In the 30’s and 40’s when the world was young and naive, Freud and his fellow psychotherapists had legions of followers. Theories of human behavior flourished like mosquitos on Summer nights. If we could just find the causal factors, human behavior would be as predictable as the union of hydrogen and oxygen producing water.
One mainstream theory said the personality was structured by birth trauma — tough birth, tough individual. a psychiatrist — Otto Rank popularized this theory.
I thought of this hypothesis the other day as I read “The Last tsar”, by Edvard Radzinsky: basically the story of modern Russia’s birth and their assasination of the royal family. The Marxists mowed down the Tsar, his family and retainers. Al Capone style. (Not that the Tsar had much of an ethical or intellectual IQ, that’s not the point,) No trial, no constitutional or legal protocol. Just shot the whole shebang. And millions more. What kind of state could come from such origins, By comparison the French revolution was namby pamby.
Rank should would have loved it — bolstered his theory that organizations like individuals take on the coloration of their birth. Here was the metaphorical spawn of a gangster nation — a bold philosophical proof of his theory. Almost a century later repression rules. Poisonings, media suppression, absence of legal justice.
One of the more amusing and less gory Soviet slogans of the day was “ let us drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand.” Has anything changed between Moscow and Vladivostok?
