In Wie is van hout, the Dutch psyciatrist Jan Foudraine describes his Werdegang, his personal development, as much as his original success in revolutionizing psychiatry. Key in the work of Foudraine is the way we see "man", i.e. other people, namely as people.

In Part 1 of the book, Foudraine describes his experience during his training, with two schizophrenic patients, and how, he was able to establish contact, and build up a meaningful relation with patients who were considered beyond reach. Part 2 of the book describes the experiments he was enabled to complete at Chestnut Lodge, a well known as a psychiatric institution, in Rockville, Maryland. Building on the work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Foudraine broke through the traditional view of seeing and treating the clients as, and thereby institutionalising them as untreatable patients. Instead of continuing treatment as it had been for sometimes more than 20 or 30 years, for some of the schizophrenic patients at the clinic, Foudraine started treating them as individual and responsible people, aimed at returning them to some form of independent life in society. He succeeded achieving that with a number of patients.

To Jan Foudraine his discoveries and professional successes are no less than a stage in his own personal development. He celebrates his achievement of viewing schizophrenic people as humans rather than patients (objects), as a step in his own increasing understanding of human nature, and what it means to be human.

Following the success of this first book, Foudraine has spent ample time with Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh in Poona, India, and was given the name Swami Deva Amrito. His thinking has developed further in a more mystical-philosophic direction, based on the belief that human suffering could end by discovering one's non-dualism, and abandoning one's sense of ego, (Freud's Ich).

I will be very interested to read his latest book,
Metanoia. Over psychiatrie, psychotherapie en bevrijding (2004). ( )