Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences Crossing Dialogues ORIGINAL ARTICLE Association Madman and Philosopher: Ideas of Embodiment between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer AEP Meeting of Psychopathologists at Hospital Corentin Celton, Paris (France), December 2016 N A Introduction 15.11.1921: Severe delusional ideas during lunchtime: cabage is the brain of his brother, potatoes are the heads of his children, meat is the human fl esh of his relatives, milk is not from the cow, eating a sandwich is eating his own son […] 19.11.1921: Three children have been slaughtered and have been eaten by patients. Three dead kids are lying in the nurse’s bed […] 09.04.1922: Patient very aggressive, boxing, hitting out and injuring nurse and doctor. Feels his nurse, coming back from leave has killed all his relatives on the order of Dr. Binswanger. Keywords: embodiement, psychopathology, Binswanger, Cassirer, Warburg. DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2017; 10(1): 14-22 These are only a few of numerous reports form though, remains focussed on the abstract from the hospital-fi les of Aby Warburg during and conscious end of the symbolising process, his treatment in Kreuzlingen between 1921 thus gaining distance from concrete emotions and 1924. Despite his diagnosis of an ongoing and from being caught in physical interaction. schizohrenia (later changed to mixed manic- My presentation focusses on the original depressive state) philosopher Ernst Cassirer and encounter between Warburg and Cassirer, on historian of culture Fritz Saxl tried to convince the contemporary controversies about Warburg’s cilinic director Ludwig Binswanger to give madness, and on the wider implications the permission to Warburg to restart his cultural whole Kreuzlingen szenario might have with studies about the Hopi Snake-Ritual as it might regards to the implementation of symbolic/ stabilise his mental balance. semiotic fi ndings in today’s psychopathological Warburg gave special attention to the study discourse. of emotional expression in gestures, rituals and INTRODUCTION depiction. As a young man he had gone through Dear Colleages, my presentation tries to the personal experience, that the encapsulation highlight the extraordinary results of a self- of emotional states into bodily confi guration healing eff ort of an ununusual personality like had a calming down and protective impact Aby Warburg, his synergic and mutual profi table, on his vulnerable and easily aff ected mind. It yet unusual, connection with philosopher Ernst fostered Warburg’s theory of iconography and Cassirer, and the amazing theatre of therapeutic his idea of ‚Pathosformeln’, looking out for the action and confl icting opinion around his case embodyment of human feeling in images and of madness played out on the mondaine scenery sculptures throughout the history of art. of Bellevue Hospital in Kreuzlingen, a Swiss Warburg’s approach guided by his very psychiatric shelter for the European upper class personal highly sensitive condition was and nobility. In his novel “The Radetzky March” somewhat contradictory, but at the same time the Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1995:187) complementary to Cassirer’s views. Cassirer, called Kreuzlingen interested in the logic of mental categorisation, “the linstitution on Lake Constance where spoiled and aligned himself temporarily with Warburg’s wealthy madmen underwent careful and expensive outlook, emphasising the primacy of ritual action treatments, – and the psychiatric attendants were as in the emergence of culture. His idea of symbolic nurturing as midwifes […]”1 www.crossingdialogues.com/journal.htm 14 Andersch, 2017 This is the place where Aby Warburg, deemed embodied emotion on art. In 1912 – following a an untreatable and unrecovering schizophrenic, reinterpretation of frescoes in the Schifano palace ended up in April 1921 – following a 30-month of Ferrara – he called his method ‘iconography’, odyssey through a number of mental hospitals.2 yet his 1893 dissertation on this subject is seen Here he and ‘his case’ got drawn into an by many art-historians already as the start of this astonishing whirlpool of opinions between new science. In open disregard of family opinion diff erent schools of contemporary psychiatry, he married a non-Jewish (orthodox-protestant) argueing philosophers, psychoanalysists, art painter and sculptor in 1897 and had three historians, infl uential family protagonists and children with her. committed psychiatric staff : a clinical panopticum During his visit to the USA in 1895/6 he carried of madness and therapy in the early 1920s, and a out ethnological studies on the Indian Hopi drama with changing encounters, from which – tribe, a work which he would revert to during strange as it seems – Aby Warburg emerged as a his psychosis. Back in Hamburg after 1902 he healed and furtheron fairly balanced personality, continued his life as a private scholar, remaining and a productive art-historian as well. involved in a multitude of cultural activities. His A PRIVILEGED WAY INTO MADNESS massive collection of scientifi c books and prints AND A PRIVILEDGED CURE TO ESCAPE brought about the idea of creating a cultural- FROM IT historic library, thereby turning his private Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was the fi rst of collection into a public institution which had fi ve sons (and two daughters) of the wealthy and grown to 60,000 books at the time of his death in conservative Jewish banker’s family (in which 1929.” In a letter to his brother Paul he explained both parental sides were troubled by a number his intentions: “The Warburg library is a post for of depressed or psychotic individuals among the registration of the changing (amplitudes) and their wider relatives). Aby was a spoiled and frequencies of human values, let’s say, between impulsive child. Noone could, or ever wanted Virtus and Contemplatio (bloody action and to rule him in. He tended to follow his wishes pure observation), while it is I who discovered and tempers, his own thoughts and daydreams. its polarity in images and actions” (Marazia/ Problems caused by Aby used to be solved by Stimilli, 2007: 115). subservient personnel. Wishful phantasies were, In November 1918, Warburg, 52 years old from early age on, followed by compulsive and only recently appointed professor of Art and frightening thoughts about his looks, his History, threatened to shoot his family and personality and character. He found it diffi cult to himself, claiming he was a ‘Werwolf’. These follow schooldiscipline and teachers found him disturbances, followed by further sophisticated diffi cult to deal with. His meandering lifestyle suicide attempts, were only the end of a and performance was an ongoing embarrassment lengthy nightmare in which Warburg had been for his father Moritz, head of the Hamburg increasingly worried and confused by late branch of the Warburg Bank, who was a strict developments of WW I, which went through its and overtly rigid parent. Aby often withdrew to fi nal stages. Obviously angered and disappointed his own company, a bit excentric and isolated, when a well loved and very close ‘Gouvernante’ already in younger years looking for remedies – caring for his needs – left the Warburg home to calm down his troubled, and easily aff ected to return to England, he withdrew from daily mind. With some help he managed his A-levels communication and got obsessed with beliefs and started studies in art-history in Bonn, Munich he might be responsible and accountable for and Strassbourg, rejecting any involvement in Germany’s dire war situation. He was admitted the banking business as his father had hoped.3 to the psychiatric Anstalt Lienau, close to He moved to Florence in 1888, developing Hamburg, where Prof. Embden diagnosed a a revolutionary method of understanding the schizophrenia with phobic and compulsive traits. afterlife of the antiquity, the reemergence of He also guessed Warburg was suff ering from a pagan imagination and the magic impact of “Beeinträchtigungswahn”. 15 DIAL PHIL MENT NEURO SCI 2017; 10(1): 14-22 Warburg, constantly shifting between bouts of recommended for his sophisticated treatment normality and extreme periods of hallucinatory of seriously mentally ill nobility, mainly from delusion, could hardly be contained in his Russia, Italy and Germany (Hirschmüller, 2002). extremely loud, aggressive, upsetting and His son and successor Robert developed the “egocentric” behaviour. A few months on the typical ‘Bellevue style’, integrating psychiatric unruly patient was subsequently transferred patients into the therapeutic and lavish from Lienau/Hamburg to Prof. Berger5 in Kreuzlingen environment like family members. Jena (who would successfully perform the He handed over Bellevue to his son Ludwig fi rst electoencephalography/EEG on a human (1881-1966) in 1911, who, trained under Bleuler being in 1939). Berger, following a careful and Jung in Burghölzli, was a close friend examination, fully confi rmed Embden’s of Sigmund Freud’s. Strongly infl uenced by schizophrenia diagnosis of Warburg. Several psychoanalysis Ludwig B. remained committed extremely diffi cult months of containment to biological aspects of illness but was at the and helpless eff orts of treatment in Jena led to same time eager in grasping new philosophical Berger’s belief that Warburg would never fully approaches and elements of treatment from a recover. His prognosis seemed confi rmed by gestaltist and phenomenological background. Warburg’s further deterioration into lengthy, In the early-mid 1920s Binswanger, after prolonged delusional