Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 18 December

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

  • 1884 – Emil Starkenstein, Czech pharmacologist, co-founded clinical pharmacology (d. 1942).

People (Deaths)

  • 1990 – Joseph Zubin, Lithuanian-American psychologist and academic (b. 1900).

Emil Starkenstein

Emil Starkenstein (18 December 1884 to 06 November 1942) was a Czech-Jewish pharmacologist and one of the founders of clinical pharmacology. He was killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp along with a few hundred refugees from Amsterdam after an incident in which a Dutch Jew resisted a Nazi patrol.

Emil Starkenstein was born in the Bohemian (now Czech) town of Poběžovice, (Ronsperg) to Jewish German parents. The family had many members who became local physician. Starkenstein researched and published a family tree in 1927 which traced his family roots as far back as 1350 and included such figures as R. Benjamin Wolf (1777-1851), R.Eleasar Löw, R. Moses Isserles (1520-1572), and several in the Katzenelbogen line, including R.Saul Wahl Katzenelbogen who, according to the glossary of the family tree, ‘became king of Poland for one night after the death of Stephen Bathory.

He was a professor at Charles University in Prague until the 1938 German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He continued his work as a refugee in the Netherlands. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1939, Starkenstein was confined to an area in Amsterdam with other Jews, where they were forced to wear yellow badges and banned from civil service employment. He was arrested and deported in 1941, via Prague and Terezin, to Mauthausen concentration camp. His wife and daughter survived in hiding in The Netherlands, and after the war his wife Marie (née Weil) donated his extensive collection of papers (more than 20,000 items) to the Czechoslovak state. In 2002, these papers were finally deposited in the archives of Charles University in Prague. In addition to the scientific papers, Starkenstein had one of the most impressive pharmacological libraries ever assembled. Before he was killed in the Nazi concentration camps, his family agreed to sell the collection to rare book dealer Ludwig Gottschalk, but when Gottschalk faced deportation to the camps himself, he secreted the library in several locations in the Black Forest and went into hiding. After the war, he reassembled the Starkenstein books and for nearly half a century sold items from the collection under the name Biblion, Inc., in Forest Hills, New York. A portion of the library was purchased by the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden. These 147 volumes, dealing primarily with the medicinal uses of plants, are identified by Starkenstein’s bookplate.

Joseph Zubin

Joseph Zubin (09 October 1900 to 18 December 1990) was a Lithuanian born American educational psychologist and an authority on schizophrenia who is commemorated by the Joseph Zubin Awards.

Life

Zubin was born 09 October 1900 in Raseiniai, Lithuania, but moved to the US in 1908 and grew up in Baltimore. His first degree was in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in 1921, and he earned a PhD in educational psychology at Columbia University in 1932. In 1934 he married Winifred Anderson (who survived him) and they had three children (2 sons, David and Jonathan, and a daughter, Winfred). At his death on 18 December 1990, he had seven grandchildren. In addition, his great-grandson is Adam Chapnik (he/him/his), counsellor of the Abbey (he/him/his) Unit at Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wildwood Camp.

Honours

Zubin was President of both the American Psychopathological Association (1951-1952) and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1971-1972) and received numerous awards for his work.[2] In 1946 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

On This Day … 17 December

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

People (Births)

  • 1930 – Dorothy Rowe, Australian psychologist and author (d. 2019).
  • 1931 – James McGaugh, American neurobiologist and psychologist.

Dorothy Rowe

Dr. Dorothy Rowe (née Conn; 17 December 1930 to 25 March 2019) was an Australian psychologist and author, whose area of interest was depression. Born; Newcastle, NSW. Died Sydney, NSW.

Rowe came to England in her forties, working at Sheffield University and was the head of Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology. In addition to her published works on depression, she is a regular columnist in the UK.

She spent her time working with depressed patients and, through listening to their stories, came to reject the medical model of mental illness, instead working within personal construct theory. She believes that depression is a result of beliefs which do not enable a person to live comfortably with themselves or the world. Most notably it is the belief in a “Just World” (that the bad are punished and the good rewarded) that exacerbates feelings of fear and anxiety if disaster strikes. Part of recovering is accepting that the external world is unpredictable and that we control relatively little of it.

In July 1989, Rowe made an extended appearance on the British television discussion programme After Dark alongside, among others, Steven Rose, Frank Cioffi, The Bishop of Durham and Michael Bentine.

The BBC were required to apologise to Dorothy Rowe in 2009 after the production editing of her radio interview misrepresented her views on the impact of religion in providing structure to people’s lives.

James McGaugh

James L. McGaugh (born 17 December 1931) is an American neurobiologist and author working in the field of learning and memory. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow and founding director of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Career

McGaugh received his B.A. from San Jose State University in 1953 and his PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. He was briefly a professor at San Jose State and then did postdoctoral work in neuropharmacology with Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Bovet at the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá in Rome, Italy. He then became a professor at the University of Oregon from 1961 to 1964. He was recruited to the University of California, Irvine, in 1964 (the year of the school’s founding) to be the founding chair of the Department of Psychobiology (now Neurobiology and Behaviour). He became dean (1967-1970) of the School of Biological Sciences and Vice Chancellor (1975-1977) and executive Vice Chancellor (1978-1982) of the university. In 1982, he founded the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and remained director from 1982 to 2004.

Early Research Findings

McGaugh’s early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) demonstrated that memories are not instantly created in a long-term, permanent fashion. Rather, immediately after a learning event, the memory is labile and susceptible to influence. As time passes, the memory becomes increasingly resistant to external influences and eventually becomes stored in a relatively permanent manner, a process termed memory consolidation. McGaugh found that drugs, given to an animal shortly after a learning event, influence the subsequent retention of that event. The concept of such “post-training” manipulations is one of McGaugh’s greatest contributions to the field of learning and memory because it avoids many potential confounds, such as performance effects of the drug, that may occur when a drug or other treatment is given prior to the training.

Over the ensuing decades, McGaugh and his research colleagues and students extended the findings into a long-term investigation of emotionally influenced memory consolidation. As most people realise, they have stronger memories for long-ago events that were emotionally arousing in nature, compared with memories for emotionally neutral events (which may not be remembered well at all). McGaugh’s research examined how emotional arousal influences memory consolidation. In particular, he has found that stress hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, mediate much of the effects of emotional arousal on subsequent retention of the event. These hormones, in turn, activate a variety of brain structures, including the amygdala, which appears to play a key role in modulating memory consolidation. The amygdala, when activated, influences a variety of other brain structures, including the hippocampus, nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus that process different aspects of memory. It is through this “orchestration” of brain structures that memories are eventually formed and stored, though the exact nature of memory storage remains elusive.

On This Day … 15 December

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Events

  • 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association votes 13-0 to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-II.

People (Births)

  • 1911 – Nicholas P. Dallis, American psychiatrist and illustrator (d. 1991).

People (Deaths)

  • 2005 – Heinrich Gross, Austrian physician and psychiatrist (b. 1914).
  • 2010 – Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, American psychoanalyst and theorist (b. 1940).

Nicholas P. Dallis

Nicholas Peter Dallis (15 December 1911 to 06 July 1991), known as Nick Dallis, was an American psychiatrist turned comic strip writer, creator of the soap opera-style strips Rex Morgan MD, Judge Parker and Apartment 3-G. Separating his comics career from his medical practice, he wrote under pseudonyms, Dal Curtis for Rex Morgan MD, and Paul Nichols for Judge Parker.

Born in New York City, Nick Dallis grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Washington & Jefferson College in 1933 and from Temple University’s medical school in 1938 and married a nurse, Sarah Luddy. He decided to specialize in psychiatry, and after World War II, started a practice in Toledo, Ohio. Allen Saunders was chair at the time of the local mental hygiene centre that invited him there, and in his autobiography, he recalled that Dallis approached him, as a well-known comics writer (Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth), about “his desire to write a comic strip, one tracing the history of medicine. I told him that, commendable as his idea was, such a feature would not succeed. Readers want entertainment, not enlightenment. But a story about a handsome young doctor’s involvement with his patients might be a winner.”

Heinrich Gross

Heinrich Gross (14 November 1915 to 15 December 2005) was an Austrian psychiatrist, medical doctor and neurologist, a reputed expert as a leading court-appointed psychiatrist, ill-famed for his proven involvement in the killing of at least nine children with physical, mental and/or emotional/behavioural characteristics considered “unclean” by the Nazi regime, under its Euthanasia Programme. His role in hundreds of other cases of infanticide is unclear. Gross was head of the Spiegelgrund children’s psychiatric clinic for two years during World War II.

A significant element of the controversy surrounding Gross’ activities is that after the children had been murdered, parts of their bodies, particularly their brains, were preserved and retained for future study for decades after the murders. It was only on 28 April 2002 that the preserved remains of these murdered children were finally buried.

Pre-War Career

Heinrich Gross was born in Vienna on 14 November 1915. His parents, Karl and Petronella Gross, were in the wool and knitwear business. His father died before Heinrich was born and his mother placed him in a Catholic boarding school for his early education. He graduated from a public high school in 1934 and received a medical degree in 1939 from the University of Vienna.

In 1932 Gross became a member of the Hitler Youth and joined the Sturmabteilung in 1934. He remained a member throughout the period 1934 to 1938 when these organisations were outlawed in Austria. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gross joined the Nazi Party.

Euthanasia Programme

Euthanasia was commonly practiced long before the infamous Nazi concentration camps. The euthanasia programme was introduced to the German people as an efficient manner to obtain a Master Race for the Nazi people and an economic relief to families. As Nazi popularity grew and the economy still struggling these options were widely accepted by the German people. Am Spiegelgrund was a youth care facility on the grounds of a mental institution. From the years of 1940 to 1945 it was used for mentally handicapped adults or children. During their stay they suffered numerous forms of torture and up to 800 people were murdered there. Gross began in pavilion 15 in November 1940. By 1942 he had killed more children than any other doctor in the hospital. He became the leading psychiatrist and began studying the neurology of mentally handicapped children. With the passing of Aktion T4 the killings increased and Gross began to harvest the brains of his victims for further study. In 1943 Gross was called for military service returning pretty regularly for research until his capture in 1945.

Post-war Career

In the same year of his overturned manslaughter case, Gross was allowed to resume his research at Rose Hill. In 1955, he completed his training as a specialist in nervous and mental diseases and became the head prison doctor or physician in the former Hospital and nursing home Am Steinhof. In 1957 he became the Chief court psychiatrist for men’s mental institutions. There he worked with the justice system in insanity cases and was the main decision maker in all sterilisation cases as well. He got promoted to the management of the “Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the study of the abnormalities of the nervous system” created specially for him in 1968. Gross worked as a reviewer and for years was considered the most busy court expert in Austria. In 1975 the Republic of Austria awarded him the medal für Wissenschaft und Kunst 1, of which he was stripped of in 2003. In 1975 it was realised that he had been involved in illegal killings during the Nazi occupation of Austria. Gross was stripped of many awards but continued serving as a court expert until he came under investigation in 1997 for nine counts of murder.

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein (09 July 1940 to 15 December 2010) was an American social theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, and a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Wolfenstein graduated with his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Columbia College in 1962. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Wolfenstein received his Master of Arts in political science in 1964 and his PhD in political science in 1965 from Princeton University. Wolfenstein became a professor of political science at UCLA.

He also completed a PhD in psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1984. He was the member of the faculty of the institute from 1988 to 2004. Moreover, he was in private practice from the time he received his degree up to the time of his death.

Wolfenstein worked in the critical theory tradition, with a focus on African American culture and social movements. In his book The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution, he used a theory of the interaction between social classes and psychological groups to analyse white racism and the black liberation struggle. He developed a more general version of this theory in Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (1993) and refined it further through engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophy in Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations (2000). These later works add a concern with gender identity to the earlier agenda. His research is in the area of African-American narrative. A Gift of the Spirit: Reading THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (2007) offered a sustained reconstruction of W.E.B. Du Bois’s canonical text. A further study entitled “Talking Books: Toni Morrison Among the Ancestors” was published right before his death.

He was a professor at UCLA. At the undergraduate level, he taught the lower division Introduction to Political Theory, along with Ancient Political Theory, African-American Freedom Narratives, Malcolm X and Black Liberation, Marxist Political Theory, and an occasional seminar on Platonic Dialectic and Spiritual Liberation. At the graduate level, he focused on major works of Du Bois, Foucault, Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, along with the related critical literatures.

His main interests were History of Political Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Theory.

On This Day … 13 December

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Deaths)

  • 1931 – Gustave Le Bon, French psychologist, sociologist, and anthropologist (b. 1840).
  • 1955 – Antonio Egas Moniz, Portuguese psychiatrist and neurosurgeon, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1874)

Gustave Le Bon

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon 07 May 1841 to 13 December 1931) was a leading French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology.

A native of Nogent-le-Rotrou, Le Bon qualified as a doctor of medicine at the University of Paris in 1866. He opted against the formal practice of medicine as a physician, instead beginning his writing career the same year of his graduation. He published a number of medical articles and books before joining the French Army after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Defeat in the war coupled with being a first-hand witness to the Paris Commune of 1871 strongly shaped Le Bon’s worldview. He then travelled widely, touring Europe, Asia and North Africa. He analysed the peoples and the civilisations he encountered under the umbrella of the nascent field of anthropology, developing an essentialist view of humanity, and invented a portable cephalometer during his travels.

In the 1890s, he turned to psychology and sociology, in which fields he released his most successful works. Le Bon developed the view that crowds are not the sum of their individual parts, proposing that within crowds there forms a new psychological entity, the characteristics of which are determined by the “racial unconscious” of the crowd. At the same time he created his psychological and sociological theories, he performed experiments in physics and published popular books on the subject, anticipating the mass-energy equivalence and prophesising the Atomic Age. Le Bon maintained his eclectic interests up until his death in 1931.

Ignored or maligned by sections of the French academic and scientific establishment during his life due to his politically conservative and reactionary views, Le Bon was critical of democracy and socialism. Le Bon’s works were influential to such disparate figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini, Sigmund Freud and José Ortega y Gasset, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin.

Antonio Egas Moniz

António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (29 November 1874 to 13 December 1955), known as Egas Moniz, was a Portuguese neurologist and the developer of cerebral angiography. He is regarded as one of the founders of modern psychosurgery, having developed the surgical procedure leucotomy – ​known better today as lobotomy – ​for which he became the first Portuguese national to receive a Nobel Prize in 1949 (shared with Walter Rudolf Hess).

He held academic positions, wrote many medical articles and also served in several legislative and diplomatic posts in the Portuguese government. In 1911 he became professor of neurology in Lisbon until his retirement in 1944.

On This Day … 11 November

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Events

  • 1934 – Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, takes his last drink and enters treatment for the final time.

People (Deaths)

  • 1966 – Augusta Fox Bronner, American psychologist, specialist in juvenile psychology (b. 1881).
  • 1979 – James J. Gibson, American psychologist and author (b. 1904).

Bill Wilson

You can find an outline of Bill Wilson here.

Augusta Fox Bronner

Augusta Fox Bronner (22 July 1881 to 11 December 1966) was an American psychologist, best known for her work in juvenile psychology. She co-directed the first child guidance clinic, and her research shaped psychological theories about the causes behind child delinquency, emphasizing the need to focus on social and environmental factors over inherited traits.

James J. Gibson

James Jerome Gibson (27 January 1904 to 11 December 1979), was an American psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

On This Day … 09 December

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

  • 1926 – Jan Křesadlo, Czech-English psychologist and author (d. 1995).
  • 1972 – Saima Wazed Hossain, Bangladeshi psychologist.

Jan Kresadlo

Václav Jaroslav Karel Pinkava (09 December 1926 to 13 August 1995), better known by his pen name Jan Křesadlo, was a Czech psychologist who was also a prizewinning novelist and poet.

An anti-communist, Pinkava emigrated to Britain with his wife and four children following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw pact. He worked as a clinical psychologist until his early retirement in 1982, when he turned to full-time writing. His first novel “Mrchopěvci” (GraveLarks) was published by Josef Škvorecký’s emigre publishing house 68 Publishers, and earned the 1984 Egon Hostovský prize.

He chose his pseudonym (which means firesteel) partly because it contains the uniquely Czech sound ř; in addition, he was fond of creating more pseudonyms such as Jake Rolands (an anagram), J. K. Klement (after his grandfather, for translations into English), Juraj Hron (for his Slovak-Moravian writings), Ferdinand Lučovický z Lučovic a na Suchým dole (for his music), Kamil Troud (for his illustrations), Ἰωάννης Πυρεῖα (for his Astronautilia), and more.

Pinkava was also active in choral music, composing (among others) a Glagolitic Mass. As well, he worked in mathematical logic, discovering the many-valued logic algebra which bears his name.

A polymath and polyglot, Pinkava was fond of setting intense goals for himself, such as translating Jaroslav Seifert’s interwoven sonnet cycle about Prague, ‘A Wreath of Sonnets’. He published a collection of his own poems in seven languages. Perhaps his most staggering achievement is ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΙΛΙΑ Hvězdoplavba, a 6575-line science fiction epic poem, an odyssey in classical Homeric Greek, with its parallel hexameter translation into Czech. This was published shortly after his death, in a limited edition. Only his first, prize-winning novel has been published in English translation, as GraveLarks in a bilingual edition in 1999 and in a revised edition in 2015.

He is the father of film director Jan Pinkava who received an Oscar for Geri’s Game in 1998 and also illustrated GraveLarks.

Saima Wazed

Saima Wazed Hossain (born 09 December 1972) is a Bangladeshi autism activist. She is the daughter of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina. She is a member of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) 25-member Expert Advisory Panel on mental health. To her family, she is known simply as “Putul”.

Early Life and Education

She was born to Sheikh Hasina, the present Prime Minister of Bangladesh, and M.A. Wazed Miah, a nuclear scientist. Her brother is Sajeeb Wazed Joy. She graduated from Barry University. She is a licensed school psychologist.

Career

She organized the first South Asian conference on Autism in 2011 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is the chairperson of National Advisory Committee on Autism and Neurodevelopmental disorders. She campaigned for “Comprehensive and Coordinated Efforts for the Management of Autism Spectrum Disorders” resolution at the World Health Assembly which adopted the resolution, Autism Speaks praised her for spearheading “a truly global push for support for this resolution”.

In November, 2016, Wazed had been elected as chairperson of International Jury Board meeting of UNESCO for Digital Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities.

In April 2017, Wazed has been designated as WHO Champion for Autism” in South-East Asia. In July, 2017 she became the Goodwill Ambassador of the WHO for autism in South-East Asia Region.

Award

In 2016, Wazed has conferred WHO’s South-East Asia Region Award for Excellence in Public Health. In 2017, she has been awarded the International Champion Award for her outstanding contribution to the field of autism. She received a distinguished alumni award from Barry University for her activism.

On This Day … 08 December

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

People (Births)

  • 1928 – Ulric Neisser, German-American psychologist, neuroscientist, and academic (d. 2012).
  • 1949 – Robert Sternberg, American psychologist and academic.

Ulric Neisser

Ulric Gustav Neisser (08 December 1928 to 17 February 2012) was a German-born American psychologist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the “father of cognitive psychology”.

Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person’s mental processes could be measured and subsequently analysed. In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviourist psychological paradigms.

Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cognitive Psychology was considered unconventional, it was Neisser’s Cognition and Reality that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser’s advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural (“ecologically valid”) settings.

Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicised studies on people’s memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Robert Sternberg

Robert J. Sternberg (born 08 December 1949) is an American psychologist and psychometrician. He is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. Prior to joining Cornell, Sternberg was president of the University of Wyoming for 5 months. He has been Provost and Professor at Oklahoma State University, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University. He is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, including American Psychologist. He was the past President for the American Psychological Association.

Sternberg has a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University, under advisor Gordon Bower. He holds thirteen honorary doctorates from two North American, one South American, one Asian, and nine European universities, and additionally holds an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany. He is a Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Among his major contributions to psychology are the triarchic theory of intelligence and several influential theories related to creativity, wisdom, thinking styles, love, and hate. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sternberg as the 60th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Sternberg has acquired over $20 million in grants and contracts for his research and has conducted research on five continents. The central focus of his research is on intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. He has also studied close relationships, love, and hatred. He has authored or co-authored over 1,500 publications, including articles, book chapters, and books. His work has been critiqued due to excessive self-citation and self-plagiarism. In 2018 he resigned as the editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science in response to these claims.

Robert Sternberg is married to Karin Sternberg, a German psychologist.

On This Day … 06 December

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

  • 1890 – Dion Fortune, Welsh occultist, psychologist, and author (d. 1946).

People (Deaths)

  • 1961 – Frantz Fanon, Martinique-French psychiatrist and author (b. 1925).

Dion Fortune

Dion Fortune (born Violet Mary Firth, 06 December 1890 to 06 January 1946) was a British occultist, ceremonial magician, novelist and author. She was a co-founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, an occult organisation that promoted philosophies which she claimed had been taught to her by spiritual entities known as the Ascended Masters. A prolific writer, she produced a large number of articles and books on her occult ideas and also authored seven novels, several of which expound occult themes.

Fortune was born in Llandudno, Caernarfonshire, North Wales, to a wealthy upper middle-class English family, although little is known of her early life. By her teenage years she was living in England’s West Country, where she wrote two books of poetry. After time spent at a horticultural college she began studying psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London before working as a counsellor in a psychotherapy clinic. During the First World War she joined the Women’s Land Army and established a company selling soy milk products. She became interested in esotericism through the teachings of the Theosophical Society, before joining an occult lodge led by Theodore Moriarty and then the Alpha et Omega occult organisation.

She came to believe that she was being contacted by the Ascended Masters, including “the Master Jesus”, and underwent trance mediumship to channel the Masters’ messages. In 1922 Fortune and Charles Loveday claimed that during one of these ceremonies they were contacted by Masters who provided them with a text, The Cosmic Doctrine. Although she became the president of the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society, she believed the society to be uninterested in Christianity, and split from it to form the Community of the Inner Light, a group later renamed the Fraternity of the Inner Light. With Loveday she established bases in both Glastonbury and Bayswater, London, began issuing a magazine, gave public lectures, and promoted the growth of their society. During the Second World War she organised a project of meditations and visualisations designed to protect Britain. She began planning for what she believed was a coming post-war Age of Aquarius, although she died of leukaemia shortly after the war’s end.

Fortune is recognised as one of the most significant occultists and ceremonial magicians of the early 20th century. The Fraternity she founded survived her and in later decades spawned a variety of related groups based upon her teachings. Her novels in particular proved an influence on later occult and modern Pagan groups such as Wicca.

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 to 06 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonisation and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria’s War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

For more than five decades, the life and works of Frantz Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organisations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalised care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonisation struggles.

What is International Volunteer Day?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development (05 December), more commonly referred to as International Volunteer Day (IVD), is an international observance mandated by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1985. It offers an opportunity for volunteer-involving organisations and individual volunteers to promote volunteerism, encourage governments to support volunteer efforts and recognise volunteer contributions to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at local, national and international levels.

International Volunteer Day is celebrated by many non-governmental organisations, civil society, and the private sector, among others. It is also marked and supported by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme.

UNV coordinates a campaign to promote IVD every year, building on the impact volunteers have in communities, nationally and globally for peace and development.

In 2018 the focus of IVD is not only to celebrate volunteerism in all its facets, but also to highlight the role that volunteers play in building resilient communities. It is worth noting that current estimates equate the global volunteer workforce to 109 million full-time workers. 30% of volunteering that takes place formally through organisations, associations and groups; and 70% occurs through informal engagement between individuals. Overall, 60% of the informal volunteers are women.

Background

IVD is a chance for individual volunteers, communities and organisations to promote their contributions to development at the local, national and international levels. By combining UN support with a grassroots mandate, IVD is a unique opportunity for people and volunteer-involving organisations to work with government agencies, non-profit institutions, community groups, academia and the private sector.

The International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development was adopted by the UN General Assembly through Resolution A/RES/40/212 on 17 December 1985.

In 2012, in response to evolving experiences and recommendations, the UNV programme spearheaded a Five-Year IVD Strategy, with the aim to make it more globally recognised and grassroots-owned.

Celebration of IVD and the Themes

In the last six years, IVD was celebrated each year in over 80 countries annually. The IVD website receives around 50,000 page views every year, with around 150 stories posted which highlight over 50,000 volunteers, photos and videos of celebrations worldwide.

  • IVD 2018 – “Volunteers build Resilient Communities”:
    • IVD 2018 celebrates volunteer efforts that strengthen local ownership and the resilience of the community in the face of natural disasters, economic stresses and political shocks.
    • The event on 05 December 2018 will focus on how volunteers can build resilient communities.
  • IVD 2017 – “Volunteers Act First. Here. Everywhere.”:
    • The focus of IVD 2017 was to recognize the positive solidarity of volunteers around the world who answer calls in times of crisis, helping save lives today and supporting those who want to continue living their lives with dignity tomorrow.
  • IVD 2016 – “Global Applause – give volunteers a hand”:
    • Under this theme, IVD presented a round of global applause to celebrate volunteers everywhere and encouraged others to join in and contribute to peace and sustainable development.
  • IVD 2015 – “Your world is changing. Are you? Volunteer!”:
    • The goal of IVD 2015 was to start a dialogue about how volunteerism is vital to the success of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda.
  • IVD 2014 – “Make change happen, volunteer!”:
    • The goal of IVD 2014 was to highlight the contribution of volunteers in engaging people from the grassroots in decision-making processes, ultimately creating spaces for participation that lead to stronger governance, social cohesion, peace and sustainable development.
  • IVD 2013 – “Young. Global. Active.”:
    • The goal of the event was to pay special tribute to the contribution of youth volunteers to global peace and sustainable human development, highlighting that young people act as agents of change in their communities.
  • IVD 2012 – “Celebrate volunteering”:
    • The event celebrated its commitment and hope for a better world. The main focus of IVD 2012 was awareness of and recognition for volunteers and volunteer organisations.

A Focus on Partnership and Development

Through the years, IVD has been used strategically: many countries have focused on volunteers’ contributions to achieving the SDGs, a set of time-bound targets to combat poverty, hunger, disease, health, environmental degradation and gender equality.

IVD celebrates active volunteers and attracts new volunteers in the North and in the South, with a special focus on promoting South-South cooperation.

The organisation of IVD is generally the result of a partnership between the UN system, governments, volunteer-involving organisations and committed individuals. Representatives from the media or academia, foundations, the private sector, faith groups, and sports and recreational organisations are often involved too.

The General Assembly invited Governments to observe annually, on 05 December, the International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development (resolution 40/212 of 17 December 1985) and urged them to take measures to heighten awareness of the important contribution of volunteer service, thereby stimulating more people in all walks of life to offer their services as volunteers, both at home and abroad.

The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 52/17 of 20 November 1997, proclaimed 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers (IYV). The year was conceived to further the recognition of volunteers, facilitate their work, create a communication network and promote the benefits of voluntary service.

In 2001, the International Year of Volunteers, the General Assembly adopted a set of recommendations on ways in which Governments and the United Nations system could support volunteering and asked that they be given wide dissemination (resolution 56/38 of 05 December 2001).

The UN General Assembly, in its resolution 57/106 of 22 November 2002, called upon the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme to ensure that the potential of International Volunteer Day is fully realized.

On 18 December 2008, the General Assembly decided that on or around 05 December 2011, two plenary meetings of the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly should be devoted to the follow-up to the International Year of Volunteers and the commemoration of its tenth anniversary (resolution 63/153).

Online Volunteering Award

Traditionally, on International Volunteer Day (05 December), UNV calls for nominations and launches the UNV Online Volunteering Award. A jury made up of UNV representatives and external experts in volunteerism and development cooperation reviews the nominations and selects the winners.

The UNV programme invites citizens worldwide to be inspired by the winner’s stories and participate in the global voting for their favourite winner. The team that gets the most votes is announced as the public’s favourite on the International Day of Happiness.

The purpose of the award is to recognise online volunteers’ contributions towards achieving the SDGs, to showcase the many ways in which online volunteers can strengthen the capacities of organisations and to demonstrate the difference volunteers can make to peace and development projects by sharing their time, skills and expertise over the Internet.

On This Day … 05 December

Published on by Andrew Marshall3 Comments

People (Births)

  • 1901 – Milton H. Erickson, American psychiatrist and author (d. 1980).

Milton H. Erickson

Milton Hyland Erickson (05 December 1901 to 25 March 1980) was an American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy.

He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association.

He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.