Brainwashing

“ The congenitally deficient brain is the brain of the low-class savage, approaching the brute, or the brain in which some part is wanting, rudimentary, or stunted. The possessors of these brains must inevitably be criminals in civilised society, belonging as they do to a lower plane of development. Where the intellectual deficiency is very extreme, idiocy or lunacy is admitted, and the sufferer is regarded as "irresponsible"; but where he shows any comprehension of causation he is held as a criminal when he disregards law. ”

“ Those doctors who have devised a system of tortures, such as hunger cures, dark rooms, prohibition of letters, painful electric currents, etc. in order to extort from the patients the abandonment of their neurotic symptoms, unconsciously recognise the Freudian theory by the inversion of its fundamental principles. They make a torture of the treatment in order to force the neurotic “to flee into health”. The doctor schooled in psycho-analysis does not need to hound in the opposite direction his patients who have been driven into illness. ”

“ It is much more conducive to cure than the system of perfect separation and exclusion from any association. This truth is another important reason for being anxious, from the best of motives, to remove these baneful prejudices which have hitherto made a marked moral line of distinction between diseases of the brain, and other parts of the system, exclusively and absurdly making the former a proof of some shameful criminality. ”

“ While we all allow that extensive or recognizable diseases of, or injuries to, the brain, free a man from responsibility and punishment, how can we logically mete out blame or praise, punishment or reward to our ordinary acts, thoughts, and impulses, seeing that all our acts, thoughts, and impulses, good or bad, virtuous or criminal, are equally the mere expressions of certain inevitable physical changes in the brain, the mere register on the dial plate of consciousness of necessary predetermined complications in the working of certain atoms of the gray matter of our cortex? ”

“ When the disease is established, the patient has paroxysms of violence directed against himself as well as others. He tears his clothes to pieces, either abstains from food and drink or eats voraciously, and sustains immense muscular exertion without apparent fatigue. The face becomes flushed, the eye wild and sparkling; there is pain, weight, and giddiness in the head, with restlessness.
General Intellectual Mania, attacking the intellect alone, is rare; but some one emotion or passion, as pride, vanity, or love of gain, may obtain ascendancy, and fill the mind with intellectual delusions. ”

“ And should we really sacrifice so much for the eradication of the neuroses, if the world is filled with other inevitable misery? Should we therefore give up our efforts to explain the secret meaning of the neurosis as being in the end dangerous for the individual and for the workings of society, and should we waive the right of drawing practical conclusions from a fragment of scientific knowledge? No. I believe that notwithstanding all, our duty moves us to another direction. For the morbid gain of the neurosis is on the whole harmful for the individuals and for society. ”

“ Insanity can be alleviated,—but much, if not all, of that psychopathic misery known as functional, mental diseases is entirely preventable. For it is the result of our pitiful, wretched, brain-starving, mind-crippling, terrifying and terrorizing system of education. ”

“ The more the differences were reduced, the more we should become sensitive even for the smaller variations. All that society can do is, therefore, not to remodel the manifoldness of brains, but to shape the conditions of life in such a way that the weak and unstable brains also have a greater chance to live their lives without conflicts with the community.
The situation is different as soon as the particular surroundings have brought it about that such a brain with reduced powers has entered a criminal career. The thought of crime now becomes a sort of obsession or rather an autosuggestion. ”

“ The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled; prejudice—the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion—takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by on-lookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease. ”

“ Here, we have a striking proof of the immediate action of the mind upon the body,—of mental disorder instantaneously producing physical derangement, having the power to corrupt the purest juices of the system, and even to extend its deleterious effects to a second individual,—to communicate disorder and pain to an innocent infant. So powerful and so immediate is moral evil in producing physical. ”

“ Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? ”

“ It has been discovered on Earth that crime is the result of a diseased brain, and with us this discovery, in time, developed the fact that wrong-doing, even in its minor phases, is the result of physical ill health. ”

“ It seldom takes longer than five hours to complete the brain-washing. You pass through three stages. At the end of an hour—or two, at most—when the torment becomes almost unbearable you start to hallucinate a little, but you're still sane enough to answer most of the questions they ask you. Then you become so hopelessly psychotic that your answers can no longer be relied on. But they're satisfied, they've got what they wanted from you when they started the interrogation. ”

“ But there are no laws for the protection of their brains from the attacks of ignorant parents and guardians, the insidious warfare of the compilers of school-books who write treatises on physiology in rhyme for infants, and the ever-ready schoolmaster, who, with the child, a victim of a pernicious system, must carry out the behests of those set over him.
Every person who has tried both knows that an hour of intense mental exertion fatigues the whole system more than does a corresponding amount of the most severe physical work. ”

“ Some day it arranges its limited number of words into a new thought, a bad thought, our idle mind grasps the significance of the new thought, and we give birth to a new piece of scandal, or we commit a crime. The brain is pleased, because the execution of the new bad impulse brought more blood, more vitality to it, and it gets the habit of thinking bad thoughts and conveying evil impulses. They were the product of idleness of mind. And as a matter of statistical fact, all tragedies, crimes, vices, scandal, gossip and misery are direct products of mental inertness or idleness. ”

“ It may be stated that the relation between crime and insanity, especially weak-mindedness, is one of the most intimate character, both in regard to the people who commit criminal acts and their descendants. Our examination of the mental condition of convicts, and of their physiognomy and cerebral development, has long convinced us that a large number of this class are mentally deficient: sometimes from birth; at other times their mental development being arrested by their wretched bringing up. ”

“ But these causes are in no other way operative in producing insanity than by unduly exciting the brain. By neglect of moral discipline, a character is formed subject to violent passions, and to extreme emo [310] tions and anxiety from the unavoidable evils and disappointments of life, and thus the brain, by being often and violently agitated, becomes diseased; and by too early exercising and prematurely developing the mental powers, this organ is rendered more susceptible and liable to disease.
"I am confident there is too much mental labor imposed upon youth at our schools and colleges. ”

“ Instead of this, parents frequently add fuel to the fever of the brain, by supplying constant mental stimulus, until the victim finds refuge in idiocy or an early grave. Where such fatal results do not occur, the brain, in many cases, is so weakened, that the prodigy of infancy sinks below the medium of intellectual powers in afterlife. In our colleges, too, many of the most promising minds sink to an early grave, or drag out a miserable existence, from this same cause. And it is an evil, as yet little alleviated by the increase of physiological knowledge. ”

“ It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life.
The psychopathic diathesis can be overcome by dispelling the darkness of ignorance and credulity with their false fears and deceptive hopes, above all, by fortifying the critical, controlling, guiding consciousness. Let in sun and air into the obscure cobwebbed regions of the child and man. The gloom and the ghosts of the fear instinct are dispersed by the light of reason. ”

“ Attacking the brain, they warp the judgment, and weaken the power of restraint. Avoid what is called good living: it is madness to allow the pleasures of the table to corrupt and corrode the human body. ”

“ Poverty causes ill health, and malnutrition saps the power of self-control.
Medical science is even now telling us that there is probably no form of criminal tendency unrelated to physiological defects: brain-cells poisoned by disease; brain-cells defective either through heredity—as in the offspring of the feeble-minded—or enfeebled through malnutrition in childhood, the offspring of want; brains slightly out of balance; and, more rarely, the criminal impulse developed as the result of direct injury to the brain caused by a blow. ”

“ All exhaustions, all moral failings have the closest connection with neuroses and psychoses.
These reflections prove to us that the alienist physician should interest himself more and more in the treatment of neuroses even slight, to rectifying the disorders of temper, to the education of the young, to the direction of the moral hygiene of his country. On many of these points America leads the way; your works of social hygiene, the good battle you are righting against alcoholism, are examples for us. You are the new world, younger, not rendered so inactive by secular habits. ”

“ It arose from his diseased mental condition, and the solution of the problem of his life can be obtained only by tracing back his history to the unfavorable circumstances of his childhood, acting upon a brain in all probability predisposed to disease.
Should such a man be interfered with? Interference could not be made on account of the neglect of his property, or of his mode of life. But, conceding his insanity, would it have been desirable to place him under care? ”

“ Nothing is destructible in mind as long as the brain-tissue is normal; you put it in prison, and after the lapse of many years, owing, perhaps, to some slight declension in brain power, it broke out, dominated you, and lived again. Youth must be served. ”

“ But while affirming that the disease usually arises in the body, and even frequently in parts far removed from the brain, we must not deny nor ignore the fact that intellectual and protracted worry, or sudden and violent grief, can also be the direct cause of disturbance in the brain. For the brain is the organ not of the imagination alone, which is put to an unhealthy strain by excessive mental labor, but probably also of the passions, whose emotions when excessive may cause even permanent lesion. Hence mental insanity may and does often arise from ill-subdued passions. ”

“ There will be fretfulness, or ill-nature, or selfish exactions, or mental obscurity, or unreasoning demands, or, it may be, vicious and cruel propensities, where, when the brain was undisturbed by disease, reason held rule with patience and loving kindness. If the disease which has attacked the brain goes on increasing, the mental disease which follows as a consequence of organic disturbance or deterioration, will have increased also, until insanity may be established in some one or more of its many sad and varied forms. ”

“ As this state of brain is fatal to sleep, and therefore to needful repose of brain, every sufferer has a remedy which he finds more or less available. This usually consists in some form of effort to throw the thoughts off the track upon which they are moving. Almost every literary biography has some instance of this difficulty, and some hint as to the sufferer's method of freeing his brain from the despotism of a ruling idea or a chain of thought. ”

“ Pallor of countenance, nervous and rheumatic affections, loss of memory, epilepsy, paralysis, and insanity find their principal predisposing cause in the same shameful waste of life. The want of moral force and strength of mind often observable in youths and young men is largely induced by this destructive and deadly sin. ”

“ They may have noticed it, but very few can have had the same opportunities as myself of seeing the reality and force of this mania, and possibly no one has ever racked their brains or searched their mind as I have in the vain endeavour to find some method of saving these people from themselves, and of helping them in the strenuous but fruitless battle that many of them fight. ”

“ The cultivation of credulity, the absence of critical judgment and of recognition of evil, with consequent increase of suggestibility, make man an easy prey to all kinds of social delusions, mental epidemics, religious crazes, financial manias, and political plagues, which have been the baleful pest of aggregate humanity in all ages.
The immunization of children, the development of resistance to mental germs whether moral, immoral or religious, can only be effected by the medical man with a psychological and psychopathological training. ”