I was trying to understand the Nazis' idea of "Degenerate art," so I have been reading through Max Nordau's book "Degeneration" which is freely available on Project Gutenberg. It was published in 1892. Nordau himself was Jewish but also racist, in conformity with what passed for "science" in those days.
It is a really interesting insight into how fascism and eugenics developed, and how entwined both of those things are with the history of psychiatry.
Nordau believes in a Lamarckian idea of evolution where if an organism's body is damaged or altered by the environment, those acquired traits can be passed onto offspring. This is very important for understanding the arguments of the book.
Nordau thinks that modernity is damaging the bodies and minds of humans, making them perpetually exhausted and weak, which makes them susceptible to "degeneracy," the decline of health, morality, and reason through regression to an animal-like state. His explanations for how this works, which I assume from his citations are basically what experts thought at the time, are fascinating to read. He gives theories for how the brain and the senses work that are a little bit right but dreadfully limited and mostly wrong.
Many of Nordau's main points, though, are basically identical to today's arguments about art, morality, sexuality, and censorship.
Furthermore, the social and human phenomena he describes, including psychiatric phenomena, are much more familiar and easily mapped onto modern concepts than I thought.
I wish I could find it again, but there was a book from...1904? maybe 1914?...describing the treatment of mentally disabled kids in an asylum, that I found online.
It was STRIKING to me how the descriptions of the kids matched perfectly to modern descriptions of ADHD and autism. This book also contained numerous descriptions that seemed unmistakably, obviously like ADHD or autism.
But the labels they used were: "mental defectives," "imbeciles," "idiots," and other things even more offensive.
What is so interesting is that Nordau describes, and singles out, what are popularly considered harmlessly quirky or even positive traits of neurodivergence, and identifies them as part of "degeneracy," categorized along with more noticeable or stigmatized forms of mental disability. He especially emphasizes sensory hyper- and hypo-reactivity as a trait of "degeneracy" in many places.
Here's an example of his descriptions:
“Imbeciles (weak minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain, or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in conformity with the laws of association, and also that of reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which differs from it in that the particular representations of which it is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his consciousness. All observers maintain that the ‘higher degenerate’ is frequently ‘original, brilliant, witty,’ and that whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working of association.”
This book made me consider the possibility that what we now call ADHD was actually significantly more disabling and stigmatized in the early 20th century, because criminality and mental illness are so closely linked in here, and it is highly visible how traits like impulsivity and emotional dysregulation were extremely costly to have.
At one point he gives a really detailed description of synesthesia, including grapheme-color synesthesia:
Sounds are said to awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures; according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means of nerve filaments[...]That it is a question of purely individual associations brought about by the accident of associated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter ‘a’ black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel as blue, and so on.
And he is REALLY pissed off about it.
In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly confounds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man to that of the oyster.
Like, he is absolutely seething.
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