” where the patient could be entrusted to the care of specialists.

With that Nietzsche stopped being a person acting autonomously.

Categories
Alice Miller Child abuse Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

WDH’s recent focus

I have been asked why the recent focus of The West’s Darkest Hour on Nietzsche. I replied that my intention is to explain (1) the “transvaluation of all values” (Nietzsche’s ultimate philosophy) and (2) “poisonous pedagogy” which goes together with the “trauma model of mental disorders” (illustrated in Nietzsche’s life).

As to #2, I believe that one of the ingredients of the witches’ brew that is killing whites is the toll of child abuse in the adult. In the white nationalist movement no one has suspected this. A few months ago Alex Kurtagic wrote on The Occidental Observer that the engulfing behavior of Jewish mothers towards their male children explained the haughty behavior of the grown-up Jew. But Kurtagic and the rest of writers of the pro-white blogosphere have failed to ask what could the engulfing behavior of white mothers cause on their white children.

I am the only one in the movement who has written on the implications of the trauma model on white pathology. See for example my seminal article, “A body-snatched Spaniard.” I even plan to translate to English the rest of my book Hojas susurrantes, the most didactic and comprehensive explanation of the model under a single cover.

However, since that kind of literature is very strong meat indeed, and since pro-white advocates are uninterested in the subject, I better start introducing it by means of baby steps, like my next series of entries on Carlo Collodi’s novel for children.

Pinocchio

The original Pinocchio tale by Collodi is must reading. A 1880 magazine series (Disney’s 1940 film is a betrayal of the original Italian tale), Collodi projected his feelings for his abusive parents onto the characters of the very manipulative Blue Fairy and Geppetto.

In chapter XV Pinocchio is hanged in front of the Blue Fairy mansion and the motherly Fairy didn’t help him at all. The wooden puppet exclaimed Jesus-like words on the cross:

The editor asked Collodi to rescue Pinocchio in the following issue of the magazine.

As a child Collodi had been tormented in a Jesuit school (incidentally, as a child my father was also tormented in a Jesuit school). Since Collodi (like my father) never settled accounts with the perpetrators, he later identified himself with them; hated the children, illustrated boring school textbooks for them and always lived with his manipulative “Blue Fairy” mother.

The original Le Avventure di Pinocchio is poisonous pedagogy at its worst. The parents and the school system are idealized at the expense of the child’s true self. (Later in my series on Nietzsche you will see the relevance of the Prussian pedagogy applied to the child Nietzsche by his mother and other female figures and his adult breakdown.) A major bestseller, Collodi’s novel was used to manipulate and socialize children in the early 20th century.

In future entries I will show that together with the German biographers of Nietzsche I will be quoting, Alice Miller is the obliged reference to understand “poisonous pedagogy” and ultimately my interpretation of both Pinocchio and many people who have suffered mental breakdowns.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Psychology

Curt Paul Janz on Nietzsche, 1

Nietzsche_after_catastrophe

Excerpted from Curt Paul Janz’s last volume of his biography, Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie. Band 3: Die Jahre des Siechtums, Chapter “The Catastrophe”:


Omens

In the last months before the disaster, acute disturbances of the understanding of reality and his identity increasingly piled up. A fact whose significance cannot be underestimated is that Nietzsche’s philosophical thought is definitely interrupted with the Antichrist on September 30, 1888. In a completely wrong assessment of the magnitude and significance of the matter, Nietzsche wants to see from that date a new beginning, a new measure of time, and what happens is the beginning, just for him, of a “new” time, a new and radically different consciousness.

What is perhaps the most significant part of his philosophy, the critique of knowledge, seems totally forgotten. Nietzsche no longer speaks of moral and cultural criticism; there are only vague memories of the world of Zarathustra (lyrical content is precisely what revives in some poetry). On the contrary, neither the “overman” or the “eternal return” are any longer defended.

With the alleged murder of Pauline Christianity as inverted Platonism and as a building for Jewish priestly power, Nietzsche believes he has finished the major philosophical work. Everything else, all “revaluation of all values” naturally follows that, so that he is no longer committed but to ensure the propagation of this final “knowledge.” With it, on September 30, 1888 philosophy is finished!

“It’s all over,” Nietzsche writes to Carl Fuchs on December 18. Even before, it shone occasionally, and strangely, this split regarding his own work. Thus for example on July 18, 1888, Nietzsche makes the arrogant statement to Fuchs: “I have given men the deepest book they possess, my Zarathustra” (which is also repeated multiple times to other recipients), and Nietzsche adds a few lines later: “Since then I do nothing but buffoonery to keep beating a vulnerability and an unbearable tension,” an idea—that of being the “jester of the millennium”—that continues well into the time of the transition into darkness. The strangeness toward his latest work, The Genealogy of Morals, can be captured more accurately in the letter of August 22, 1888 to Meta von Salis:

The first glance I threw inside surprised me: I discovered a long prologue… whose existence I had forgotten… Actually I kept in memory only the title of the three treaties: the rest, the content, was lost. This is the result of extreme intellectual activity… which, as it were, had brought a wall in the middle… Those times I underwent an almost uninterrupted state of inspiration, so that this text emerged as the most natural thing in the world… The style is passionate and disturbing, full of finesses: flexible and colorful as I had not written such prose before.

Nietzsche took another decisive step still further in this way when he confesses to Köselitz on December 9, 1888:

A few days ago I leafed thru my writing, for which only now I am mature… I’ve done everything very well, but I had never thought of it… Damn, how much is hidden in there! —In the Ecce homo you will find a discovery on the third and fourth Untimely Meditations that will put you on the willies, as it did to me. Both speak only about me, anticipating… Neither Wagner nor Schopenhauer appear there psychologically… I could only understand these writings four days ago.

The reference to Ecce homo is to be taken very seriously. For very valuable and significant the biographical and data regarding the history of his work are, in this letter the interpretations of his books are to be taken with extreme care. The Nietzsche of Ecce homo is no longer the Nietzsche who wrote a philosophical work. He is now facing a stranger. He “interprets it,” thinks he only now understands his work; that only now he has a feel for it. Unwittingly, with the signing of the letter he reveals that he is not the same: “Yours, the phoenix.”

Thus start the mystifying pseudonyms. For example, in the December 18 letter to Fuchs he is “the monster,” and after the collapse the pseudonyms take full possession of him. After philosophy, what Nietzsche first lost is his identity. Just two weeks later, on December 31, 1888 (to Köselitz) he does not already know his address: “Suppose it could be in principle the Palazzo del Quirinale.” Turin, from which emerged the young Italian kingdom, and Rome, from where it dominates now, merge into one before that blotchy look.

Later Nietzsche sees himself as the organizer of a European congress of princes, who wants to convene on January 8, 1889 in Rome, the heart of “Imperium Romanum.” He has already drafted the invitations: one for the Italian king Umberto II, another for Mariani, the papal secretary of state, and one for the “House of Baden.”

What remains for the moment is poetry and music. But even poetry could not be maintained for long…

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy Psychology Stefan Zweig

The Struggle with the Daimon


der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

For an easy reading,
you can read all of my excerpts
of Zweig’s essay on Nietzsche
at Ex libris (here).

Categories
Art Friedrich Nietzsche Music Stefan Zweig

Dance over the abyss

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

If you look into an abyss, the
abyss, likewise, looks into you.



This self-addressed pæan of intoxicated happiness is, I know, regarded by modern physicians as a morbid euphoria, as the last pleasure in a decaying brain, as the stigma of that megalomania which is characteristic of the early stage of paralytic dementia. But Nietzsche talks clearly and incisively amid the ardours of intoxication. No other mortal, perhaps, has ever in full awareness and without a trace of giddiness leaned so far and seen so clearly over the edge of the precipice of lunacy.

No doubt the light that sparkles here is a perilous one. It has the phantasmal and morbid luminosity of a midnight sun glowing red above icebergs; it is a northern light of the soul whose unique splendour makes us shudder. It does not warm us, it terrifies us. It does not dazzle, but it slays. He is not carried away as was Hölderlin by an obscure rhythm of feeling, is not overwhelmed by the onrush of melancholy. He is scorched by his own ardours, is sunstruck by his own rays, is affected by a white-hot and intolerable cheerfulness. Nietzsche’s collapse was a sort of carbonization in his own flames.

He commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot; he summoned the European powers to take united military action against Germany, to encircle his fatherland in a ring of iron. Never did apocalyptic wrath shout more savagely into vacancy, never did so glorious presumption scourge a mind beyond earthly bounds. His words issued like hammer-blows striving to demolish the edifice of established civilisation. The Christian era was to cease with the publication of his Antichrist, and a new numbering of the years was to begin.

“No one has written, felt, suffered in such a manner before; the sufferings of a god, a Dionysius.” These words, penned when his mental disorder had already begun, are painfully true. The little room of the fourth floor, and the hermitage of Sils-Maria, not only sheltered the man Friedrich Nietzsche whose nerves were breaking under the strain, but also served as the places from which were issued a marvellous message to the dying century. The Creative Spirit had taken refuge beneath the attic roof heated by the southern sun, and was bestowing its entire wealth upon a timid, neglected, and lonely being, bestowing far more than any isolated person could sustain.

Within those narrow walls, wrestling with infinities, the poor mortal senses were stumbling and groping amid the lightening-flashes of revelation. Like Hölderlin, he felt that a god was revealing himself, a fiery god whose radiance the eyes could not bear and whose proximity was scorching. Again and again the cowering wrench raised his head and attempted to look upon the countenance of this deity, his thoughts running riot the while.

Was not he who felt and wrote and suffered such unthinkable things, was not he himself God? Had not a god reanimated the world after he, Nietzsche, had slain the old god? Who was he? Who was Nietzsche? Was Nietzsche the Crucified; the dead god or the living one; the god of his youth, Dionysius; or both Dionysus and the Crucified—the crucified Dionysius?

More and more confused grew his thoughts; the current roared too loud beneath the superfluity of light. Was it still light? Had it not become music? The narrow room on the fourth floor in the Via Carlo Alberto began to intone; the shining spheres made music; all heaven was aglow. What wonderful music! Tears tricked down his face, warm tears. What sublime tenderness, what auspicious happiness! And now, what lucidity! In the street, everyone smiled at him in friendly fashion; they stood up to greet him; they made obeisance to him, the slayer of gods; they were all so delighted to see him. Why? Why?

He knew. Antichrist had appeared upon earth, and men acclaimed him with hosannas. The world hummed with jubilation, was full of music. Then suddenly the tumult was stilled. Something, someone fell down. It is he, himself, in the street, in front of the house where he lodged. He was picked up. He found himself back in his room.

Had he been asleep for a long time? It seemed very dark. There was the piano. Music! Music! Then, unexpectedly, people appeared in the room. Surely one of them must be Overbeck. But Overbeck is in Basel; and where is he, Nietzsche? He no longer remembers. Why does the company look at him so strangely, so anxiously? He is in a train, rattling along the rails, and the wheels are singing; yes, they are singing the “Gondolier’s Chanty,” and he joins in, signs in an interminable darkness.

He is in a strange room, and always it is dark. No more sunshine, no light at all, either within or without. People talk in the room. A woman among them, surely it is his sister? He had thought she was travelling. She reads aloud to him, now from one book, now from another. Books? “Was not I once a writer of books?” Comes a gentle answer, but he cannot understand. One in whose soul such a hurricane has raged grows deaf to ordinary speech. One who has gazed so intently into the eyes of the daimon is henceforth blinded.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Pseudoscience Psychiatry Richard Wagner Stefan Zweig

A response to Kurwenal

Or:

Why am I reproducing excerpts of Zweig’s book?



In the other thread Kurwenal asked me:

Would it not be more enriching to find out why Rosenberg considered Nietzsche to be one of us rather than to discuss which Jewish author gives a more or less faithful account of Nietzsche’s life and theories.

I see your point, and let me say that this blog has paid due homage to Nietzsche in that sense. See these entries:

“Atheist scum”

“Quotable quote”

“Nietzsche on the Aryan race”

“Nietzsche on the institution of marriage”

Kurwenal again:

By the way, if you can spare one hour of your time, I have tried to summarize the importance of Wagner and Nietzsche for our cause [links to Counter-Currents added].

I am a huge fan of Richard Wagner too. A couple of days ago for example I had to do some driving in Mexico City and the only way I could protect my mind from the nasty surroundings was precisely by listening the complete Second Act of Parsifal. It worked! I didn’t feel so depressed even when navigating in a sea of non-white troglodytes.

But there’s something more as to why I am excerpting Zweig, and it is so important that I will promote this response as a separate blog entry.

The reason that many years ago I read Zweig’s book and Ross’ and Janz’s biographies of Nietzsche has nothing to do with the discussion in this thread. It has to do with my quest about why Nietzsche, and many other people, lost their minds.

Before arriving to the nationalist camp my field of interest was advancing a counter-hypothesis to the medical model of mental disorders, insofar as I believe that biological psychiatry is a pseudoscience. That’s what, originally, moved me to read thick volumes originally written in German about Nietzsche’s life.

One of my dreams is that, if an ethno-state is formed in North America, their architects will do tabula rasa on the fraudulent professions of mental health (a “therapeutic state” as some critics of psychiatry say). White people will have to rediscover a field of research that the current System started to bury since the late 1970s, and especially in the 80s and 90s. Presently very few remember the trauma model of mental disorders (I started a Wikipedia article under that title). And my big hope is that this model, which unlike biopsychiatry is not unscientific, will be considered very seriously in the new white nation.

The gist of this model is that biographical narrative is pivotal to understand the personal tragedies that drive some people mad. That is the reason why I am adding chapter excerpts of Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon. It has nothing to do with a desire to pathologize Nietzsche. As you can see in my linked posts above, he obviously had great insights on important subjects. But we also got to understand why some people with perfectly healthy brains suffer permanent psychotic breakdowns.

This is a “software” problem of the human mind, not a “hardware” problem as the current System wants us to believe. (See my book Hojas Susurrantes for a full explanation of it.)

Categories
Child abuse Kevin MacDonald Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychology

MacDonald and psychiatry

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

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

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

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

In the interview MacDonald also said:

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

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

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

MacDonald said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miller and deMause

Or:

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

For the other eight books see here.