Careful, pleasantly readable biography of the controversial psychiatrist Jan Foudraine ★★★★☆

Worshiped, reviled, mocked, forgotten: psychiatrist Jan Foudraine experienced it all. He had made it too. In 1971 he threw a big stone into the calm waters of psychiatry with his instant bestseller Who is made of wood? The message: everything had to change in psychiatry, especially in the institutions where people with serious disorders, such as schizophrenia and manic depression, shuffled around drugged. Stop the pills and electroshock, get rid of the labels, give patients back their humanity, talk to them, approach them on an equal footing and encourage them to return to society.

With this message, Jan Foudraine (1929-2016) became the Dutch face of critical psychiatry that emerged in several places around the world in the 1960s. His commitment to disrupting psychiatry made him especially endearing to the protest generation of those years, which welcomed any attack on traditional power relations. Most of his fellow psychiatrists saw him more as a nuisance agitator who, unfortunately, with his influence and popularity, they could not flatly ignore.

It was not until nearly ten years later that they could breathe a sigh of relief: the therapeutic communities set up by critical psychiatrists did not turn out to be the hoped-for beneficial environment for patients with schizophrenia. Foudraine, filled with existential doubts, left for India to surrender himself to Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh to everyone’s bewilderment. New drugs came on the market that gave confused patients a much better chance of returning to society. End of the nonsense of the seventies. And a fresh start for the medical perspective that, coupled with the ever-expanding psychiatry manual DSMhas prevailed since the 1980s.

Time for reparation?

But was it all so nonsensical what Foudraine had claimed? Now, fifty years after Who is made of wood? is that easier to judge than in the tumult of yesteryear and the recently published biography Jan Foudraine, written by Dutch scientist Alex Rutten, can help with this. Is the time ripe for careful reparation for the idealistic Foudraine, who returned from India dressed in an orange dress to undermine his own credibility with his promotional books for Bhagwan?

‘You should judge a writer by his best work, not his worse’, puts psychiatrist Jim van Os into perspective in a VPRO podcast about the biography. In Foudraine’s best work he certainly sees reason for reparation: the attention that Foudraine paid to the patient’s experience and to his environment, both so neglected in recent years of medical approach, is worth dusting off now that the medical perspective has reached its limits. Or as Paul Verhaeghe in his foreword to the recent anniversary edition of Who is made of wood? writes: ‘What makes this work important to this day are the socio-psychologically inspired treatments in people who have spent years in psychiatry.’

Carefully researched

Rutten leaves it to the reader to assess the topicality of Foudraine’s ideas. In his biography he mainly presents the carefully researched facts about his background, his years of study, his growing aversion to the medical-biological framework in which he is trained as a psychiatrist, and about the hope that flares up in him when he discovers that some American psychiatrists do have good health. seen in psychotherapy for psychotic patients.

After his education, he leaves for the United States to further develop his skills and to set up a therapeutic community within a psychiatric institution. Back in the Netherlands, and after writing his bestseller, he finds it difficult to find his way with his acquired knowledge and ideas, not least because his authoritarian, irreconcilable character stands in the way of a good collaboration.

The period that follows – his trip to India, his marriage and his last years as a therapist in his own practice – have also been carefully selected and described in this pleasantly readable, informative biography. In this way we get to know Foudraine fairly well, although it remains unclear why this passionate revolutionary, who tolerated no contradiction with his proud ego, from one moment to the next slavishly knelt before a questionable guru with 93 Rolls Royces.

Foudraine’s early years are therefore particularly suitable for a revaluation. It is still moving to read how, during his education, Foudraine gets a virtually silent, schizophrenic student, after months of patience and attention, to talk about his fears and the hell in which he lives. He did not heal the patient, but he did give him his humanity back. For that alone, he deserves to be remembered.