Body: | Rhapsodies in the Application of the Psychological Method of Cure in Mental
Alienation
Johann Christian Reil
(1759-1813)
1803 AD
Fieberhaste Nervenkrankheiten (Feverish nervous illness, 1802)
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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)
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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)
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