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Mental Illness, Psychiatry, and Communism
- Rutgers University Press
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Mental Illness, Psychiatry, and Communism Thea H. (b. 1923) An Experience of Psychosis in Post–World War II Germany (1949) The experience of hallucination (perceiving someone or something that is really not there) has long been recognized in Western society as a characteristic feature of mental disorder. While ethnopsychiatrists and historians have noted some striking similarities in the form that hallucinations have assumed over history, it is also clear that the content of psychotic experiences differs across societies and time periods. The following is an excerpt from a letter written by a German woman, Thea H. (her name has been changed to protect her identity), to her doctors in the spring of 1949, shortly after she was checked into the psychiatric clinic at the Charit é Hospital in East Berlin. It offers us a unique glimpse into the mind of a person still actively hallucinating. Thea H.’s case is particularly instructive in that it takes place against the backdrop of the end of World War II. Following the war, both Germany and the city of Berlin were divided into zones of military occupation (American, British, French, and Russian). Thea H. was a student living in West Berlin at this time. Hospital records indicate that she was a devout communist, a fact that appar312 ently led to her being arrested by the Nazis and held in a concentration camp during the years 1943–1945. Over the course of the four years following her release from the camp, she found herself in and out of psychiatric institutions, including the facility at Haldensleben, under the direction of Dr. Ziegelrot. There, doctors may well have administered electroshock to her, this being a common form of treatment for schizophrenia at the time. 28 May 1949 So, you want to know everything—from the point of the events, so to speak, up to this present moment when my powers have left me? I will now try again to make visible the order of events and all those powers that affect being and consciousness—external events, perception, thoughts into words—will words be enough to convey an alien consciousness? I don’t know, but I will nevertheless demonstrate my good intentions. It was already there in those days and in those thoughts that circled around in my head. Its central point was that paper about transportation, its statistics, and the question about to what extent it served as a mirror image of economic development. Economic development—how varied are its factors and how pathetic, by contrast, are the indicators of transportation statistics. I had rummaged around, combined, rejected and could not recognize the standard picture of simple production numbers in correlation with the track lengths and shipping. The organic structure of capitalism appeared to me much more significant. It must provide the basis for the connection of the real relationships between the transportation process and the normal production processes. On this question of a mistaken assessment of the matter of organic structure, I went to Lenin and Stalin for advice. Suddenly the wonderful conceptual formulation of the organic structure fell into place. . . . After having finished the reassessment and formulation of the basic thinking of my essay in my paper “Costs and Prices,” which hardly struck me in the end as my own product, I chatted with Stalin about the question of the dialectic in connection with the immortality of the human soul. I explained to him that I could not believe in the immortality of the soul on the basis of the theory of dialectics alone. . . . Dialectical materialism teaches that the Psychosis in Post–World War II Germany — 313 [18.221.187.121] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:19 GMT) highest form of living material is the brain as the organ of consciousness. If this highest form of living material dies as a consequence of the death of the human body and, in its wake, the brain is transformed into its inorganic parts, then a qualitative change must result that we cannot yet pursue in reality, in the sense of the Leninist approach to human knowledge. Stalin replied to this: “My dear child, naturally you are right, for those invisible unities of consciousness are just the very things that are at the disposal of our active and developing consciousness in order to point out those processes of the past that still have an effect in the present.” . . . In the course of the argument I was having, a terrible doubt about the adequacy of my capacity for...