On the banks of the Rio Grande
the broken body of a man and his 2 years old daughter lays facedown. They died
overwhelmed by water still clinging desperately to one another in a parody of
love turned to stone. In Washington a 70 years old billionaire with orange hair
and the personality of a 2 years old pours hate and loathing out of his mouth.
Although he is 70 he has the personality of a 2 years old and the thin skin
that can only come from a large ego and the limits of unknowing. Like the
little boy drowned washed onto shore in Turkey some 3 years ago the images food
out across social media while those throughout the west bury their head in
denial. “The strong men” like Erdogan, Trump and Oban turn their heads away and
dress themselves in shark skinned suits and lead Pied-piperlike call masses of
people away from compassion and concern.
In Swansea the chattering
runs on. They call upon admins of Facebook groups to take away the image. They
claim to be non-political and yet this claim is a denial of their unknowing and
ignorance. At best the image is so frightening that in a distant part of our
mind we hide and fly from the image of our partner and child laying face down
on a river bank far away. As the chattering runs on they deny climate change,
the poverty of the third world and the arms trade.
Yet on the same page two
or three weeks ago the chattering turns to moans about immigrants with 42 inch
televisions who take all the jobs and also claim benefits. This is the Facebook
page of Schrodinger`s immigrant. The discourse is strangely seen as
non-political and yet the denial of death prevents a waking up to reality and
so the images removed from their page and they go back to their happy
chattering about food and holidays and the fear of the other.
And yet deep within they
know very well that climate change, shortage of meaning and a denial of the
truth makes them uncomfortable as they shiver uncomfortably in the mornings.
The family historian accuses me of lack of decorum and fails to see his own denial. Conservatism long
ago was revealed as empiricism tempered by prejudice. Welcome to the chattering
of Swansea. The fear runs on the denial grows. There is darkness here and the
chatters do not wish to look when the darkness in their world into sex with the
darkness spilled from the mouth of the shark skinned billionaires who rule the
world, listen to Forage and Johnson, let them tell you tales that keep the
ghosts away until you are alone and afraid.
1. Roman World. Lunacy:
Lat. Luna = moon; moonstruck [poet, lover]; Brewer (1), SOED (2).
Roman beliefs included influence of moon on mental derangement.
2. Old English. Madness:
a broad concept, variously from Old English, gemad = insane; Old
Saxon, gimed = foolish; Old High German, gemeit = vain, foolish,
boastful. By M16-L16, SOED gives mad folly, great foolishness. ‘Master in
lunacy’ was a legal officer, concerned with definitions & legality of
incarceration. Roget (3) offers ‘Devil to pay’, ‘hell broke loose’, ‘all the
fat in the fire’, ‘pretty kettle of fish’ and other synonyms.
3. 1407 A.D. Bedlam:
vocal shortening of ‘Royal Bethlem Hospital, London; a Priory since 1247, then
an institution for the insane - ‘madhouse’, ‘wild uproar’, ‘a bedlam’. By 1815,
moved to Lambeth, London. By 1852 synonyms (3) included: madman, lunatic,
bedlamite; dreamer, rhapsodist, enthusiast; fanatic, idiot, knight errant;
mash, mess, muddle; tangled skein, knot, Babel, ferment, turmoil. [see (22:
Index) for Lewis Carroll’s usage of many of these]. Mad-doctor: Lat. insanus,
a specialist carer of the insane, the mad.
5. L18. Alienisms,
Alienist: pre-psychiatric terms, now obsolete. From Lat. alienus =
different, foreign, beyond society. ‘Mad-doctors’ now become ‘alienists’.
6. M19. Psychiatry:
formal medico-psychological term for appropriate care, under- standing,
diagnosis. L19, Psychiatrist (2). From Gk. Psyche + iatros.
7. M19. Psychopathology,
psychopathologist: 1872, Charcot at Paris; 1880, Breuer at Vienna; 1886,
Freud at Vienna.
8. Historical. Childhood
mental disorder: the near universal historical and cultural abuse and
neglect of many children, by adults and societies themselves generally with
illness and suffering from spiritual and psychological alienation; together
with rarer underlying feeblemindedness [‘the village idiot’] and/or other
biological handicaps or disfigurement; often with prejudicial economic/social
rulings, incarcerations, semi-legal dictates, as opposed to informed
medical-psychological assessment and care. Exceptions at individual levels;
spiritual houses, priories; 19th-cent., early pedagogy.
9. E20. Child Psychopathology:
formal and directed study of childhood mental disorders; supported by credible
psychological models/theory, beyond mere lay care and observation. Contrary to
view of Schatz (7a) and a few others, not a significant nineteenth-century
development in C. L. Dodgson-Lewis Carroll’s active lifetime, nor before c.
1890-1900, with the passing of prior phases of moral condemnation and
restraint, hypnosis and suggestion, and the electro-therapy of Erb’s 1882 Handbuch.
The Royal
Bethlehem Hospital (now the
Imperial War Museum) designed by James Lewis in 1815 with important additions
by Sydney Smirke, 1835-1846. Click on image to enlarge it.
By 1815, when the Royal Bethlem
Hospital for the Insane (The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, London) was
removed from Moorgate, north of the River Thames, to Lambeth-Southwark, south
of the river, the asylum had long developed an odious reputation and common
name — of ‘Bedlam’, whose many discharged but uncured inmates, often
previously licensed to beg, were the “Tm o’ Bedlam” and “Jack o’ Bedlam” of the
sprawling unhygienic metropolis and its disorderly masses.
The dreadful reputation of the place and its
mad-doctors [doctors-in-charge of the mad] drew fierce condemnation from
Parliament, which voted on Bills of the Select Committee on Madhouses, and
Bills to amend the laws for Regulation of Pauper Lunatics. Foremost among
campaigners for improvements — to the physical, hygienic and
socio-economic conditions of hapless inmates, though scarcely yet their medical
and psychological care — was Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1801-1885, Seventh
Earl of Shaftesbury:1
Shaftesbury thus became the leading governmental Commissioner in Lunacy, and
Chairman of The Board, 1829- 1885, op. cit., p. 132. His experiences were vivid
and real — of “fearful evils” being perpetrated upon “unhappy persons”,
“outcasts”, full of “pain” and neglect, whom he witnessed would “writhe under
supposed contempt”, ibid, 130. Lord Ashley’s name rightly stood “at the head”
of those Lunacy Commissioners whose struggles eventually provided for the
“mighty change in the treatment” of lunacy, via the County Asylums system,
whether for genuine cases of dissociation [from reality]-insanity, or spurious
incarcerations of ‘inconvenient’ people.2 Specialist psychiatric historians, such as R.
H. Rollin and Z. Kotowicz, have indicated how formal care models and associated
treatment regimes at that period were still far from efficacious, humane or
logical-impartial, and often continued a tradition of critical blame
— both secular and religious — heaped upon the inmates, together with
a deleterious marked separation of interest from and by the general medical
profession.3
Thus,
(a) James Prichard, MD, 1786-1848,
offered the diagnosis of ‘moral insanity’, which was rapidly and
enthusiastically taken up.4
(b) Sir Alexander Morison,
1779-1866, routinely described child-patients through the above system, finding
them “violent”, “mischievous” and “incoherent of speech”. Six year-old Eliza,
admitted in 1842 with convulsions, was given into the care [sic] of an older
patient [sic], and discharged ‘cured’ after two years (cited in Kotowicz).
( c) the saintly Dr. Isaac Watts,
DD, 1674-1748, though long dead and departed, maintained a continued ‘moral’
standpoint via his published books, aimed against …The Sins and Follies of
Childhood and Youth. His eventually pernicious framework was given a not too
subtle drubbing by Lewis Carroll’s Alice,5 as
Carroll-Dodgson had himself, meanwhile, discovered the non-moral psychological
borderline between dreams and wakefulness, reality testing and the truer
definition of madness.6 The
moral-diagnostic route continued to be followed by authorities, including J.
Crichton-Browne, for some time thereafter. 7
By c. 1855-60 the ‘moral treatment regime’,
of enforced occupational therapy, food austerity and exercise-yards, was
beginning to wane. More progressive alienists in the new County Asylums were
now distinguishing the stubbornly incurable and the chronically insane
[dissociated, hallucinatory] from the wrongfully confined [social misfits,
feebleminded youth, senile aged; inebriates, and the merely ‘pauper lunatics’
with no social-economic recourse]. The County of York provided one region of
new and especially improved practice, with the York Out-Patient Clinic, the
Leeds Medical School and the Wakefield ‘West Yorkshire Pauper Asylum’. Here
there came to some competence, if not wider medical prominence, such men as the
later great J. Hughlings Jackson, 1835-1911; Daniel Hack Tuke, 1827-1895, and
James Crichton-Browne, 1840-1938, the latter being Medical Superintendent at
Wakefield, 1866-76, before moving to London. Innovations included visiting
alienists, ward rounds, and exchanges of ideas via conversaziones as the order
of the day. The alienists were nevertheless largely ignored, with their
speciality suffering from the isolation from General Medicine (6). Children
were especially still prone to lack of understanding, with critical attitudes
maintained against their [developmentally normal] “flights of imagination” as a
“pernicious practice.”8 By 1867 in England, broader diagnostic
schemes, then including childhood epilepsy and melancholy, were becoming
recommended, as by Henry Maudsley, 1835-1918, physician, Manchester Asylum,
before becoming Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at University College
London, 1869-79.9 Any formal emergence of psychopathological,
psychiatric and especially child psychiatric disciplines however, even on
crudely diagnostic criteria rather than on psychodynamic and
developmental-pedagogic lines, was nevertheless slow and faltering — if
not non-existent — in Victorian England (14), with roots continuing to
incite controversy to the present day. Students of these fields, recently more
pertinent to Lewis Carroll Studies, must therefore look elsewhere for the
centre and lingua franca of scientific-based mental health studies in the
period c. 1865-1898.
During the Victorian period English
psychology was a definite step-child and follower of medical-psychological
authorities in Germany and France. A recent researcher has pointed to the role of
“mental physiologists” of the era, citing sources and pioneers from entirely
English-speaking countries, and in particular books known to have been in
Dodgson-Carroll’s library.1 The term
‘mental physiologists’ is itself pre-psychological and occasions ambiguity,
being here replaced by ‘medical psychologists’. The important psychological
phenomena — and especially the medical psychologist’s ‘hypnagogic
imagery’, echolalia, ‘dissociation’ and so on — are poorly served by a
physiological framework, and thus impair the impact of sources2 (17, 18
cited in 15). A key concept there, of ‘gradient consciousness’, would lead us
to expect intimations of the dynamic ‘conscious-preconscious-unconscious’ so
familiar from later psychoanalysis, and alike here at c. 1865-1889, familiar to
Dodgson-Carroll in his dream musings, and to Breuer and Freud in their early
studies of hysterics. What we find, however, from the “mental physiologists”,
is a quite different ‘evolutionary-physiological gradient’, from lowly animal
forms, through molluscs (“sluggish”), to higher forms, whose ‘consciousness’
must be inferred by the reader.
A further English ‘pioneer,’
according to Kohlt, is the supposed psychologist Herbert Spencer,
but whose works show him to have been more interested and competent as a social
philosopher than student of psychology.3 Kohlt’s
final source was G. H. Lewes a fairly typical, wide-ranging, Victorian
intellectual with little valuable to say about psychology.4 That most
or all of such authors — and others such as ‘Mackay. Popular Delusions’
and ‘Lavater. Physiology’ — should have been collected by Dodgson-Carroll
(LIB., Lots 579 & 580) — will not surprise any who have managed to
arrive at an understanding of Dodgson’s sophisticated psychology and
personality. Whether he lived by such contemporary medical-psychological texts,
or satirised them, is discussed elsewhere with reference to his ‘Mad Tea-Party’
of Alice in Wonderland.5
Around 1858 the German physicist and
optical-physiologist H. von Helmholtz, 1821-1894, was joined in his university
laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt, 1832-1920 as assistant. The latter, over the
following four decades, would establish a German-language domain of
experimental physiology and early empirical psychology, which eventually came
to influence American pioneers such as J. McKeen Cattell, Edward B. Titchener,
and by 1883 the Johns Hopkins University psychology laboratory. German as the
lingua franca also predominated in medical-psychology and psychiatric fields,
led by pioneers such as Alois Alzheimer, 1864-1915, Emil Kraepelin, 1856-1926,
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, 1840-1902, and Josef Breuer, 1842-1925. French-based
continental studies of cognate fields were led by J. M. Charcot, in Paris at
the Salpetriere from 1872; H. Bernheim and hypnosis at Nancy in 1880s; Pierre
Janet replacing Charcot in Paris, 1890; and August Forel, 1848-1931 and Eugene
Bleuler, b. 1857, at the German-Swiss Burgholzli Clinic , Zurich, where
schizophrenia and autism began to be penetrated c. 1890s.
In the England of C. L. Dodgson,
psychologically and therapeutically some decades behind the nearby
continentals, the slow emergence of healthy therapeutic regimes, viable
theoretical models and efficacious results, are here seen as instrumental in
Carroll-Dodgson’s continued ‘flight to Romanticism’, prolonged throughout his
life, and largely to the detriment of his late nascent Modernism. His own
sophisticated grasp and understanding of dreams, inner world and psychological
states, mental health and illness issues; creativity-originality-divergence,
love and morality — whilst much of these must be credited in part to
family upbringing — are here recommended as best regarded as stemming in
large part, not from familiarity with Lunacy Commissioners and the texts of
alienists — which latter he was eminently capable of parodying — but
rather from his life-long reading and empathy with such intuitive greats as
Shakespeare, Bunyan, Blake, Coleridge, other Romantic Poets, artists, novelists
and theatrical performers and their plays, all seen and read “over again” in
his busy lifetime.
David
Ricardo was one of those rare people who achieved both tremendous
success and lasting fame. After his family disinherited him for marrying
outside his Jewish faith, Ricardo made a
fortune as a stockbroker and loan broker. When he died, his estate was
worth more than $100 million in today’s dollars. At age twenty-seven,
after reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations,
Ricardo got excited about economics. He wrote his first economics
article at age thirty-seven and then spent the following fourteen
years—his last ones—as a professional economist.
Ricardo first gained notice among economists over the “bullion controversy.” In 1809 he wrote that England’s inflation
was the result of the Bank of England’s propensity to issue excess
banknotes. In short, Ricardo was an early believer in the quantity
theory of money, or what is known today as monetarism.
In his Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock
(1815), Ricardo articulated what came to be known as the law of
diminishing marginal returns. One of the most famous laws of economics,
it holds that as more and more resources are combined in production with
a fixed resource—for example, as more labor and machinery are used on a
fixed amount of land—the additions to output will diminish.
Ricardo also opposed the protectionist Corn Laws, which restricted imports of wheat. In arguing for free trade, Ricardo formulated the idea of comparative costs, today called comparative advantage—a
very subtle idea that is the main basis for most economists’ belief in
free trade today. The idea is this: a country that trades for products
it can get at lower cost from another country is better off than if it
had made the products at home.
Say, for example, Poorland can produce one bottle of wine with five
hours of labor and one loaf of bread with ten hours. Richland’s workers,
on the other hand, are more productive. They produce a bottle of wine
with three hours of labor and a loaf of bread with one hour. One might
think at first that because Richland requires fewer labor hours to
produce either good, it has nothing to gain from trade.
Think again. Poorland’s cost of producing wine, although higher than
Richland’s in terms of hours of labor, is lower in terms of bread. For
every bottle produced, Poorland gives up half of a loaf, while Richland
has to give up three loaves to make a bottle of wine. Therefore,
Poorland has a comparative advantage in producing wine. Similarly, for
every loaf of bread it produces, Poorland gives up two bottles of wine,
but Richland gives up only a third of a bottle. Therefore, Richland has a
comparative advantage in producing bread.
If they exchange wine and bread one for one, Poorland can specialize
in producing wine and trading some of it to Richland, and Richland can
specialize in producing bread. Both Richland and Poorland will be better
off than if they had not traded. By shifting, say, ten hours of labor
out of producing bread, Poorland gives up the one loaf that this labor
could have produced. But the reallocated labor produces two bottles of
wine, which will trade for two loaves of bread. Result: trade nets
Poorland one additional loaf of bread. Nor does Poorland’s gain come at
Richland’s expense. Richland gains also, or else it would not trade. By
shifting three hours out of producing wine, Richland cuts wine
production by one bottle but increases bread production by three loaves.
It trades two of these loaves for Poorland’s two bottles of wine.
Richland has one more bottle of wine than it had before, and an extra
loaf of bread.
These gains come, Ricardo observed, because each country specializes
in producing the good for which its comparative cost is lower.
Writing a century before Paul Samuelson
and other modern economists popularized the use of equations, Ricardo
is still esteemed for his uncanny ability to arrive at complex
conclusions without any of the mathematical tools now deemed essential.
As economist David Friedman put it in his 1990 textbook, Price Theory, “The modern economist reading Ricardo’s Principles
feels rather as a member of one of the Mount Everest expeditions would
feel if, arriving at the top of the mountain, he encountered a hiker
clad in T-shirt and tennis shoes.”1
One of Ricardo’s chief contributions, arrived at without mathematical tools, is his theory of rents. Borrowing from Thomas Malthus,
with whom Ricardo was closely associated but often diametrically
opposed, Ricardo explained that as more land was cultivated, farmers
would have to start using less productive land. But because a bushel of
corn from less productive land sells for the same price as a bushel from
highly productive land, tenant farmers would be willing to pay more to
rent the highly productive land. Result: the landowners, not the tenant
farmers, are the ones who gain from productive land. This finding has
withstood the test of time. Economists use Ricardian reasoning today to
explain why agricultural price supports do not help farmers per se but
do make owners of farmland wealthier. Economists use similar reasoning
to explain why the beneficiaries of laws that restrict the number of
taxicabs are not cab drivers per se but rather those who owned the
limited number of taxi medallions (licenses) when the restriction was
first imposed.
was one of those rare people who achieved both tremendous
success and lasting fame. After his family disinherited him for marrying
outside his Jewish faith, Ricardo made a
fortune as a stockbroker and loan broker. When he died, his estate was
worth more than $100 million in today’s dollars. At age twenty-seven,
after reading
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations,
Ricardo got excited about economics. He wrote his first economics
article at age thirty-seven and then spent the following fourteen
years—his last ones—as a professional economist.
Ricardo first gained notice among economists over the “bullion controversy.” In 1809 he wrote that England’s inflation
was the result of the Bank of England’s propensity to issue excess
banknotes. In short, Ricardo was an early believer in the quantity
theory of money, or what is known today as monetarism.
In his Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock
(1815), Ricardo articulated what came to be known as the law of
diminishing marginal returns. One of the most famous laws of economics,
it holds that as more and more resources are combined in production with
a fixed resource—for example, as more labor and machinery are used on a
fixed amount of land—the additions to output will diminish.
Ricardo also opposed the protectionist Corn Laws, which restricted imports of wheat. In arguing for free trade, Ricardo formulated the idea of comparative costs, today called comparative advantage—a
very subtle idea that is the main basis for most economists’ belief in
free trade today. The idea is this: a country that trades for products
it can get at lower cost from another country is better off than if it
had made the products at home.
Say, for example, Poorland can produce one bottle of wine with five
hours of labor and one loaf of bread with ten hours. Richland’s workers,
on the other hand, are more productive. They produce a bottle of wine
with three hours of labor and a loaf of bread with one hour. One might
think at first that because Richland requires fewer labor hours to
produce either good, it has nothing to gain from trade.
Think again. Poorland’s cost of producing wine, although higher than
Richland’s in terms of hours of labor, is lower in terms of bread. For
every bottle produced, Poorland gives up half of a loaf, while Richland
has to give up three loaves to make a bottle of wine. Therefore,
Poorland has a comparative advantage in producing wine. Similarly, for
every loaf of bread it produces, Poorland gives up two bottles of wine,
but Richland gives up only a third of a bottle. Therefore, Richland has a
comparative advantage in producing bread.
If they exchange wine and bread one for one, Poorland can specialize
in producing wine and trading some of it to Richland, and Richland can
specialize in producing bread. Both Richland and Poorland will be better
off than if they had not traded. By shifting, say, ten hours of labor
out of producing bread, Poorland gives up the one loaf that this labor
could have produced. But the reallocated labor produces two bottles of
wine, which will trade for two loaves of bread. Result: trade nets
Poorland one additional loaf of bread. Nor does Poorland’s gain come at
Richland’s expense. Richland gains also, or else it would not trade. By
shifting three hours out of producing wine, Richland cuts wine
production by one bottle but increases bread production by three loaves.
It trades two of these loaves for Poorland’s two bottles of wine.
Richland has one more bottle of wine than it had before, and an extra
loaf of bread.
These gains come, Ricardo observed, because each country specializes
in producing the good for which its comparative cost is lower.
Writing a century before Paul Samuelson
and other modern economists popularized the use of equations, Ricardo
is still esteemed for his uncanny ability to arrive at complex
conclusions without any of the mathematical tools now deemed essential.
As economist David Friedman put it in his 1990 textbook, Price Theory, “The modern economist reading Ricardo’s Principles
feels rather as a member of one of the Mount Everest expeditions would
feel if, arriving at the top of the mountain, he encountered a hiker
clad in T-shirt and tennis shoes.”1
One of Ricardo’s chief contributions, arrived at without mathematical tools, is his theory of rents. Borrowing from Thomas Malthus,
with whom Ricardo was closely associated but often diametrically
opposed, Ricardo explained that as more land was cultivated, farmers
would have to start using less productive land. But because a bushel of
corn from less productive land sells for the same price as a bushel from
highly productive land, tenant farmers would be willing to pay more to
rent the highly productive land. Result: the landowners, not the tenant
farmers, are the ones who gain from productive land. This finding has
withstood the test of time. Economists use Ricardian reasoning today to
explain why agricultural price supports do not help farmers per se but
do make owners of farmland wealthier. Economists use similar reasoning
to explain why the beneficiaries of laws that restrict the number of
taxicabs are not cab drivers per se but rather those who owned the
limited number of taxi medallions (licenses) when the restriction was
first imposed.
