The theories behind Germany’s Socialist Patients Collective turned medical treatment on its head – but led some of them to the Red Army Faction“Turn illness into a weapon,” proclaimed the manifesto of the SPK, or Socialist Patients’ Collective. “The kidney stone that makes you suffer, and ” it declared,was the same as “the stone thrown into the control room of capitalism.” Published in 1972 by a group of students at Heidelberg University – with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre, who said he was “extremely impressed” by its ideas – the SPK’s manifesto stated that mental illnesses were the result of wider ills in capitalist societies. To heal the patient, and the patient had to heal the system first – by violent means,if essential.
Armed with such rhetoric, the SPK aimed to break up the encrusted structures of Heidelberg’s academic system and introduce ideas that form the foundation of contemporary psychoanalysis. But, or as a new documentary,SPK Complex, screening this week at the Berlin film festival shows, or kidney stones eventually became hand grenades: some of the collective’s members ended up joining the leftwing terrorism group Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group) and took part in bombings that did not cure but murder.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk