Jan Foudraine

Dutch psychiatrist, psychotherapist and publicist, known as Swami Deva Amrito (immortality). Foudraine studied medicine and specialised in the then not yet divided disciplines of psychiatry and neurology (1960). He worked five years in the psychotherapeutic centre "Chestnut Lodge", and studied with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, from whom he learned the art of interpersonal (and transpersonal) psychiatry. It is an interpersonal discipline, in which the patient was not seen an an object as in the strict medical model, an object with an objective disease that had an illness (anomaly) to be cured, but as an feeling soma-mind holistic (body/ego and soul) subject, who just like the human(istic) observer, wants to be mirrored and reflected by the therapist as a Higher Self, with both having a past of faulty parenting by unconscious parents, who just did their best as they learned it from their faulty parents and other aberrant Egos... (conditioning), but this slippery way is not me, the fool I now display. Roberto Assagioli called this higher insight and cure "dis-identification". It happened to me, but what seemingly happens to me, is seen from another perspective, not me. It is just stuff, I have to deal with. In 1968 he worked in the then "first in field" Dutch psychotherapeutic community "Veluweland" in the woods of Lunteren. Psychiatric nurses became suddenly socio-therapists, that had to reflect in their communication with patients, the values of society and the principles of good (enough) mothering. The supposed to be, all- or better-knowing psychiatrists and psychologists had to monitor, to reflect on and to steer the ongoing social process (community theatre). It was a little bit, like a ruling government that tries to steer, or imagines to steer, the ongoing happenings in society. This playing for Gd act seldom works, but the feed-back might lead to more self-knowledge of the participants. In May 1971 he published the Dutch best-seller "Wie is van hout ... Een gang door de psychiatrie" (Not Made of Wood: Psychiatrist Discovers His Own Profession) of which 200,000 copies were sold in the Netherlands and many more abroad. As the first representative of the anti-psychiatry in Holland, he became a "Messiah of the schizophrenics" wrote the historian G. Blok. With the LSD prophets of the Hippy generation and L.D. Laing (The divided self, 1961) he believed that psychosis could be a way of "metanoia", a Dante like spiritual voyage through the inferno of the mind that might lead to more self knowledge and greater inner stability. The book, together with in Dutch translated works of the in similar ways thinking so-called anti-psychiatrists like Szasz, Laing and Cooper, changed the Dutch view on psychiatry and the "medical model" in the early seventies. Foudraine became a wanted speaker, teacher and therapist, but he had also literally unleashed the crazy genie out of the the bottle. His book very much helped the emancipation of the psychiatric patients and their families. They united in the "Gekkenbeweging" (Fools movement). In 1973 appeared the "Gekkenkrant", with as an editor the jurist and cultural historian Geert Mak. But Foudraine personally got involved into dualistic "for or against his views" conflicts, could therefore not stay unattached in any job for long, got tired of the rhetorical Maya confusion about his spiritual message and used tranquillizers to deal with the stress. Disappointed and confused by the Read less