Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation



In 1803 AD, Johann Christian Reil, an anatomist, believed that insanity was caused by the mind and choices people made. He rejected a physical etiology of insanity. He practices all the moral treatments of his era. Reil coined the phrase, "non-injurious torture" with used the shock of fear and terror to cure insanity. Examples of how he induced terror include: seating an unsuspecting patient in a quiet place then firing cannons nearby; dressing up in a ghost costume and waking up soundly sleeping patients; suddenly throwing a patient into a pond who couldn't swim. Typical of all the mad doctors of his day, he used coercion and discipline to gain control over the insane. He would water board, pour hot wax on the body, burn the souls of the feet, surprise baths with live eels, recommend sex with prostitutes to elevate sexual insanity. But he most famous for his Cat piano (Katzenklavier) therapy where cats " be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard outfitted with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument-particularly when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals-must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into prudential awareness ". The cat piano was a fictional instrument of folklore. Reil's clever and imaginative use of this instrument was a hyperbole designed to drive his point home that the madman was to be cured by appealing to the will of the individual. While other mad doctors of his day dreamed up treatments to cure insanity by fixing the broken body or brain, Reil's KlinkenKaten as we call it, represented a lightening rod that attracted attention to his method of curing broken souls. The KlinkenKaten was in fact pure satirical genius, because even today, it attracts enormous attention and curiosity. After the marvel, disgust and chortling in defense of the felines has come to an end, the mind is driven to wonder how such a device cured insanity. In this way Reil not only focused on what the cure was, as much as what it was not. We believe every chemical psychiatrist today, should have a KlinkenKaten in his office as a reminder that chemical imbalances are a myth and that it is the soul that needs repair, not the body. (Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation, Johann Christian Reil, 1803 AD)

"Long ago men tried to shock the insane back into sanity by throwing them into a snake pit- a drastic treatment which by its sudden terror was sometimes successful. Modern methods, though superficially more civilized, often rely on the same brutal shock to achieve their results." (The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward, 1947 AD, Dust Jacket)

Cats "be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard outfitted with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument—particularly when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into prudential awareness" (Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation, Johann Christian Reil, 1803 AD)

This late account of the cat piano may be a fiction: "When the King of Spain Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his brother the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin ride on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the archangel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand. The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvete, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave." (Musiciana, descriptions of rare or bizarre inventions, Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, 1877)

"Nature has endowed us with so many divine impulses toward lofty and noble deeds, the drive for fame, for one's own perfection, the power of self-determination and perseverance, and the passions, which through their storms guard against the deadly desire for sleep. Yet nature, through these very same inclinations, has also planted in us as many seeds for madness Warrior . By equally measured steps, as we advance on the path of our sensible and intellectual culture, we fall back ever nearer to the madhouse." (Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation, Johann Christian Reil, 1803 AD)

"The ordering of these relations of the parts of the soul's organ is grounded in a determined distribution of forces in the brain and the whole nervous system. if this relationship is disturbed, then arise dissociations, volatile character, abnormal ideas and associations, fixed trains of ideas, and corresponding drives and actions. The faculties of the soul can no longer express the freedom of the will. This is the way the brain of a mad person is produced." (Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental Alienation, Johann Christian Reil, 1803 AD)

"Reil thought of mental illness as a disruption of the normal functioning of the powers of the soul, which he glossed explicitly in Kantian terms. The very basic powers were the typical Kantian ones of consciousness, understanding, reason, imagination, and sensibility. In his application, though, Reil distinguished three main areas of representational understanding, malfunctions of which might produce illness: representations of "common sense" , representations of sensibility, and representations of imagination. Common sense, m Red's account, consisted in a perception of the well-being of the different parts of the body, and its abnormal activity could result in hypochondria, melancholy, and vertigo, as well as in nonspecific dreaminess. Problems with sensible representations might produce fantasies and hallucinations. And, finally, the classic cases of insanity would arise from an energetic imagination, in which the sufferer could not distinguish manufactured images from reality. This last condition produced those archetypal examples in which "the sick person plays a king, a general, or soldier." Red thought that Saint Theresa and Emanuel Swedenborg undoubtedly suffered from this kind of derangement." (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the age of Goethe, 2002 p 251-288)

"Quite clearly he had been reading Schelling, whose Romantic idealism, I believe, fundamentally reoriented Reil's understanding of the root causes of mental illness. In the light of this new philosophical conception, Reil came to regard insanity as stemming from the fragmentation of the self, from an incomplete or misformed personality, and from the inability of the self to construct a coherent world of the non-ego—all of which resulted from the malfunctioning of self-consciousness, that fundamentally creative activity of mind postulated by the Romantic philosophers." (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the age of Goethe, 2002 p 251-288)

"Like Freud after him, Red would have preferred an array of medical specifics to reorder defective nervous centers more directly. Little, though, was available. Opium might immediately quiet someone in a frenzy, but the outcome would only be a calmer madman . The Rhapsodieen instead proposed an indirect method of cure, which would leap past the obstacles to direct intervention. Reil believed psychological means could be effectively employed to alter deficient ideas and abnormal emotional states, at least of the curably insane. If psychological manipulations were successful, then the underlying nervous connections would be properly readjusted and the rational operations of mentality restored." (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the age of Goethe, 2002 p 251-288)

"In the Rhapsodieen, Reil distinguished three chief forces of the soul, whose disruption could produce pathology. These were self-consciousness, prudential awareness, and attention. Though he had mentioned the latter two powers in his earlier work on mental illness, he devoted most of his effort in the Rhapsodieen to the analysis of a force now considered the most crucial for understanding pathologies, that of self-consciousness and its attendant powers of temporal and spatial perception." (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the age of Goethe, 2002 p 251-288)

"The psychological methods that Red prescribed ranged from the commonsensical to, from our perspective, the bizarre. For example, one might bring a patient to a sense of well-being by exposing him or her to quite normal surroundings and a good diet (even spiking the wine with a bit of opium to produce a warm, contented glow). Plenty of sunshine could also yield positive results. Gymnastic exercises and dancing might harmonize the mind just as they brought the body into balance. Sexual intercourse (Beischlaf ), perhaps with a prostitute , could well reduce accumulated lascivious energy that might contribute to mental disturbance. The mad should not be denied reading, learning poetry by heart, and practicing sums. Any well- built asylum, Red proposed, would include a theater, in which patients would have "their imaginations strongly excited in a purposeful way; their prudential awareness awakened; contrary passions elicited; fear, terror, amazement, anxiety, and tranquility excited; and the fixed ideas of the mad confronted." Red strongly recommended the use of music, to speak directly to the heart; for "music quiets the storm of the soul, chases away the cloud of gloom. and for a while dampens the uncontrolled tumult of frenzy." These humanizing measures, of course, stood in stark contrast to the wretched conditions endured by the institutionalized insane in much of the world. They also provided the kind of stimuli that a Romantic personality would regard as deeply restorative. Reil also recommended what we would call aversive conditioning and even primitive shock therapy . His descriptive accounts of these latter, which build toward a dissonant crescendo, do abruptly remind one of the work's eighteenth-century character. For example, withdrawing food or applying hot wax to the body would restore control to the hitherto uncontrollable, without real damage being inflicted. Hysterical mutes, he assured his readers, had been brought to speak by the application of a strong irritant to the soles of their feet . Cold baths seemed therapeutic for the willfully convulsive. To place an unsuspecting madman in a tub of live eels must , Reil thought, rather strongly "work on his emotions through the torturous play of imagination.'' For those whose attention could not be easily tamed, Reid recommended the amazing device of a Katzenclavier—indeed, a piano made from cars. One would first voice the instrument with suitable animals, which would, then, "be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard outfitted with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument—particularly when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into prudential awareness"" (The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the age of Goethe, 2002 p 271)

By Steve Rudd:

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