Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 22 April

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People (Births)

  • 1884 – Otto Rank, Austrian-American psychologist and academic (d. 1939).

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (22 April 1884 to 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher.

Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud’s closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud’s publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist.

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

On This Day … 20 April

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People (Births)

  • 1745 – Philippe Pinel, French physician and psychiatrist (d. 1826).
  • 1915 – Joseph Wolpe, South African psychotherapist and physician (d. 1997).
  • 1920 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (d. 2002).

Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 to 25 October 1826) was a French physician who was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as “the father of modern psychiatry”.

An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the second edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualisation.

Joseph Wolpe

Joseph Wolpe (20 April 1915 to 04 December 1997 in Los Angeles) was a South African psychiatrist and one of the most influential figures in behaviour therapy.

Wolpe grew up in South Africa, attending Parktown Boys’ High School and obtaining his MD from the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 1956 Wolpe was awarded a Ford Fellowship and spent a year at Stanford University in the Center for Behavioral Sciences, subsequently returning to South Africa but permanently moving to the United States in 1960 when he accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

In 1965 Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University.

One of the most influential experiences in Wolpe’s life was when he enlisted in the South African army as a medical officer. Wolpe was entrusted to treat soldiers who were diagnosed with what was then called “war neurosis” but today is known as post traumatic stress disorder. The mainstream treatment of the time for soldiers was based on psychoanalytic theory, and involved exploring the trauma while taking a hypnotic agent – so-called narcotherapy. It was believed that having the soldiers talk about their repressed experiences openly would effectively cure their neurosis. However, this was not the case. It was this lack of successful treatment outcomes that forced Wolpe, once a dedicated follower of Freud, to question psychoanalytic therapy and search for more effective treatment options. Wolpe is most well known for his reciprocal inhibition techniques, particularly systematic desensitisation, which revolutionised behavioural therapy.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wolpe as the 53rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, an impressive accomplishment accentuated by the fact that Wolpe was a psychiatrist.

Frances Ames

Frances Rix Ames (20 April 1920 to 11 November 2002) was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody. When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

Born in Pretoria and raised in poverty in Cape Town, Ames became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Cape Town in 1964. Ames studied the effects of cannabis on the brain and published several articles on the subject. Seeing the therapeutic benefits of cannabis on patients in her own hospital, she became an early proponent of legalisation for medicinal use. She headed the neurology department at Groote Schuur Hospital before retiring in 1985, but continued to lecture at Valkenberg and Alexandra Hospital. After apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Ames testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her work on the “Biko doctors” medical ethics inquiry. In 1999, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest civilian award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights.

What is the World Association of Psychoanalysis?

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Introduction

The World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) was launched at the initiative of Jacques-Alain Miller in Buenos Aires on 03 January 1992.

It was declared in Paris, four days later, on 07 January.

Background

Its statutes are modelled on Jacques Lacan’s “Founding Act” and adopt the principles outlined in his “Proposition” on the Pass.

Refer to Lacanianism.

Components

The World Association of Psychoanalysis groups include:

  • The École de la Cause freudienne (France);
  • The Escuela de la Orientación Lacaniana (Argentina);
  • The Escuela Lacaniana de Psicoanálisis del Campo Freudiano (Spain);
  • The Scuola lacaniana di psicoanalisi (Italy);
  • The European Federation of the Schools of the WAP;
  • The Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise (Brazil);
  • The Nueva Escuela Lacaniana (Latin America); and
  • The New Lacanian School.

Lacanian

With over 1,500 members worldwide, the WAP stands as the largest institutional structure dedicated to the training of psychoanalysts in the Lacanian orientation.

What is Lacanianism?

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Introduction

Lacanianism is the study of, and development of, the ideas and theories of the dissident French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Beginning as a commentary on the writings of Freud, Lacanianism developed into a new psychoanalytic theory of humankind, and spawned a worldwide movement of its own.

Fredric Jameson argued that “Lacan’s work must be read as presupposing the entire content of classical Freudianism, otherwise it would simply be another philosophy or intellectual system”.

Lacanianism began as a philosophical/linguistic re-interpretation of Freud’s original teachings. How far it subsequently became an independent body of thought has been, and remains, a matter of debate. Lacan himself famously informed his followers “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian”.

The wide extent of Lacan’s evolving intellectual stances, and his inability to find a settled institutional framework for his work, has meant that over time the Lacanian movement has been subject to numerous schisms and continuing divisions.

Development of Lacan’s Thought

Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan’s thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, “I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic…and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real”.

Early Lacan

Lacan’s early psychoanalytic period spans the 1930s and 1940s. His contributions from this period centred on the questions of image, identification and unconscious fantasy. Developing Henri Wallon’s concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to the views of ego psychology.

Structuralist Lacan

In the fifties, the focus of Lacan’s interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure and roles – all mediated by the acquisition of language – into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms.

The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by the signifier/Other/Symbolic Order.

Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis created a dialectic between Freud’s thinking and that of both Structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as with Heidegger, Hegel and other continental philosophers.

The Real: Poststructuralism

The sixties saw Lacan’s attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real – not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to trauma, dream and the drive, which resists signification.

The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory; and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan’s shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.

Then Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic came to form a triad of “elementary registers.” Lacan believed these three concepts were inseparably intertwined, and by the 1970s they were an integral part of his thought.

Lacanianisms

Lacan’s thinking was intimately geared not only to the work of Freud but to that of the most prominent of his psychoanalytic successors – Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, Michael Balint, D.W. Winnicott and more. With Lacan’s break with official psychoanalysis in 1963-1964, however, a tendency developed to look for a pure, self-contained Lacanianism, without psychoanalytic trappings. Jacques-Alain Miller’s index to Ecrits had already written of “the Lacanian epistemology…the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition…)”; and where the old guard of first-generation disciples like Serge Leclaire continued to stress the importance of the re-reading of Freud, the new recruits of the sixties and seventies favoured instead an ahistorical Lacan, systematised after the event into a rigorous if over-simplified theoretical whole.

Three main phases may be identified in Lacan’s mature work: his Fifties exploration of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a, during the Sixties; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching.

As the fifties Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud, so too he built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse [SFP], with Serge Leclaire only the first of many French “Lacanians”. It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in Écrits, and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice.

However the very extent of Lacan’s following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by the use of shortened analytic sessions. The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the International Psychoanalytical Association recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was “Lacanianism” – a failure that led to his founding the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as Jean Laplanche, chose the IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms.

Outside France

Lacan’s 1973 Letter to the Italians, nominated Muriel Drazien, Giacomo Contri and Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy.

As a body of thought, Lacanianism began to make its way into the English-speaking world from the sixties onwards, influencing film theory, feminist thought, queer theory, and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as politics and social sciences, primarily through the concepts of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the role of the real and of jouissance in opposing structure became more widely recognised, however, so too Lacanianism developed as a tool for the exploration of the divided subject of postmodernity.

Since Lacan’s death, however, much of the public attention focused on his work began to decline. Lacan had always been criticised for an obscurantist writing style; and many of his disciples simply replicated the mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of transferential identification) without his freshness.

Where interest in Lacanianism did revive in the 21st century, it was in large part the work of figures like Slavoj Žižek who have been able to use Lacan’s thought for their own intellectual ends, without the sometimes stifling orthodoxy of many of the formal Lacanian traditions. The continued influence of Lacanianism is thus paradoxically strongest in those who seem to have embraced Malcolm Bowie’s recommendation: “learn to unlearn the Lacanian idiom in the way Lacan unlearns the Freudian idiom”.

Lacanian Movement

During Lacan’s Lifetime

Élisabeth Roudinesco has suggested that, after the founding of the EFP “the history of psychoanalysis in France became subordinate to that of Lacanianism…the Lacanian movement occupied thereafter the motor position in relation to which the other movements were obliged to determine their course'”. There was certainly a large expansion in the numbers of the school, if arguably at the expense of quantity over quality, as a flood of psychologists submerged the analysts who had come with him from the SFP. Protests against the new regime reached a head with the introduction of the self-certifying ‘passe’ to analytic status, and old comrades such as François Perrier broke away in the bitter schism of 1968 to found the Quatrieme Groupe.

However, major divisions remained within the EDF underwent another painful split over the question of analytic qualifications. There remained within the movement a broad division between the old guard of first generation Lacanians’, focused on the symbolic – on the study of Freud through the structural linguistic tools of the fifties – and the younger group of mathematicians and philosophers centred on Jacques-Alain Miller, who favoured a self-contained Lacanianism, formalised and free of its Freudian roots.

As the seventies Lacan spoke of the mathematicisation of psychoanalysis and coined the term ‘matheme’ to describe its formulaic abstraction, so Leclaire brusquely dismissed the new formulas as “graffiti” Nevertheless, despite these and other tensions, the EDF held together under the charisma of their Master, until (despairing of his followers) Lacan himself dissolved the school in 1980 the year before his death.

Criticism

Frederick Crews writes that when Deleuze and Guattari “indicted Lacanian psychoanalysis as a capitalist disorder” and “pilloried analysts as the most sinister priest-manipulators of a psychotic society” in Anti-Oedipus, their “demonstration was widely regarded as unanswerable” and “devastated the already shrinking Lacanian camp in Paris.”

Post-Lacan

The start of the eighties saw the Lacanian movement dissolve into a plethora of new organisations, of which the Millerite Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF, 273 members) and the Centre de formation et de recherches psychoanalytiques (CFRP, 390 members) are perhaps the most important. By 1993 another fourteen associations had grown out of the former EDF; nor did the process stop there. Early resignations and splits from the ECF were followed in the late 1990s by a massive exodus of analysts worldwide from Miller’s organisation under allegations of misuse of authority.

Attempts were made to re-unite the various factions, Leclaire arguing that Lacanianism was “becoming ossifed, stiffening into a kind of war of religion, into theoretical debates that no longer contribute anything new”. But with French Lacanianism (in particular) haunted by a past of betrayals and conflict – by faction after faction claiming their segment of Lacanian thought as the only genuine one – reunification of any kind has proven very problematic; and Roudinesco was perhaps correct to conclude that “‘Lacanianism, born of subversion and a wish to transgress, is essentially doomed to fragility and dispersal”.

Topology

Three main divisions can be made in contemporary Lacanianism.

  • In one form, the academic reading of a de-clinicalised Lacan has become a pursuit in itself.
  • The (self-styled) legitimatism of the ECF, developed into an international movement with strong Spanish support as well as Latin American roots, set itself up as a rival challenge to the IPA.
  • The third form is a plural Lacanianism, best epitomised in the moderate CFRP, with its abandonment of the passe and openness to traditional psychoanalysis, and (after the 1995 dissolution) in its two successors.

Attempts to rejoin the IPA remain problematic, however, not least due to the persistence of the ‘short session’ and of Lacan’s rejection of countertransference as a therapeutic tool.

On This Day … 19 April

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People (Births)

  • 1874 – Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist (d. 1952).

Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 to 22 October 1952) was a Swiss-born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi. Rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming his directorship at what is now called the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilisation and clinical killing of adults and children.

Early Career

Commencing in 1893, Rüdin studied medicine at universities in several countries, graduating in 1898. At the Burghölzli in Zurich, he worked as assistant to Eugen Bleuler who coined the term ‘schizophrenia‘. He completed his PhD, then a psychiatric residency at a Berlin prison. From 1907, he worked at the University of Munich as assistant to Emil Kraepelin, the highly influential psychiatrist who had developed the diagnostic split between ‘dementia praecox’ (‘early dementia’ – reflecting his pessimistic prognosis – renamed schizophrenia) and ‘manic-depressive illness’ (including unipolar depression), and who is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatric classification. Rüdin became senior lecturer in 1909, as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer.

Kraepelin and Rüdin were both ardent advocates of a theory that the German race was becoming overly ‘domesticated’ and thus degenerating into higher rates of mental illness and other conditions. Fears of degeneration were somewhat common internationally at the time, but the extent to which Rüdin took them may have been unique, and from the very beginning of his career he made continuous efforts to have his research translate into political action. He also repeatedly drew attention to the financial burden of the sick and disabled.

Rüdin developed the concept of “empirical genetic prognosis” of mental disorders. He published influential initial results on the genetics of schizophrenia (known as dementia praecox) in 1916. Rüdin’s data did not show a high enough risk in siblings for schizophrenia to be due to a simple recessive gene as he and Kraepelin thought, but he put forward a two-recessive-gene theory to try to account for this. This has been attributed to a “mistaken belief” that just one or a small number of gene variations caused such conditions. Similarly his own large study on Mood disorders correctly disproved his own theory of simple Mendelian inheritance and also showed environmental causes, but Rüdin simply neglected to publish and continued to advance his eugenic theories. Nevertheless, Rüdin pioneered and refined complex techniques for conducting studies of inheritance, was widely cited in the international literature for decades, and is still regarded as “the father of psychiatric genetics”.

Rüdin was influenced by his then brother-in-law, and long-time friend and colleague, Alfred Ploetz, who was considered the ‘father’ of racial hygiene and indeed had coined the term in 1895. This was a form of eugenics, inspired by social darwinism, which had gained some popularity internationally, as would the voluntary or compulsory sterilization of psychiatric patients, initially in America. Rüdin campaigned for this early on. At a conference on alcoholism in 1903, he argued for the sterilisation of ‘incurable alcoholics’, but his proposal was roundly defeated. In 1904, he was appointed co-editor in chief of the newly founded Archive for Racial Hygiene and Social Biology, and in 1905 was among the co-founders of the German Society for Racial Hygiene (which soon became International), along with Ploetz. He published an article of his own in Archives in 1910, in which he argued that medical care for the mentally ill, alcoholics, epileptics and others was a distortion of natural laws of natural selection, and medicine should help to clean the genetic pool.

Increasing Influence

In 1917, a new German Institute for Psychiatric Research was established in Munich (known as the DFA in German; renamed the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry after World War II), designed and driven forward by Emil Kraepelin. The Institute incorporated a Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies (known as the GDA in German) – the first in the world specialising in psychiatric genetics – and Rüdin was put in charge by overall director Kraepelin. In 1924, the Institute came under the umbrella of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society. From 1925, Rüdin spent three years as full Professor of Psychology at Basel, Switzerland. He returned to the Institute in 1928, with an expanded departmental budget and new building at 2 Kraepelinstrasse, financed primarily by the American Rockefeller Foundation. The institute soon gained an international reputation as leading psychiatric research, including in hereditary genetics. In 1931, a few years after Kraepelin’s death, Rüdin took over the directorship of the entire Institute as well as remaining head of his department.

Rüdin was among the first to attempt to educate the public about the “dangers” of hereditary defectives and the value of the Nordic race as “culture creators”. By 1920, his colleague Alfred Hoche published, with lawyer Karl Binding, the influential “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living”.

In 1930, Rüdin was a leading German representative at the First International Congress for Mental Hygiene, held in Washington, US, arguing for eugenics. In 1932, he became President of the International Federation of Eugenics Organisations. He was in contact with Carlos Blacker of the British Eugenics Society, and sent him a copy of pre-Nazi voluntary sterilisation laws enacted in Prussia; a precursor to the Nazi forced sterilisation laws that Rüdin is said to have already prepared in his desk drawer.

From 1935 to 1945, he was President of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists (GDNP), later renamed the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology (DGPPN).

The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered the founding fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia respectively, as well as Franz Josef Kallmann who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[4] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that ‘minor anomalies’ in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenics should be grounds for compulsory sterilisation.

Rüdin’s research was also supported with manpower and financing from the German National Socialists.

Nazi Expert

In 1933, Ernst Rüdin, Alfred Ploetz, and several other experts on racial hygiene were brought together to form the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy under Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. The committee’s ideas were used as a scientific basis to justify the racial policy of Nazi Germany and its “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” was passed by the German government on 01 January 1934. Rüdin was such an avid proponent that colleagues nicknamed him the “Reichsfuhrer for Sterilization”

In a speech to the German Society for Rassenhygiene published in 1934, Rüdin recalled the early days of trying to alert the public to the special value of the Nordic race and the dangers of defectives. He stated: “The significance of Rassenhygiene racial hygiene did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30-year-long dream of translating Rassenhygiene into action finally become a reality.” Describing it as a ‘duty of honour’ for society to help implement the Nazi policies, Rüdin declared: “Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children. Conversely, it must be regarded as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the state.”

From early on, Rüdin had been a ‘racial fanatic’ for the purity of the ‘German people’. However, he was also described in 1988 as “not so much a fanatical Nazi as a fanatical geneticist”. His ideas for reducing new cases of schizophrenia would prove a total failure, despite between 73% and 100% of the diagnosed being sterilised or killed.

Rüdin joined the Nazi party in 1937. In 1939, on his 65th birthday, he was awarded a ‘Goethe medal for art and science’ handed to him personally by Hitler, who honoured him as the ‘pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich’. In 1944, he received a bronze Nazi eagle medal (Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches), with Hitler calling him the ‘pathfinder in the field of hereditary hygiene’.

In 1942, speaking about ‘euthanasia’, Rüdin emphasised “the value of eliminating young children of clearly inferior quality”. He supported and financially aided the work of Julius Duessen at Heidelberg University with Carl Schneider, clinical research which from the beginning involving killing children.

Post-War

At the end of the war in 1945, Rüdin claimed he had only ever engaged in academic science, only ever heard rumours of killings at the nearby insane asylums, and that he hated the Nazis. However, some of his Nazi political activities, scientific justifications, and awards from Hitler were already uncovered in 1945 (as were his lecture handouts praising Nordics and disparaging Jews). Investigative journalist Victor H. Bernstein concluded: “I am sure that Prof. Rüdin never so much as killed a fly in his 74 years. I am also sure he is one of the most evil men in Germany.” Rüdin was stripped of his Swiss citizenship which he had held jointly with German, and two months later was placed under house arrest by the Munich Military Government. However, interned in the US, he was released in 1947 after a ‘denazification’ trial where he was supported by former colleague Kallmann (a eugenicist himself) and famous quantum physicist Max Planck[verification needed]; his only punishment was a 500-mark fine.

Speculation about the reasons for his early release, despite having been considered as a potential criminal defendant for the Nuremberg trials, include the need to restore confidence and order in the German medical profession; his personal and financial connections to prestigious American and British researchers, funding bodies and others; and the fact that he repeatedly cited American eugenic sterilization initiatives to justify his own as legal (indeed the Nuremberg trials carefully avoided highlighting such links in general). Nevertheless, Rüdin has been cited as a more senior and influential architect of Nazi crimes than the physician who was sentenced to death, Karl Brandt, or the infamous Josef Mengele who had attended his lectures and been employed by his Institute.

After Rüdin’s death in 1952, the funeral eulogy was held by Kurt Pohlisch, a close friend who had been professor of psychiatry at Bonn University, director of the second-largest genetics research institute in Germany, and expert Nazi advisor on Action T4.

Rüdin’s connections to the Nazis were a major reason for criticisms of psychiatric genetics in Germany after 1945.

He was survived by his daughter, Edith Zerbin-Rüdin, who became a psychiatric geneticist and eugenicist herself. In 1996, Zerbin-Rüdin, along with Kenneth S. Kendler, published a series of articles on his work which were criticised by others for whitewashing his racist and later Nazi ideologies and activities (Elliot S. Gershon also notes that Zerbin-Rüdin acted as defender and apologist for her father in private conversation and in a transcribed interview published in 1988). Kendler and other leading psychiatric genetic authors have been accused as recently as 2013 of producing revisionist historical accounts of Rüdin and his ‘Munich School’. Three types of account have been identified: “(A) those who write about German psychiatric genetics in the Nazi period, but either fail to mention Rüdin at all, or cast him in a favorable light; (B) those who acknowledge that Rüdin helped promote eugenic sterilization and/or may have worked with the Nazis, but generally paint a positive picture of Rüdin’s research and fail to mention his participation in the “euthanasia” killing program; and (C) those who have written that Rüdin committed and supported unspeakable atrocities.”

On This Day … 18 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 1917 – Vladimir Serbsky, Russian psychiatrist and academic (b. 1858).

Vladimir Serbsky

Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky (Russian: Влади́мир Петро́вич Се́рбский, 26 February 1858 to 18 April 1917 in Moscow) was a Russian psychiatrist and one of the founders of forensic psychiatry in Russia. The author of The Forensic Psychopathology, Serbsky thought delinquency to have no congenital basis, considering it to be caused by social reasons.

The Central Institute of Forensic Psychiatry was named after Serbsky in 1921. Now the facility is known as the Serbsky Centre (Serbsky State Scientific Centre for Social and Forensic Psychiatry).

Biography

Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky was born in 1858 in Bogorodsk (now Noginsk, Moscow Region) in the family of a zemstvo doctor.

After Serbsky grew up, his family moved to Moscow, where he studied at the Second Moscow Gymnasium. After graduation he entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, graduating in 1880 with a candidate’s degree. In the same year, he entered the Medical Department of Moscow University. Since he already had a higher education, he was immediately placed into the third year. Serbsky was fascinated by the study of nervous and mental diseases and became one of the students of S.S. Korsakov. In 1883 Serbsky defended his thesis on “The clinical importance of albuminuria”, for which he received a silver medal.

After graduating from the medical department, Serbsky began medical work under the direction of S.S. Korsakov in the private psychiatric hospital M.F. Bekker. In 1885, Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky was offered to manage a zemstvo psychiatric clinic in the Tambov province; he accepted the offer, leading the clinic until 1887. The local zemstvo offered him a trip to Austria, where he worked for almost a year at the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic under the direction of T. Meinert.

After returning from Austria, Serbsky worked for several months in the Tambov Clinic for the mentally ill, and then returned to Moscow, where he was elected to the position of senior assistant of the Moscow University psychiatric clinic. In 1891, Serbsky defended his thesis, “Forms of mental disorders described under the name of catatonia” for the degree of Doctor of Medicine and in 1892 received the title of privat-docent.

After the death of S.S. Korsakov, Serbsky in actuality became the chief psychiatrist in Russia. In 1902 he was appointed extraordinary professor and director of the psychiatric clinic, and in 1903 he headed the Department of Psychiatry of Moscow University, which he directed until 1911.

In 1905, Serbsky made a report in which he showed that the situation created in the country promotes the growth of mental illnesses. After the congress, he published a book in which he considered the role of revolution as a factor influencing the change in the consciousness of a large number of people. Such a position had a negative effect on his relations with the authorities. In 1911, as a sign of protest against the reactionary policy of the Minister of Education L.A. Kasso, Serbsky resigned and in the same year at the First Congress of Russian Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists he spoke against the government’s policy of suppressing rights and freedoms that resulted in the closing of the congress.

In 1913, the English and Scottish societies of psychiatrists elected the scientist their honorary member and were invited to visit Britain. Serbsky accepted the invitation. He was accepted as a famous scientist and public figure. He gave lectures, visited clinics, and advised patients. The University of Edinburgh offered him the position of a professor. He declined it and returned to Russia.

In 1913 Serbsky publicly denounced unsound examination of government-inspired anti-Semitic case M. Bayliss, who was unjustly accused of murdering a boy for ritual purposes.

After the Provisional Government came to power, the new Minister of Education, A.A. Manuilov, sent a letter to Serbsky, in which he invited him to return to Moscow University. The letter came too late, the scientist was already terminally ill. Vladimir Petrovich lived out his last days in poverty, since he retired without earning his pension. Renal failure due to chronic nephritis was gradually aggravated, and on 23 March 1917, Serbsky died. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Scientific Activity

Under the supervision of Serbsky, the Tambov hospital became one of the most advanced institutions of its type in Russia. Straight jackets and leather sleeves were banned in the patients clinic. There was a widespread use of work and entertainment for patients and the main contingent of workers who took part in walks and other festivities consisted of chronic patients.

Serbsky always advocated that patients were treated primarily as people. He repeatedly engaged in arguments with psychiatrist E. Krepelin, who fell back on a formalised diagnosis of mental illness. Considering the big picture of the disease, Serbsky took into account not only mental, but also physical ailments of patients, trying to recreate a picture of their relationships.

Serbsky was the first teacher at Moscow University in 1892 who lectured on forensic psychiatry to students of the law and medical departments.

Serbsky worked on issues of diagnosing the main forms of psychosis. He was the first one to find that some of the painful manifestations observed in adult patients are consequences of their childhood intellectual disorders. Gradually, Serbsky formulated the basic principles of the methodology by which psychiatrists could now determine the degree of the patient’s sanity, that is, the ability to critically evaluate his actions.

Serbsky supported and developed A.W. Freze’s and V.X. Kandinsky’s positions on the significance of the psychological understanding of mental disorders for the correct solution to forensic psychiatric questions. He pointed to the merits of V.X. Kandinsky: “V. X. Kandinsky developed the need to establish the psychological criterion of insanity by law with the greatest conviction- I can only align myself with the views of this talented psychologist.”

Serbsky first proved the inconsistency of K. Kalbaums’s doctrine of catatonia as an independent disease. In 1890 Serbsky found that the catatonic symptom complex can be a consequence of schizophrenia and other psychoses.

In 1895, Serbsky released the first volume of “The Guide to Forensic Psychopathology,” devoted to general theoretical questions and legislation on forensic psychiatry. This covered issues of forensic psychiatric theory and practice, as well as legislation for mental patients. The second volume of the “Guide” was published in 1900. For many decades the book was the desk guide for psychiatrists around the world. In this book, for the first time in the history of science, a description of various forms of malignant schizophrenia was presented. Serbsky succeeded in showing that an accurate diagnosis can be made only on the basis of a comprehensive examination of the patient.

Serbsky proved that from the point of view of psychiatry even a dangerous criminal can be a sick person. In this case, he should be isolated from society and be allowed to heal. The scientist was deeply convinced that in many crimes the environment that influenced the formation of his personality is to blame. He suggested introducing mandatory psychiatric examination for those accused of committing serious crimes. Usually in such cases, death sentences were imposed.

In 1912, Serbsky organised and headed the “Moscow Psychiatric Circle of Small Fridays,” which became one of the first organisational structures composed and led by psychoanalysts (M.M. Asatiani, E.N. Dovbnya, N.Ye. Osipov, O.B. Feltsman and others). He criticized a number of provisions of Freud’s teachings and the works of Russian psychoanalysts, including his students. At the same time encouraged the discussion of psychoanalytic problems. The discussions were carried out from the first day of the work of the circle.

Serbsky developed a modern form of sponsorship for psychiatric patients, was one of the founders of the Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry after S.S. Kosakov and the Russian Union of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, he was an active participant in all psychiatric and Pirogov congresses, delivering program papers on problems of forensic psychiatry, participated in many complex and forensically responsible psychiatric examinations in cases that caused great public outcry, boldly defending his own-always clinically sound- opinion.

Memory

Since 1912 the name of Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky has been carried by the Central Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow.

Major Works

  • The Forensic Psychopathology (1896-1900).
  • On Dementia praecox (1902).
  • Manual of Study of Mental Diseases (1906).

On This Day … 17 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 1994 – Roger Wolcott Sperry, American psychologist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1913).

Roger Wolcott Sperry

Roger Wolcott Sperry (20 August 1913 to 17 April 1994) was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Education

Sperry was an English major, but he took an Intro to Psychology class taught by a Professor named R. H. Stetson who had worked with William James, the father of American Psychology. This class sparked Sperry’s interest in the brain and how it can change. Stetson was disabled and had trouble getting around so Sperry would help him out by driving him to and from wherever he needed to go. This included taking Stetson to lunch with his colleagues. Sperry would just sit at the end of the table and listen to Stetson and his colleagues discuss their research and other psychological interests. This increased Sperry’s interest in Psychology even more and after he received his undergraduate degree in English from Oberlin he decided to stay and get his master’s degree in Psychology. He received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1935 and a master’s degree in psychology in 1937. He received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1941, supervised by Paul A. Weiss. Sperry then did postdoctoral research with Karl Lashley at Harvard University though most of his time was spent with Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Research Centre in Orange Park, Florida.

Career

In 1942, Sperry began work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then a part of Harvard University. There he focused on experiments involving the rearranging of motor and sensory nerves. He left in 1946 to become an assistant professor, and later associate professor, at the University of Chicago. In 1949, during a routine chest x-ray, there was evidence of tuberculosis. He was sent to Saranac Lake in the Adironack Mountains in New York for treatment. It was during this time when he began writing his concepts of the mind and brain, and was first published in the American Scientist in 1952. In 1952, he became the Section Chief of Neurological Diseases and Blindness at the National Institutes of Health and finished out the year at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Coral Gables, FL. Sperry went back to The University of Chicago in 1952 and became an Associate Professor of Psychology. He was not offered tenure at Chicago and planned to move to Bethesda, Maryland but was held up by a delay in construction at the National Institutes of Health. During this time Sperry’s friend Victor Hepburn invited him to lecture about his research at a symposium. There were professors from the California Institute of Technology in the audience of the symposium who, after listening to Sperry’s lecture, were so impressed with him they offered him a job as the Hixson Professor of Psychobiology. In 1954, he accepted the position as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech as Hixson Professor of Psychobiology) where he performed his most famous experiments with Joseph Bogen, MD and many students including Michael Gazzaniga.

Under the supervision of Paul Weiss while earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, Sperry became interested in neuronal specificity and brain circuitry and began questioning the existing concepts about these two topics. He asked the simple question first asked in his Introduction to Psychology class at Oberlin: Nature or nurture? He began a series of experiments in an attempt to answer this question. Sperry crosswired the motor nerves of rats’ legs so the left nerve controlled the right leg and vice versa. He would then place the rats in a cage that had an electric grid on the bottom separated into four sections. Each leg of the rat was placed into one of the four sections of the electric grid. A shock was administered to a specific section of the grid, for example the grid where the rat’s left back leg was located would receive a shock. Every time the left paw was shocked the rat would lift his right paw and vice versa. Sperry wanted to know how long it would take the rat to realize he was lifting the wrong paw. After repeated tests Sperry found that the rats never learned to lift up the correct paw, leading him to the conclusion that some things are just hardwired and cannot be relearned. In Sperry’s words, “no adaptive functioning of the nervous system took place.” During Sperry’s postdoctoral years with Karl Lashley at Harvard and at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology in Orange Park, Florida, he continued his work on neuronal specificity that he had begun as a doctoral student and initiated a new series of studies involving salamanders. The optic nerves were sectioned and the eyes rotated 180 degrees. The question was whether vision would be normal after regeneration or would the animal forever view the world as “upside down” and right-left reversed. Should the latter prove to be the case, it would mean that the nerves were somehow “guided” back to their original sites of termination. Restoration of normal vision (i.e. “seeing” the world in a “right-side-up” orientation) would mean that the regenerating nerves had terminated in new sites, quite different from the original ones. The animals reacted as though the world was upside down and reversed from right to left. Furthermore, no amount of training could change the response. These studies, which provided strong evidence for nerve guidance by “intricate chemical codes under genetic control” (1963) culminated in Sperry’s chemoaffinity hypothesis (1951).

Sperry later served on the Board of Trustees and as Professor of Psychobiology Emeritus at California Institute of Technology. The Sperry Neuroscience Building at Oberlin College was named in his honour in 1990.

Nobel Prize

Sperry was granted numerous awards over his lifetime, including the California Scientist of the Year Award in 1972, the National Medal of Science in 1989, the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 1979, and the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in 1979, and the Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology in 1981 that he shared with David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Wiesel.

Sperry won this award for his work with “split-brain” patients. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, the left and right hemispheres, connected in the middle by a part of the brain called the corpus callosum. In “split-brain” patients, the corpus callosum has been severed due to the patients suffering from epilepsy, a disease that causes intense and persistent seizures. Seizures begin in one hemisphere and continue into the other hemisphere. Cutting the corpus callosum prevents the seizures from moving from one hemisphere to the other, which then prevents seizures from occurring, thus allowing the patients to function normally instead of suffering from continuous seizures.

On This Day … 16 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 1961 – Carl Hovland, American psychologist and academic (b. 1912).

Carl Hovland

Carl Iver Hovland (12 June 1912 to 16 April 1961) was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra’s propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on your degree of belonging to the group.

With the advent of government propaganda in support of the United States’ participation in World War II, the artefacts worth investigating helped with increase of persuasive communication with intent to affect behaviour, attitude, and values. These artefacts had a remarkable amount of money invested into them, however, were they effective? This concept of effectiveness and affecting change within individuals, interpersonal relations, and persuasion are exactly what Hovland was interested in. Carl Hovland’s contributions to the field of communications were three-fold. First, he emphasized micro-level analysis, next he was interested in all facets of interpersonal communication, and finally he revolutionised persuasive research.

On This Day … 15 April

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People (Births)

  • 1858 – Émile Durkheim, French sociologist, psychologist, and philosopher (d. 1917).
  • 1920 – Thomas Szasz, Hungarian-American psychiatrist and academic (d. 2012).
  • 1931 – Tomas Tranströmer, Swedish poet, translator, and psychologist Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2015).

Emile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim (15 April 1858 to 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology and, with Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.

From his lifetime, much of Durkheim’s work would be concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work would be De la division du travail social (1893; The Division of Labour in Society), followed in 1895 by Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (The Rules of Sociological Method), the same year in which Durkheim would set up the first European department of sociology and become France’s first professor of sociology. Durkheim’s seminal monograph, Le Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, especially pioneered modern social research, serving to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The following year, in 1898, he established the journal L’Année Sociologique. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim would also be deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of institutions, understanding the term in its broader meaning as the “beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity,” with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic, in that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as “collective consciousness” have since entered the popular lexicon.

Thomas Szasz

Thomas Stephen Szasz (15 April 1920 to 08 September 2012) was a Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism. His books The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) and The Manufacture of Madness (1970) set out some of the arguments most associated with him.

Szasz argued throughout his career that mental illness is a metaphor for human problems in living, and that mental illnesses are not “illnesses” in the sense that physical illnesses are; and that except for a few identifiable brain diseases, there are “neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses.”

Szasz maintained throughout his career that he was not anti-psychiatry but was rather that he opposed coercive psychiatry. He was a staunch opponent of civil commitment and involuntary psychiatric treatment, but he believed in and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy between consenting adults.

His views on special treatment followed from libertarian roots, based on the principles that each person has the right to bodily and mental self-ownership and the right to be free from violence from others, and he criticised the use of psychiatry in the Western world as well as communist states.

Tomas Transtromer

Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (15 April 1931 to 26 March 2015) was a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer’s work is also characterised by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He has been described as a Christian poet.

Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. Critics praised his poetry for its accessibility, even in translation. His poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. He was the recipient of the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.

On This Day … 14 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 2010 – Alice Miller, Polish-French psychologist and author (b. 1923).

Alice Miller

Alice Miller, born as Alicija Englard (12 January 1923 to 14 April 2010), was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.

Her book The Drama of the Gifted Child caused a sensation and became an international bestseller upon the English publication in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

Life

Miller was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland into a Jewish family. She was the oldest daughter of Gutta and Meylech Englard and had a sister, Irena, who was five years younger. From 1931 to 1933 the family lived in Berlin, where nine-year-old Alicija learned the German language. Due to the National Socialists’ seizure of power in Germany in 1933 the family turned back to Piotrków Trybunalski. As a young woman, Miller managed to escape the Jewish Ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, where all Jewish inhabitants were interned since October 1939, and survived World War II in Warsaw under the assumed name of Alicja Rostowska. While she was able to smuggle her mother and sister out, in 1941, her father died in the ghetto.

She retained her assumed name Alice Rostovska when she moved to Switzerland in 1946, where she had won a scholarship to the University of Basel.

In 1949 she married Swiss sociologist Andreas Miller, originally a Polish Catholic, with whom she had moved from Poland to Switzerland as students. They divorced in 1973. They had two children, Martin (born 1950) and Julika (born 1956). Shortly after his mother’s death Martin Miller stated in an interview with Der Spiegel that he had been beaten by his authoritarian father during his childhood – in the presence of his mother. Miller first stated that his mother intervened, but later that she did not intervene. These events happened decades before Alice Miller’s awakening about the dangers of such childrearing methods. Martin also mentioned that his mother was unable to talk with him, despite numerous lengthy conversations, about her wartime experiences, as she was severely burdened by them.

In 1953 Miller gained her doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. Between 1953 and 1960, Miller studied psychoanalysis and practiced it between 1960 and 1980 in Zürich.

In 1980, after having worked as a psychoanalyst and an analyst trainer for 20 years, Miller “stopped practicing and teaching psychoanalysis in order to explore childhood systematically.” She became critical of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Her first three books originated from research she took upon herself as a response to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. However, by the time her fourth book was published, she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable in any respect.

In 1985 Miller wrote about the research from her time as a psychoanalyst: “For twenty years I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means.” In 1985 she left Switzerland and moved to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in Southern France.

In 1986, she was awarded the Janusz Korczak Literary Award for her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child.

In April 1987 Miller announced in an interview with the German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today) her rejection of psychoanalysis. The following year she cancelled her memberships in both the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, because she felt that psychoanalytic theory and practice made it impossible for former victims of child abuse to recognise the violations inflicted on them and to resolve the consequences of the abuse, as they “remained in the old tradition of blaming the child and protecting the parents”.

One of Miller’s last books, Bilder meines Lebens (“Pictures of My Life”), was published in 2006. It is an informal autobiography in which the writer explores her emotional process from painful childhood, through the development of her theories and later insights, told via the display and discussion of 66 of her original paintings, painted in the years 1973-2005.

Between 2005 and her death in 2010, she answered hundreds of readers’ letters on her website, where there are also published articles, flyers and interviews in three languages. Days before her death Alice Miller wrote: “These letters will stay as an important witness also after my death under my copyright”.

Miller died on 14 April 2010, at the age of 87, at her home in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence by suicide after severe illness and diagnosis of advanced stage of pancreatic cancer.

Work

Miller extended the trauma model to include all forms of child abuse, including those that were commonly accepted (such as spanking), which she called poisonous pedagogy, a non-literal translation of Katharina Rutschky’s Schwarze Pädagogik (black or dark pedagogy/imprinting).

Drawing upon the work of psychohistory, Miller analysed writers Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and others to find links between their childhood traumas and the course and outcome of their lives.

The introduction of Miller’s first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, contains a line that summarises her core views:

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.

In the 1990s, Miller strongly supported a new method developed by Konrad Stettbacher, who himself was later charged with incidents of sexual abuse. Miller came to know about Stettbacher and his method from a book by Mariella Mehr titled Steinzeit (Stone Age). Having been strongly impressed by the book, Miller contacted Mehr in order to get the name of the therapist. From that time forward, Miller refused to make therapist or method recommendations. In open letters, Miller explained her decision and how she originally became Stettbacher’s disciple, but in the end she distanced herself from him and his regressive therapies.

In her writings, Miller is careful to clarify that by “abuse” she does not only mean physical violence or sexual abuse, she is also concerned with psychological abuse perpetrated by one or both parents on their child; this is difficult to identify and deal with because the abused person is likely to conceal it from themselves and may not be aware of it until some event, or the onset of depression, requires it to be treated. Miller blamed psychologically abusive parents for the majority of neuroses and psychoses. She maintained that all instances of mental illness, addiction, crime and cultism were ultimately caused by suppressed rage and pain as a result of subconscious childhood trauma that was not resolved emotionally, assisted by a helper, which she came to term an “enlightened witness.” In all cultures, “sparing the parents is our supreme law,” wrote Miller. Even psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and clinical psychologists were unconsciously afraid to blame parents for the mental disorders of their clients, she contended. According to Miller, mental health professionals were also creatures of the poisonous pedagogy internalised in their own childhood. This explained why the Commandment “Honour thy parents” was one of the main targets in Miller’s school of psychology.

Miller called electroconvulsive therapy “a campaign against the act of remembering”. In her book Abbruch der Schweigemauer (The Demolition of Silence), she also criticised psychotherapists’ advice to clients to forgive their abusive parents, arguing that this could only hinder recovery through remembering and feeling childhood pain. It was her contention that the majority of therapists fear this truth and that they work under the influence of interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness by the once-mistreated child. She believed that forgiveness did not resolve hatred, but covered it in a dangerous way in the grown adult: displacement on scapegoats, as she discussed in her psycho-biographies of Adolf Hitler and Jürgen Bartsch, both of whom she described as having suffered severe parental abuse.

A common denominator in Miller’s writings is her explanation of why human beings prefer not to know about their own victimisation during childhood: to avoid unbearable pain. She believed that the unconscious command of the individual, not to be aware of how he or she was treated in childhood, led to displacement: the irresistible drive to repeat abusive parenting in the next generation of children or direct unconsciously the unresolved trauma against others (war, terrorism, delinquency), or against him or herself (eating disorders, drug addiction, depression).

The Roots of Violence

According to Alice Miller, worldwide violence has its roots in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years of life, when their brains become structured. She said that the damage caused by this practice is devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society. She argued that as children are forbidden to defend themselves against the violence inflicted on them, they must suppress the natural reactions like rage and fear, and they discharge these strong emotions later as adults against their own children or whole peoples: “child abuse like beating and humiliating not only produces unhappy and confused children, not only destructive teenagers and abusive parents, but thus also a confused, irrationally functioning society”. Miller stated that only through becoming aware of this dynamic can we break the chain of violence.