Jan Foudraine

Personal

Vocation

Notable

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 Ego's... (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 nurse's 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 G'd 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 ghost in the bottle he had released - Jung might call this the "Collective Unconsciousness", and Richard Tarnas a slow planet Hegelian Zeitgeist affair- , anyway, he travelled in 1976 to Poona to seek rest and to visit the Baghwan. He, the once in Holland famous psychiatrist and scientist, now became a modest "silent" disciple of an Indian guru. But the Baghwan changed his mind set. He came back as another person in an orange dress and with another name: (Swami Devi) Amrito. His "conversion" to an old Indian philosophy got again a lot of media attention in the Dutch press. And he was now seen by some as a Saint, but by most as a typical fool. Under the pen name "Amrito" he published in 1979 the book "Oorspronkelijk gezicht... Een gang naar huis" (Original face.. A way back home), two books about the Baghwan and a series of publications about non-dualism. Other for him important teachers were Alexander Smit, a student of Shri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Tony Parsons and Richard Sylvester. His early inspiring figures were C.G. Jung and the Ich und Du of Martin Buber, the meaning of which, he once tried to explain to Dutch psychiatric patients. Like Koppejans, and Buber, he imagined that one could see "the face of Christ" in the smile of the loving other. But the word "love" has never been an scientifically expressed object. So "believing in it" can make you only a spiritual dreamer. In 2004 he published "Metanoia: over psychiatrie, psychotherapie en bevrijding" (Metanoia, about psychiatry, psychotherapy and libeartion). In the tradition of Buddhist and Hindu mysticism, he sees mental suffering as the consequence of the sense of separateness that can be removed by releasing the ego-concept (Idea of Ich) and the (re)discovery of non-dualism or Advaita (non-duality). As young children, we once had a sense of unity with the surroundings, but with the necessary building of the Ego "fortress" and his defences we lost it. He sees the I versus Other distinction as an artificial creation of the ego, which is only an psychological instrument for the experienced "soma" body that wants (for ever) to survive. The death of the ego within the psychosomatic organism is an existential and traumatic event of "to be and not to be". It brings us anxiety, as the seemingly unique on its own "existing" personality still identifies with his deeply conditioned in childhood conditioned mask. Interpersonal psychotherapy and meditation can support the transition from a born with mask to the Higher Self. Until his death, he gave interpersonal psychotherapy and lived together with his spouse, the hypnotherapist Marijke Foudraine-Kranenburg. http://www.foudraine.com German Wikipedia Link to Dutch Wikipedia