Alexandr Peškov, already unknown to younger generations but still traceable in encyclopedias as Maxim Gorkij, said that for everything good in him he owes it to books. And he did not realize how good a book that I had written was on its way. It will be called Psychosomatická prvouka, and if all goes well, it will be released this year as well. Until then, one can look at books from which I still managed to copy something, or from which I did not manage in time, but if I had managed, I would have copied from those too.

Abraham H. Maslow: Náboženství, hodnoty a vrcholné zážitky. Holar, Brno, 2017 The original of this (well-translated) text was published in 1964, in part as a reaction to the despair and inner emptiness offered by the then-peak existentialism, when “even most scholars and artists actively took part in the decline of humanistic values,” and in part as a synthesis of findings on human spiritual needs, and as a result of meetings with transpersonal psychology and logotherapy. Maslow himself was a convinced atheist and had to exert some effort to fit supernatural experiences into a positivist psychological framework, yet he calls them something essential that is missing in all contemporary forms of “netheism.”

For him these are “peak experiences,” experiences of wholeness, love, but also self-actualization and surrender to higher truths, truth, justice, and other positive values. He considers them the physiological fulfillment of spiritual needs, which contain both a transgression of ordinary existence and a feeling of unity with higher systems, with the universe, experiences that in the past were characterized as peak religious, ecstatic, and so on.

One of the core chapters analyzes the main reasons for misunderstanding the whole issue of the spiritual dimension: the vocabulary is missing. For the spiritual domain only the terminology of various religions is offered to us, and for most people this deters them, because practically no one identifies with any religion understood in the sense of medieval universalism with a later emphasis on either mysticism or orthodox legalism, and a shared language with general human needs does not serve here but hinders and discourages. “I myself have become somewhat out of place and, I can say, semantically nervous,” the author describes this fact. (By the margin of this uncertainty, I would like to note that Jiřina Šiklová, in her lively talks and in her books dealing with the end of life, speaks about spiritual needs in a wonderfully natural language.) If religion disappointed (already before), then by the end of the twentieth century science also disappointed. “The orthodox scientist of the 19th century (and such are still the majority, I add), seems to the sophisticated person like a chattering child simply because he is so conceited, because he does not realize how little he knows and how limited scientific knowledge is compared with the immense unknown.” There is a separate chapter on the need for values in education, pointing out that only by adding values to knowledge and technology does the path to full humanity become possible.

Maslow sees the experience of extraordinary events as companion phenomena of the self-actualization process, which runs counter to a regression process filled with fear and stagnation. There are also “non-peak people,” whose experiences do not reach extreme intensity, and yet they do have and satisfy spiritual needs in less visible ways, but also people who forcibly deny them. Several supplements to the main text help map the entire area clearly.

The humanistic message and the core of the text, I feel, is captured in this part of the author’s 1970 preface: “Yes, in a sense a person is his own project and shapes himself. At the same time, there are limits to shaping oneself. The project is technologically predetermined for all people—to become human. A man cannot choose for himself to become a chimpanzee. Or even a woman. Or a child.”

If we add to this reference the famous sentence about the hammer from another Maslow work, Psychology of Science, which goes: “What everyone carries a hammer, tends to see nails everywhere,” we have a theoretical guide on how to move forward and not become one-sided.

Jiří Jilík: Žítkovské čarování. Pravdivý příběh žítkovských bohyní. CPress, Brno, 2013 Whereas the term “doctor” is derived from the Latin doctus, that is, learned and teaching, the term “lékař” is said to come from the Celtic liah, a designation for a shaman. Greek iatros is also said to have taken its name from there. Medicine is still something between science and art, as we are reminded by works devoted to the placebo effect, and its significant magical component remains completely missing from biomedicine.

I recently had the good fortune to hear testimony from a witness, one of the former athletes and patients of Ms. Mojžíšová, about the flourishing of her work. The famous Ludmila Mojžíšová, whom scientific medicine recognized only in 1990, began as a physiotherapist for elite athletes and infertile women. They quietly slipped up into the attic of Tyrš House between all the injured and strained athletes, separated from whom only by a curtain made of a sheet, where she, who allegedly did not speak otherwise, gave very loud spoken advice with a closing line: “All this was squeezing your fallopian tubes. Now it is released. And they have stuffed you full of this kind of crap... So now go, buy a seven-wine [measure?], go home and do that, and in six weeks come back and tell me you are pregnant.”

What would IVF operators have said if they had heard the advice of the Žítková goddess? Buy yourself butter, warm your lower belly and let your husband anoint your whole body. Then lie on your back and let him anoint you all over again. Then take a pad, in the evening rub it with a piece of raw wax and in the morning twist that pad and put it into a dry cup. Into the pad then stick a pile of matchsticks, with the heads of the matches on top. When your husband is massaging you, your hands must be bound at the neck? No, hands of him? lying straight, stretched out and relaxed. The man has to be clever, because he needs to light the matches in the cup and set the cup on the belly so the heads warm up but do not burn out. The cup stays on the belly for two hours and during the two hours you should neither speak nor turn, not to one side nor the other. After those two hours, lifting the cup, put a finger under the cup and it will gradually come away. If they wanted to pull it away, he could sit on the belly for two full days. But this would of course only delay him from removing it. He should buy nutmeg, grate it, toast it in butter, put a little rum into it and cook it. Pour this into the cup with water and sugar, boil it again, then let it cool and drink after the two hours. The woman remains lying down all the time. For fourteen days no meat or flour should be eaten; she must endure it. Pork meat should not be eaten in a year, and goose, duck, turkey should never be eaten if she wants to stay healthy. I have known quite a few women seeking help with infertility, and as far as I know Jung’s ideas, I believe this can be an effective means. That there was, he also tells stories in an interesting, objective, non-exaggerating, non-critical, chronicle-precise book recording one of the islands of folk medicine. It also includes the resistance of the “occult” church and “enlightened” science.

Eric Berne: Sex v lidském milování. Portál, Praha, 2017 A publication nearly half a century old, issued in another time and in very different conditions, in an era in which the sanctity of marriage and condemnation of extramarital immorality were proclaimed in 1970’s puritan America, now sounds here somewhat anachronistic. It is as if I were teaching a sixteen-year-old boy how butterflies do it, or if my wife were teaching granddaughters that “women wear aprons to cover what happened at home.”

It thus becomes a guide for people who still adhere to values from the middle of the last century, when the marital vow could have a pecking lifespan, yet it was something improper and wrong, and therefore mostly hidden. For today’s post-factual time, when consumerism, hedonism, and lying become the reason of the age, these instructions resemble a map of Central Bohemia from the days when the Czech Tourist Club reached its first hundred members. Because how does the requirement of a “non-deviant” encounter sound today: not using an artificial aid for climax, for example a vibrator?

Berne himself writes: “The question in my head was: Is it possible to make five lectures about sex without repeating all those trivial, unnecessarily serious and acrobatic phrases, or maybe statistics, that every second person drones? I hope I managed at least partially.” My note on this is: he did. Before this reached us, time had jumped. The question remains whether it should happen proactively? Is it not time to start calling: Gimi det old time religion?

A nice and useful observation uses uppercase letters to represent the emergence and development of marriage: AHIOSXYV.

A

– Marriage began because of an unexpected pregnancy or a parental agreement, but a common bond soon appears and the partners hurry toward unity.

H

– Marriage begins the same way, but there is no rapprochement, and the only bond that keeps them together is a child, money, or some other interest.

I

– The spouses are, from start to finish, “one body and one soul.”

O

– Nothing happens in the marriage; it keeps turning in circles until divorce or death occurs.

S

– The couple’s shared path twists and ends elsewhere than they wanted. Because they do not want to separate, they are suitable candidates for psychotherapy.

X

– It begins as A, reaches moments of happiness, but does not hold, and their paths diverge.

V

– First one body and one soul, and then nothing.

Y

– For a while they share interests, and then one or both go their own way.

As far as interpersonal relationships are concerned (to which sex comes as one of the props, in fact one of the most important but finally just a prop in some partner games), an orderly account of transactional analysis theory and practical procedures is given in a bare form, without all attributes and additions (for example, Kahler’s dramatic triangle is still missing) and without successors and expansions of the original axioms.

Summary: regarding relationships, still excellent; regarding sexuality, still somewhat anachronistic, a manual.

Patricie S. Churchlandová: Mozek a vědomí aneb Role mozku při utváření lidské identity. Dybbuk, Praha, 2016 In contrast to most contemporary neuroscientists and philosophers, the author holds the view that consciousness is what arises exclusively in our brain, and thus places itself in a reductionist biological position in explaining how brain and consciousness are related. She writes herself (p. 190): “This approach focuses only on basic motivations and dispositions that enable social behavior, rather than on the specific nature of the norms accepted by some group.”

The mind, what is called the soul today, is according to the author derived from the electrical and electrochemical activity of the brain, so the human being is studied and scientifically explained as a solipsist. “Genes all at once managed to build a brain that felt pain when mammalian offspring cried in fear or fell out of the nest. And the offspring naturally felt pain when they were hungry, lonely, or chilled, and made distressed sounds.” To me this strongly recalls Descartes’s rational machine. However, let us carry the idea to the point of answering the questions that arise from it: “This mammal brain felt pleasure when it was with its children, and the children in turn felt joy when they cuddled up to the mother. Being together with them was enjoyable, while being one without the other in them caused suffering.”

Fine, but why did this form of reproduction evolve specifically in mammals? What was so advantageous about the way the first salamander-like reptiles of the sauropsid class lived? Why did it lead to this completely new reproductive strategy? The answer is probably related to energy sources and food. The first sauropsids, the result of accident that made them endothermic, gained a huge advantage: they could hunt at night when their cold-blooded competitors could not move quickly. And so the author, accompanied by happy chances, reaches toward undefined and therefore entirely unclear evolutionary pressures that lead to whether an individual cares only about himself or also about his relatives. Now and then a deus ex machina approaches the rational machine and everything is handled. The question of why cold-blooded companions still survive, when it is so evolutionarily disadvantageous, is not asked.

Thus, in the concluding chapter on the moral brain, we learn that “social life can be highly sophisticated and often requires much more wisdom than blind rule-following, as Aristotle and the Chinese philosopher Mencius already recognized.” So nothing new (just like a canary burned out, as the old Lord anecdote says).

Summary: a good textbook in neuroscience; philosophically, although the author is also a philosopher, it relies on untestable hypotheses of happy accidents, evolutionary pressures, and developmental mechanisms, but is written briskly and is certainly useful. Just a bit reductionist.

MUDr. Tomáš Lebenhart: Bez pláště. Grafia, Plzeň, 2013 An author who has himself removed from the ČLK and at the same time ostentatiously puts his medical title on the cover of his book seems to me—don’t know why—somewhat suspicious. He undoubtedly does his work with conviction as a health consultant, but he moves in alternative fields where I do not orient myself, and therefore I will not comment on the second part of his book.

The first part is, however, a fine example and description of the malady called zolpidem dependence, that is, of a substance thought to cause far fewer dependencies than other molecules acting on the GABA receptor. I would have those roughly thirty-six pages displayed in every waiting room so that people who are tormented by doctors of all specialties with requests for a prescription for “something for sleep,” meaning the one thing they mean on the market, would know into what kind of trap they are putting their head.

For current barnum-like tidbits focused on sleep and business, I refer mainly to this recent text of mine: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php?itemid=29092

Sociální nevědomí u osob, skupin a společností. Eds: E. Hopper a H. Weinberg, Irene Press, Praha, 2015 (1. a 2. díl) This is a collection of works by authors from all over the world (including South America), primarily analytically focused, trying to capture the hidden issues of small and large social groups. Reading it is not easy or simple, especially in the philosophical contributions, where authors refer to classics that a typical Czech therapist usually has not mastered.

Who among us has studied the perpetually referenced Sigmund Heinrich Foulkes, whose group dynamics annoyed us in training almost as much as anything else? I still remember that to this day! And that did not make it easier for me that Foulkes abandoned the concept of “social mind” and replaced it with “matrix.”

As Helena Klímová, the driving force behind the Czech edition, writes in the introduction: “The search for the unconscious forces and motivations of the individual and community is often the final step in the search for truth; the desire for true speech and life in truth motivates both the individual and social movements—it is a deep spiritual longing. At the same time, knowledge and articulation of the truth can appear threatening, and the struggle between these two motivations fills and shapes the life courses of individuals and generations.”

From the opening contributions we move to the concept of MIND in a completely different and much broader sense than the one described by the above-mentioned Churchland, indeed in an even broader formulation than we can read in neuroscientists such as Dan Siegel or Andy Clark. I like the fairly clear and comprehensible simplification that people and society are only two sides of the same coin. People create community and at the same time represent it.

As a reader and a curious person, I found it quite uninteresting to justify Foulkes that he did not betray psychoanalysis by taking social instinct as fundamental, because by doing so he did not diminish either the importance of the sexual instinct or aggression. What seemed important to me was that social unconscious was for him something like “intuition.” More interesting for me was the chapter on shared consciousness in Moreno’s psychodrama, because I still use its elements and magical aha-moments while deconstructing enacting classic fairy tales give us all a glimpse behind the automatisms of some of our actions. The chapter on the Latin American tradition was, for me, more a cultural note about one chapter of local history and the history of tango.

I began to get fully engaged only with the neurobiologically oriented texts, in which “we” is supported by the existence of mirror neurons ensuring empathy. As a contrast to the already mentioned Churchland, this Pines sentence (p. 84) presents a different idea: “There is a view that living in a large group requires a large brain, and the development of a large brain comes from belonging to a large group; consciousness is in fact the result of the ‘we’ that we together create and develop … the English word consciousness comes from the Latin con-scio, to know together.”

Another idea found in another chapter on group mind and psychotherapy, further illuminated by neuroscientific findings, moves us one step further: “The mind, defined as a body-bound relational process that regulates the flow of energy and information (Siegel), is a characteristic of every living human system. This process arising from isomorphism will function at all systemic levels in hierarchy. We therefore understand group mind as mutually dependent processes within the person, member, subgroup and layer as a whole, and between them, which regulate energy and information in the system of a psychotherapeutic group.”

The relational and interpersonal perspective introduces further variables, namely the view of the individual as a “person in relation.” This fact is documented and represented by the famous statement: “The infant does not exist!” concerning the fact that without the mother one is incapable of life. Thus the individual appears in a double role: on one hand, dependent on society, on the other hand having power over others.

Another chapter is of purely psychoanalytic focus; the offered metaphors can be used by anyone: Freud’s unconscious lives in a conceptual house deep in the cellar, current consciousness in the rooms, and with it current unconscious in the basement, while pre-reflective unconscious is in the building plan, and from it come the “bricks and timber left over in a corner unused.” That is quite a decent mess.

The chapter by Helena Klímová that follows is titled Falešné my – falešné kolektivní self and narrates two totalitarian systems that marked this society. And with it, the risk of transmitting trauma and faulty schemas to further generations and their repetition. To this Mark Twain once remarked that history does not repeat itself, but the rhyme of history may recur. Clinical experience with transgenerational traumatization gives these unpleasant reflections a likelihood, and so it is therefore legitimate to ask what we should do with this.

And so, for encouragement from history, I revisited Vahala’s book I nám vládli nemocní, Lesný’s Zprávy o nemocech mocných, and Miloš Vojtěchovský’s essay on our presidents. Edifying reading concludes with Hovory k sobě, in which Marcus Aurelius advises: No one loses another’s life than the one he is losing now, and no one lives another life than the one that is currently living. Neither past nor present belongs to us. Because he did not know English, he did not call it “mindfulness.” Had he known, who knows...

MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Blog autora: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php