Lo psicologo nel palazzo. Il caso Bechterev-Stalin. Con una novella di Lion Feuchtwanger

From the mysterious disappearance of a famous scientist to the real cause of Lenin’s death, from Stalin’s alleged paranoia to the techniques used to control individuals and the masses: as in a spy story, the secret face of Soviet Russia in an investigation in which history and psychology, politics and psychiatry intertwine. ‘Power makes you stupid’, wrote Nietzsche, and this opinion is shared by the protagonist of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger with which this book by Luciano Mecacci opens: the eccentric Dr Bl., a ‘brain physiologist’ and brilliant scientist, who shortly after a crucial meeting with the dictator who rules his country, for whom he carries out delicate tasks, dies suddenly from a mysterious illness. Feuchtwanger never specified whether his story, written in 1931, was inspired by real events and characters, but one can’t help but be struck by the disturbing similarities – as Mecacci observes – with one of the most obscure cases in Soviet Russia: that of Vladimir Bechterev, an authoritative neurologist, psychiatrist and psychologist, who in December 1927, the day after visiting Stalin in the Kremlin, died of poisoning ‘from rotten food’. Between historical reconstruction and psychological investigation, and starting from the account of Bechterev’s life – which becomes a vivid fresco of Russia in the transition from the Tsarist to the Soviet era – Mecacci examines all the aspects of the story and their varied implications: from the alleged diagnosis of Stalin as ‘paranoid’, which would have been fatal to the scientist, to the other hypotheses about his death; from his studies on suggestion, hypnosis and telepathy to the use of psychology to control individuals and masses, also through techniques inspired by Siberian shamanism and other oriental esoteric traditions – up to the capital theme of the relationship between Psyche and Power. This creates a picture in which history and psychology, politics and psychiatry are inextricably intertwined. With an unpublished interview of Stalin by Lion Feuchtwanger.