"Sickness" and Rebellion: East and West (Ward 7, by Valeriy Tarsis)

...It is Almazov-Tarsis who sees the tyranny that afflicts his fellow "patients," and it is he whose vision and passion we feel—in everything, from his particular sensitivity to nature and the weather, to his sardonic humor, so very much like Chekhov's...

...It is well known that for a certain kind of dogmatic "Marxist" psychoanalysis has little to offer...

...As one student working with me in a Boston slum put it recently, "It's like a nightmare here...

...I don't know exactly what's going on there...

...We don't care what happened in Russia, or in the 30's between the liberals and the Communists...

...If the mind—including the unconscious— is largely denied a life of its own, but is always considered in relation to the material forces of history and society, patients will largely be those who in some way fall into difficulty not with themselves or their families but with the social order...

...The narrative—in contrast to the ideas expressed—is not easy to follow, even though the book has been nicely translated into lean, idiomatic English...

...Certainly there are no psychoanalytic training centers in Eastern Europe, even though Freud was really much less hostile to Lenin's achievements than some believe...

...In the South for years I saw civil rights workers arrested, then charged with "delinquency" and sent away for psychiatric observation...

...A recent article in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry (Autumn 1965) reports on the daily climate in one of the better American mental hospitals...

...some the doctors and their views...

...Who can know, particularly in a secretive police state...

...The youth I have quoted again and again recalled for me the awful facts of the Negro's historical exploitation, yet the spectacle of an enormous bureaucracy abroad relentlessly swallowing every opposition, even seeing opposition where it isn't, bothered him very little...

...In this regard I have continually noted the reluctance of certain American radicals to discuss the implications of Stalin's increasingly punitive orthodoxy for the civil rights movement or other protest groups now in action...

...All else failing, they will be confined and worked, but not approached as particular people with problems needing their own, quite special solutions...

...Those words, on one of my tapes, are characteristic...

...Perhaps the real issue is larger than that of Bolshevism or even the everyday cruelty in hospitals anywhere...

...They will be treated by various suggestive maneuvers, or by Pavlovian "conditioning," their troubles being thereby "extinguished...

...Degradation rituals" were described, "where attendants reminded patients of their low status by teasing them, insulting them, making them do ridiculous tasks, making pets of some and ignoring others...

...In contrast, the crimes of Joseph Stalin and his state are more notorious than precisely realized...

...It all seems far distant, awful and at times hard to believe, particularly when Tarsis becomes bitter enough to make one pause a bit about his condition: perhaps he is sicker than he knows, his unsparing anger and episodic arrogance but a manifestation of "deeper" illness...

...and anyway, the Germans have always been passionate archivists...

...more likely, its mention was a bogus issue used to discredit or weaken the present-day radical spirit at work in America...

...I fear Tarsis could find material for another book, a Ward 8, right here in a society far less committed to a single inclusive ideology...

...Tarsis spells out quite pointedly the differences between such a view and those generally held in the West by engaging several Russian psychiatrists in discussion...

...In fact it is an autobiographical fragment by a Russian author confined to an asylum, presumably for his bold and outspoken criticism of the regime...

...As today's American radicals struggle hard and with rising vexation to catch a handle that somehow will enable them to deal forthrightly with major social and economic issues—and not only waning historical ones, or regional ones, no matter how important they be—it must be clear that Kafka was perhaps the most profound social critic of this century...

...In the Middle Ages those afflicted with insanity were predominantly allowed their freedom...

...Who does...

...New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc...

...We need continuing scrutiny of hospital wards, in both the East and West...

...We also need to place our notions of "mental illness" (and "health") in an historical perspective they so far lack...

...All over this country peace demonstrators are called names that essentially skirt the border between illness and non-conformity...

...Yet I found it curious that young people who spoke such words could ignore the terrible paradox that in 40 years a revolution made in the name of sweeping social and economic justice might well have been responsible for more deaths and more suffering than 300 years of unabashed slavery in America...

...In form we meet up with a series of sketches: some describe the various wards...

...Sickness" and Rebellion: East and West WAxn 7, by Valeriy Tarsis...

...It gives us an intriguing glimpse of Soviet psychiatry...

...But I am not so sure that the terrors instituted by Stalin's bureaucrats and technocrats are at all irrelevant to the concerns of American radicals...

...With the death of Lenin and the removal of Trotsky, the more rational and humane traditions of Communist ideology were destroyed by a canny despot the extent of whose arbitrary cruelty has yet to be appreciated...

...I am sure there are Soviet psychiatrists who would deny the view of mental hospitals this book provides —and remind us that it is, after all, a patient who addresses us...

...We care what is happening right here, in this state...

...The author shows that a totalitarian regime is always the unsatisfied busybody: even a psychiatry that has fallen in line ideologically cannot keep free of political interference...

...During those long nights of argument we had in the Mississippi Project of 1964, and again in 1965, the mere mention of Communism was suspect...

...some were quite openly called insane by judges or law officers, if in less formal or neutral language...

...The doctors themselves are frightened, mutual ly suspicious, and without a free hand to practice as they will...

...The patients are not treated but herded to gether and often punished...

...some "the patients," who actually are often as not disenchanted with "socialist" life and anxious to escape it by suicide, by flight abroad, or at the very least by evasion of all sorts of responsibilities—the draft, work, the writing of appropriate "socialist realism...

...The chaos and bestiality, some of it under medical auspices, that characterized Nazi totalitarianism has been rather thoroughly documented...

...In several respects this book is very important indeed...

...In point of fact he rather interestingly applauded the goals of socialism, even as he wondered whether their achievement would founder upon the mortal weaknesses and excesses of political leaders—and the "ordinary" men who follow them...

...What binds these people together is the central figure, Valentine Almazov—actually Tarsis, the fiercely defiant writer who will risk death by saying no to a system he deplores...

...More and more those radicals are beginning to realize how devious their enemy is: the faceless army of organization men—and they exist not only in business—who may be nervous with one another, but together maintain a formidable solid guard over the richest industrial enterprise in the world's history...

...Having lost the war, Germany was exposed to the scrutiny of outsiders...

...Ward 7 is meant to follow Chekhov's great story Ward 6 as another description of man's ability to brutalize people by labeling them "sick...

...Only gradually did the idea dawn upon men that those who are "fools" or "madmen" deserve confinement...

...Even when it did hit home, when Khrushchev's admissions were made public, I couldn't get too involved...

...There is more, much more, and it is chilling...

...not necessarily Communist infiltration of the civil rights movement, but even the history of Communism in Russia...

...Yet, there is much in the book that sounds and feels credible to me— enough to make me think of the somewhat parallel if less dramatic and oppressive conditions that prevail in certain areas of American psychiatry and society...

...everyone checks on everyone else—the owners, the police, the welfare workers, the politicians, the racketeers—but no one knows what is really going on, or who runs what, or why...

...It is a slim book, and only half-heartedly pretends to be a novel...

...The nature of industrialized society, particularly as it is increasingly automated and influenced by computers, makes American and Soviet society much more similar than either John Reed or J. P. Morgan ever dreamed...

...We've got a different problem here, and plenty to do to solve it, without worrying about all the other problems in the world...

...In Valeriy Tarsis' book Ward 7 the Soviet side of the nightmare is made rather fearfully clear...

...To tell the truth," he once told me, "it's far away from me...

...A summary of two years of research describes the ward routine as one of "making the patients quiet, orderly and properly subservient to attendants...

...Those are dead issues...

...One of them is influenced by the "French school" and clearly in danger on that account of becoming a patient himself...

...See the excellent book Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault...

...The refinements of Soviet terror, its trials and methods of exile, its grotesqueries— the "doctor's plot," the suicides that mask murder, the public confessions—have one by one reminded anyone willing to pay attention just how blind the self-righteousness of some leftists can be: it took words from Khrushchev himself to persuade them that, all along, the reported horror had not simply been capitalist slander...

...Anyone who has worked in a mental hospital has seen his fair share of uncaring, selfimportant, thoroughly vulgar administrators and mean, insulting or useless procedures...

...Instead he becomes disenchanted and sad—in the few lines that describe his manner we can feel Pasternak's presence...

...The subject was thought to be irrelevant at best...