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The Psychotic Left: From Jacobin France to the Occupy Movement Kerry Bolton Black House Publishing Ltd, 2013
We approached this book with some fear and trepidation. Was a study of "the psychotic Left" going to be an overwrought attempt to match Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality?4 Although Adorno's book has been much admired in American academia, we prefer to remember it as a highly ideological application of Freudian psychology to make an ad hominem attack on conservatives of all sorts.5 Would Bolton seek to counterbalance this by a comparable pseudo-scientific attack on the Left?
Our apprehension vanished, however, as we got into the book. Bolton, it turns out, is fair-minded, balanced and scholarly. Anyone who is interested in knowing more about the extreme thinking and behavior of radical personalities going back as far as the Jacobins will find The Psychotic Left a fascinating source-book. Bolton brings into one place a vast array of detail from a wide variety of sources. These include such esoterica as the notes written by Mao Zedong in the margins of a book, and letters written by Karl Marx's wife Jenny and father Heinrich. By such means, he avoids any superficial gloss, and explores, through the personalities' own words and those of people who knew them well, the inner lives of many of the Left's leading radicals over the past two centuries.
As Bolton lays out so many facts about thoughts and actions, a reader has no difficulty seeing the plausibility of his attributing a broad array of psychiatric disorders to such individuals as Marquis de Sade, Jean Paul Marat, Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, and several others. The disorders include such categories as sociopathy, hysterical hyperesthesia, narcissistic personality disorder, pathological egotism, and bi-polar disorder, among others. Although in each case the appellation is well-supported by the facts, we would downplay this particular aspect of the book. Bolton, who has a doctorate in theology, is not medically trained; and he doesn't cite trained medical opinion in support of his diagnoses. We are certainly pointed appropriately toward considering psychological disorder as relevant, but the principal value of the book, it seems to us, lies in the wealth of information it gives.
Bolton's level-headedness is apparent...