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Hypochondria and Its Discontents, or, the Geriatric Sublime
In the third Conflict of the Faculties, virtually the last text published within his own lifetime, Immanuel Kant runs through a ridiculous catalogue of (his own) hypochondriac afflictions and offers a panoply of philosophical prescriptions for alleviating these — the " power of the mind to master its sickly feelings by sheer resolution. " Some readers seize on this scenario as an unwitting parody of Kant's own transcendental project: the comedy seems to stage an empirical dress rehearsal of the systematic opposition between the empirical and the transcendental and suggests the structural contamination of the very ideal of purity by the pathology it wants to master. A well-trodden dialectical approach, from Hegel and Nietzsche through Freud and Adorno, discerns in this tizzy of stage-management the perfect case history of the dialectic of enlightenment, ascetic ideology, or the return of the repressed: the very success of the will would be the measure of its failure, the obsession with pathology the ultimate pathology — the return of mythic nature in the most strenuous efforts to control it. This dialectical approach is compelling but it underplays both the perversity of the scenario and its strange theatricality. It also overlooks the startling practical implications — at once biopolitical, ideological, economic, institutional, and aesthetic — of Kant's peculiar experiment. A strange note on which to end a treatise dedicated to the pedagogical imperatives of the Prussian state.
From Hypochondria to Convalescence Health as Chronic Critique in Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari
Deleuze Studies 4.2 Special Issue: The Symptom, 2010
In 1886, Nietzsche wrote: 'I am still waiting for a philosophical doctor in the extraordinary sense of the term': a doctor who pursues not truth, but an exceptional kind of health. Nietzsche's will to health, his theory of drive organisation, and his insistence that the philosopher put himself at risk, all work together in his overall project, which consists of taking up the very role of the highly revalued physician for whom he is waiting. Deleuze and Guattari engage this same task of a revalued doctoring in the Capitalisme et Schizophrénie books, attacking the disease of oedipality and providing instructions for the deorganisation of the organism as self-cure. Offering tips on this radical treatment, they employ the figure of the hypochondriac to show how it can fail. Both Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari perform a revaluation of health as a condition of chronic critique, a condition that wraps itself around illness to keep itself critical.
Unpublished, 1991
Freud’s biographers and other writers on psychoanalysis have often dismissed as insignificant Freud’s specific claim that he was inspired by Goethe’s essay ‘On Nature’ to take up the study of medicine. Others, like Fritz Wittels and Walter Kaufmann, have recognised Goethe’s imprint on Freud’s ideas. This MA thesis, written in 1991, examines the evidence that Goethe exerted an influence on Freud in three distinct areas; the scientific, the psychological and the philosophical. Goethe’s influence in the scientific arena appears to have been exaggerated by Kaufmann, while that of Helmholtz, Brücke and Meynert is underestimated by him. However, Wittels’ idea that Freud used paradigmatic cases in the same way as Goethe seems to be supported by the evidence. Freud strongly hinted at a psychological influence, but this has been largely ignored by writers about Freud; a great deal of material is found to demonstrate this aspect. A separate chapter is devoted to the early scenes of Faust, Part I, because they particularly well illustrate this point. In the philosophical area there is much to be said in favour of Kaufmann’s view that Freud was influenced by existentialist ideas, although it is also argued that Freud was either unaware of this tendency in himself, or at least resisted it. The idea of the ‘daemonic’ is considered to be a crucial existential element in Goethe’s thought, but Freud appears to have found no place for this concept in his psychology. In the concluding chapter a few remarks are made about the practical implications of the findings of this thesis. An Appendix examines the interconnection between Goethe, Freud and Judaism.
Nietzsche's Goethe: In Sickness and in Health
Publications of the English Goethe Society, 2008
This article re-evaluates Nietzsche's view of Goethe by analyzing the function and significance of the term "Goethe" in Nietzsche’s writings. While Nietzsche's attitude to Goethe is indisputably complex, it is argued here that the image of Goethe presented in Nietzsche's writings is the exception which proves the rule that his engagements with historical figures are characterized by deliberate ambivalence and/or violent shifts in attitude. While Nietzsche's view of Goethe is not wholly uncritical, the ambivalence which characterizes Nietzsche's intellectual (and emotional) encounters with other outstanding figures in Western culture is largely absent from his engagement with Goethe. Throughout Nietzsche's writings, Goethe is associated in invariably positive ways with diagnoses of cultural health and sickness, notably with Nietzsche's assessments of Greek antiquity, "Erziehung", Classicism and Romanticism, Christianity, Wagner, decadence, the "German question", Napoleon, "Lebensbejahung", and the symbolic figure of Dionysus. Increasingly and obsessively, however, Goethe comes to be linked in Nietzsche's mind with exemplary physical and mental health, to the extent that he presents Goethe as both a promise of the posited "Übermensch" and as an idealized self-projection or self-affirmation.
In the prefatory note to his definitive edition of the Fable of the bees, 1 Frederick Kaye claimed that he had 'not passed these last years in Mandeville's company without an ever-deepening certainty of his literary greatness', leaving future generations of scholars the opportunity to expound on this aspect of Mandeville's work. Notwithstanding the intricate composition of the Fable of the bees itself, published in three successive phases and featuring a long poem, a set of philosophical remarks and a dialogue, the best example of the literary qualities mentioned by Kaye is certainly -and perhaps surprisingly -Mandeville's Treatise of the hypochondriack and hysterick diseases, the only medical work ever written in English by the Dutch physician. When, in 1711, the first version of what was then entitled A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions appeared, 2 Bernard Mandeville had already published a translation of La Fontaine (Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine), Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants: a burlesque poem in imitation of the comical Mons. Scarron (1704), The Grumbling hive -the first version of the text which was reissued in 1714 with a set of philosophical remarks as The Fable of the bees -and The Virgin unmask'd, a dialogue upon love and marriage between an old woman and her niece. 3 The initial version of the Treatise was reprinted in 161 1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the bees, ed. Frederick B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford, 1924). 2. B. Mandeville, A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions, vulgarly call'd the hypo in men and vapours in women, in which the symptoms, causes, and cure of those diseases are set forth after a method entirely new, the whole interspers'd, with instructive discourses on the real art of physic itself, and entertaining remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries, very useful to all, that have the misfortune to stand in need of either, in three dialogues (London, Dryden Leach, 1711). 3. Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine (London, 1703) followed by an enlarged version (AEsop dress'd, London, R. Wellington, 1704), this edition contains Mandeville's translation of La Fontaine's 'Les membres et l'estomac', which heralds the passages on the supremacy of digestion included in the Treatise and hints at the body as a metaphor of government used in The Fable of the bees (see vol.1, p.3). Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants (London, J. Pero, 1704); The Grumbling hive, or Knaves turn'd honest (London, S. Ballard, 1705); The Virgin unmask'd (London, J. Morphew, 1709). 1715 with no changes by the same publisher. 4 Fifteen years later, a second edition 'corrected and enlarged by the author' was printed; Mandeville altered the title, added about a hundred new pages and took out certain parts. 5 With the Treatise, Mandeville returned to medical literature, which he had somewhat neglected since his university years in Leyden, where he matriculated in philosophy in 1685 and graduated in 1691 with a doctoral degree in medicine. Indeed, apart from this larger work, his only forays into medical writing had hitherto been limited to his production as a student. He wrote his inaugural thesis in 1685 (Bernardi à Mandeville de medicina oratio scholastica), followed by another philosophical dissertation on animal functions in 1689 (Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus). Finally, in 1691, he defended his medical thesis on the subject of digestion (Disputatio medica inauguralis de chylosi vitiata) and substantial portions of this text were later incorporated in the Treatise.
German-French Dialogue in the Building of Classical Psychiatry, Berlin 2017 World Congress, Symposium Section History of Psychiatry, World Psychiatric Association, 2017
Authors: SINZELLE J, SUCH G, CRAUS Y, CHARBIT P, PETERS UH, BERRIOS GE. Pr German E BERRIOS p.3 - Introduction. Pr Dr Uwe Henrik PETERS p.5 - Foreword. Dr Gaetan SUCH p.7 - Dissociation: A “Split” Concept Between French and German Psychiatry. Dr Yann CRAUS p.13 - Following Out the Concept of Paranoia: A Paradigm for Epistemology of Psychiatry. Dr Jérémie SINZELLE p.19 - A Hundred Years of Dementia Praecox: Grandeur and Decay of a Disease of the Will. Dr Patrice CHARBIT p.25 - Political Psychiatry, or Psychiatric Policies? INTRODUCTION Professor German E. Berrios (United Kingdom) (1) (2) (1) Section Chair, History of Psychiatry, WPA. (2) Emeritus Chair of the Epistemology of Psychiatry, Life-Fellow Robinson College, University of Cambridge, UK During the 19th century the construction of Psychiatry (a term of German origin) was due to an interesting combination of French and German views. This dovetailing was made possible by the cultural ferment going on in Europe at the time. Often presented as synonyms, concepts such as discordance, dissociation, Spaltung, splitting, etc. had different conceptual provenance and each Psychiatric culture used differently to explain dissimilar phenomena. For example, there were horizontal and vertical dissociations, functional and structural forms of splitting, etc. etc. This explains their different explanatory functionality as in the case of Freud’s ego theories or Bleuler’s Schizophrenia. The concept of Schizophrenia itself was a major conceptual departure from the Kraepelinian concept of Dementia praecox whose roots can be traced back to both Morel and Pick. The concept of paranoia also underwent conceptual transformation in both German and French psychiatry and the resulting definitional dissimilarities became unresolvable by the 1920s. In the event the concept was replaced by the inane diagnosis of delusional disorder. The four speakers are young French clinicians who carefully studied French and German psychiatry by reading the ancient sources in the original texts. FOREWORD Pr Dr Uwe Henrik Peters, MD, PhD, hc (Germany) (1) (2) (1) Emeritus Chair, Klinik für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie. Medical College. Universität zu Köln. Germany. (2) Former President. DGPPN, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Nervenheilkunde. Sektion Geschichte der Psychiatrie. This symposium is about classical psychopathology, what means about the pathology of psyche. French as well as German psychiatrists in the past had built up a doctrine how to observe illness signs and structures in a given patient, how to interpret the observations, how to give names to it and how to use it for diagnosing. In our times, when psychiatric brain researchers try to find technical, chemical and physical, possibilities for diagnosing and treating illnesses of the psyche, psychopathology seems to be unnecessary. However for philosophical reasons it is even impossible to reach such a goal of a technological psychiatry, as Thomas Fuchs in Heidelberg has evidenced. In this situation it is necessary to return to classical psychiatry and psychopathology. History in general and history of psychiatry does not repeat itself. Therefore Psychopathology in the future will have to incorporate histories, history of an illness, life history of the person, history of the time and history of the past. Neither American nor British psychiatry own the premises, the preconditions for working out the future psychopathology, but French and German psychiatries do. Since DSM III-V and ICD-10 or -11 in this respect are completely unsatisfying, it will be necessary to build up a new continental European system of mental disturbances. For this it is a good Aristotelian manner of human sciences to in the first step recapitulate the classical past. The papers of this symposium deal exactly with that. The only but important problem, which I see, concerns language. As Harald Weinrich, the only German Professor with chair at the Collège de France, has pointed out, the French-German friendship is a friendship without language. In spite of the fact that this symposium has to be in globalesic English language, it will demonstrate at the same time a new beginning, away from monolingualism but towards plurilingualism.