I am always immersed in some literary text. A permanent emotional trip that gives me intellectual oxygen and gratifies my knowledge. Comagin demolving trials with novels and thus I deepen all the passages of memory to see where to leave certain knowledge acquired. And that happened to me with Frankenstein’s mother of the deceased author Almudena Grandes, that a part of page 344 remained in my memory. In it, one of the characters in the book, José Luis Robles, drank water, ignited a cigarette (thank God, the novels are still a space where freedoms can continue to exercise, something that in the real world seems to be increasingly difficult), and decided, after adding some more gestures, explaining some things to the protagonist of the novel.
At the time: That in 1949 the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry had been refounded. That its president, of course, was Antonio Vallejo Nájera, authentic leader of national psychiatry. That, as I would surely know, Vallejo had a jury enemy, which was called Juan José López Ibor. That if Vallejo monopolizes the charges, López Ibor had the power that was made a millionaire with his private consultation. That he had been cheating for people with treatments to reverse homosexuality, it was said that even arriving at the lobotomy, and claimed to cure the depression based on sodium pentotal, a euphoric barbiturate of very short duration that had hooked to all depressive depressive ones. That their patients felt so well when they were injected that, although the effect did not last more than a quarter of an hour, they all returned to the following aim for another dose. That the lobotomy was just a rumor that did not seem too reliable, but the pentotal had seen him with his own eyes …
It was clear that those two literary characters, taken from reality, one of them colonel of the Spanish army and the other member of Opus Dei, held all the power that their approach to the regime gave them. And above all, the power to recast its will, (demential at some times) of psychiatry in Spain.
But what usually happens, happened, and that paragraph, standing in one of the rooms of memory, crossed with another, previously read to document one of my books on Franco’s social research brigade, and the idea of ​​writing this article that has slept about two years, until today, was born. But the main character of this Farragoso path on a complex theme is not Iberies and Vallejo Nájera, who have been lucky enough not to be judged too hard by democratic history, and even the excellent power of psychiatry in democratic media has provided them with even more power and popularity, but a disciple of his, Francisco Javier de Echalecu and Camino.
This character, Francisco Javier de Echalecu y Canino, was born in Moral de Calatrava, a municipality of Ciudad Real (Spain) in 1897. He was titled in teaching and income shortly after in the body of assistants of Penitentiary Institutions, where he already pointed ways for what came later. In 1929 he obtained the Bachelor of Sciences and began the medical career, as an unofficial student (remote) at the Central University. Combining his studies with his work. His degree as a doctor arrives on April 26, 1939, 25 days after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Where he began to collaborate permanently with Vallejo Nájera and López Ibor, which meant that he began to play notable jobs. And especially the Neuropsychiatrist of the General Directorate of Security, where he began to exercise as a professor of criminal psychology at the General Police School, let’s stay with this data, as well as neuropsychiatrist of the Superior Council for the Protection of Minors, and director of the medical services of the Women’s Protection Board. He came to receive various decorations, among which he undoubtedly highlighted by the order of the German eagle, which was granted by the Hitler government.
Likewise, once World War II, already indoctrinated forces of the Francoist Police and members of the German Police, not yet decazified, they were still integrated without excessive effort in what was called the International Commission of the Central Police, renamed the passing of the years with the name of Interpol, where all the ideological tics that remained in said European security body until well entered the 90s, affecting many 90s, affecting many 90s, affecting many 90s, affecting many years were. religious movements, which in the triennium of the 60s to 90s, were defined as destructive sects. Some of them, still years later, continue with that ideological San Benito launched by Interpol in those years. Echalecu, then became a true germ of ideological, religious and racial propaganda that permeated the new regime in Spain, to which other countries were not alien.
Echalecu, until his death in 1957, he always identified with the paradigm of German criminal biology, where the importance of understanding that mental illness is usually caused by important components that had to do with latent issues of personality such as age, sex and race. I will add, before the development of the text, that also factors such as ideology. Also accepting, as a psychiatrist, some of the reasons that led the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, since racial components were important according to their own words: Endogenous pathological constitutions seem to have a very different extension in the various countries; Thus, for example, Jews suffer above all Western Europeans, endogenous psychosis (manic-depressive and schizophrenia, that surrounding populations … It is certain that Jews suffer more frequently than other races.
If we do an analysis of psychiatric thinking prevailing in those years, we see how the genocide, relatively accepted, is not immoral, because they are sick people, the Jews, with a virus that would cause mental illnesses in other races. But the issue did not end here.
Echalecu, let’s not forget, Professor of Criminal Psychology of the State Security Forces and Security Forces. … Psychopaths are men with permanent abnormal dispositions that suffer as a result of their abnormality … For him, and it is something that extended throughout the 40 years of the dictatorship and even today, it continues in some fields, such psychopathy was a disorder of great social importancethat was given a lot in suicides, divorced, celibate, alcoholics or drug addicts. But if an effort was dedicated to any group, it was those he considered martyrs of the idea, or fanatical psychopaths.
In its harangues by the police stations, it certainly emphasized how worrying that psychopathy was anarchist, communists, exalted and in anyone who maintained an ideology contrary to the ideological principles of the prevailing political regime, including also the apostles of nude, of naturalistic life, of Christians True (See Jehovah’s Witnesses, Protestants and others), vegetarians, and all those who organized sects with their fanatic ideas.
Interestingly, while each and every one of the fanatic ideas of this psychiatric school were being dismantled in various parts of Europe, it was in the field of sects where, even today, more than 80 years later, people are still demonizing for meeting to share different ideas, or they are called sectarian for maintaining a different thought of those who hold power. These people, still saying the media, are still today poor mentally illlikely to be manipulated by anyone who submits them to an exhibition of ideas other than the prevailing. And of course, Echalecu included related aspects, curiously to the women to whom when they were exalted by the vexations to which they were often subjected by society, including their partners, they called them hysterical, a concept that made the entire weight of guilt fall in them, and never in the therapist or in the social environment that surrounded them: … women are hysterical.
Echalecu also created a school of thought based on a study to a marginal group of prostitutes he described as Mental weak, psychopaths, vagrants, mentally ill, With the addition that those women, without exceptions, had mental and criminal family history. With this provision, it was not difficult for a certain caste linked to religion or medicine, dedicate themselves to stealing children of prostitutes and to adopt them to more wealthy families that knew how to give them an environment and an education more to end the prevailing ideas, or in other cases to use them as they would like to win. Undoubtedly, it would not be strange if this psychiatric school was extended to other marginal, poor, low neighborhoods or little paid jobs and the same excuse was used with prostitutes and began to give in many countries an execrable robbery of babies, with the excuse that they had died, to deliver them for adoption with pingues benefits.
This fanatic psychiatry has not apologized for the passing of the years, and even today its stench continues to cloud some actions throughout Europe through the control of thought in the field of sects. Ideas are persecuted and many psychiatrists, now, covered by cancellation speech, continue to adopt the term mental illness, to define different different people or attitudes or behaviors.
Literature is a fascinating trip that teaches us to meditate on certain issues related to thousands of different aspects that surround us daily. Today he has taken us from the pages of a book of Almudena Grandes to the darkest and fanatic lodazal of a psychiatric school that anathematized thousands, but millions of people for a long time and that with the immoral support of cowardly societies and politicians, still today continues to exercise some kind of power.
Literature:
-The text of Almudena Grandes, has been extracted from the novel Frankenstein’s motheredited by Tusquets.
-The related to ECHALECU and the Francoist Police, has been extracted from the masterful work entitled Criminal psychology in Franco’s police, of the authors Javier Bandrés, Rafael Llavona and Eva Zubieta, for the University of Psychology of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
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First published in this link of The European Times.
