Unveiling Schizophrenia
We present the first article published by John B. Torelló in issue 3 of the journal Studi Cattolici, with the title “Will Schizophrenia be unveiled?”. See glossary for definition of schizophrenia.
As part of the cataloguing studies of Torelló’s personal archive, many of the nearly fifty articles he wrote for the journal Catholic Studies were found. We will publish the others in the coming months.
Will Schizophrenia be unveiled?
The author analyzes the 2nd International Congress of Psychiatry held in Zurich in September 1957, on a still frequent and very important mental illness: schizophrenia. Although the years have passed, the relevance is remarkable.
Download the original article in PDF
In September of that year, an important group of scientists gathered in Zurich. II International Congress of Psychiatry aroused from the very beginning of its long preparation an extraordinary interest among scholars in this branch of Medicine, both because of the quantity and quality of the participants and because of the burning topicality of the theme assigned to this conference: schizophrenia.
Torellò tells us that “all psychiatry at that time was convened in Zurich: more than 2,500 congressmen from a wide variety of origins and schools, from the long-standing celebrities-such as Minkowski, Jung, Kretschmer, Schneider, Cerletti, Binswanger, etc. – to the names that have more recently come forward in research or in the clinic, circled around one of the greatest enimmas not only of pathology, but also of our culture, our civilization.” Alessandra Adler, and C.G. Jung were also present.
Difficulty in understanding schizophrenia
Regarding the complexity, still today, of fully unraveling schizophrenia, Torelló wrote in 1957:
The research carried out in the sense of biochemistry and pharmacology, especially by the great North American cohort, which presented -as is now customary in all Congresses- an impressive mass of papers, showed, even in their hopeful fervor, the blind alley in which this line and perspective moves.
He added, “It is disconcerting, however, to observe and not only in America, but also in Europe the fervor with which so many still want to look for in the ‘experimental psychosis’ provoked in various animals, the elucidation and interpretation of a mental illness, of an illness in which the ‘personal’ elements are now undeniable.”
In the article, Torelló demonstrates his understanding of psychiatry within a Christian view of different illnesses. In his typical literary style, he analyzes the relationship between psychology and spiritual life and the latest developments on schizophrenia discussed at the congress. A critical evaluation of what he wrote back in 1957 on how to unveil schizophrenia remains out of the scope of this presentation. We leave that to the readers.
Download the PDF original transcript of the article
Juan Bautista Torelló in Studi Cattolici
As Professor José Luis González Gullón has well described in his book Opus Dei: A History, Studi Cattolici was born in 1957 as an initiative of several members of Opus Dei in Italy as a journal of practical theology. The journal has always had a large number of contributors, among them many important theologians.
Juan Bautista Torelló, who had been living in Zurich since 1956, collaborated from the beginning with articles on a wide range of topics: psychology and spiritual life, psychiatry, interior life, human virtues, theology and even literary criticism. He wrote a total of 50 articles between 1957 and 2005. Many of these articles were then published in the journal Analyse of Vienna (Austria) from 1967 to 1969 and were later collected in some of his books such as Open Psychology.
From the Gruppo di ricerca in Psicologia e Vita Spirituale we will be publishing his articles.
José María López-Barajas
