A bit of left-handed history, of cursed geniuses ... 4

09/05/2018

IV HOW WERE THE LEFT BEING TRANSFORMED FROM A SYMPTOM OF MENTAL AND MORAL DEFICIENCY TO A SIGN OF CREATIVITY AND MENTAL STRENGTH?
SCIENCE BECOMES LEFT IN PATHOLOGY
As the centuries passed, more "oracles of truth" -specifically in the sciences-gained authority in the governance of public life, the left became an object of scientific analysis and a recipient of medical treatment.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Cesare Lombroso, often considered the father of criminology, considered the left as an explanatory variable of certain less desirable behaviors. And unlike what appeared in religious texts, Lombroso used "science" to justify his thinking.
Lombroso wrote in 1903: "man advances in civilization and in culture," shows a greater use of the right always compared to ... women and wild races [that] even when they are not right using the left, they have certain gestures and movements that make them especially left-handed. "
With his hand, Lombroso did not see the devil's face but the result of a biological abnormality. Lombroso opined that those who favored the right hemisphere of the brain - and thus wrote with the left hand - were "primitive" and abnormal. Those who favored the left hemisphere and wrote with the right hand were more "civilized" and normal, and therefore less inclined to commit crime.
As Lombroso wrote: "In the criminals and lunatics the right lobe predominates much more often than in normal people ... while the healthy man thinks and feels with the left lobe, the abnormal, thinks, wants and feels more with the right".
Although Lombroso's hypothesis about the behaviors of left-handers would be reduced later to science, his thoughts resonated with others at that time and lent themselves to racist and classist thinking. As written in a 1913 edition of McClure's Magazine, the left is "somewhat more common in the lower strata of society than in the higher strata, among blacks than among whites and among savages than civilized races."
So that the left does not symbolize all possible (and excluded) others, psychoanalysts soon came to see the left as a sign of homosexuality and general sexual deviation. As the Austrian physician and psychologist Wilhelm Stekel wrote in 1911, "The path to the right always means the path to righteousness, the path to the left the road to crime. Thus, the left can mean homosexuality, incest and perversion, while the right means marriage, relationships with a prostitute, etc. "
In Berlin, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Fliess took his theories about the left to the point that he believed that any woman not so feminine or man not so masculine would always be left-handed.
"When a woman resembles a man, or a man resembles a woman, we find the emphasis on the left side of the body," Fliess wrote. "Once we know this we have the diviner's rod for the discovery of the left. The diagnosis is always correct. "
These ideas were so far from reality that even Sigmund Freud, who was not obliged to make extravagant claims, took them seriously. Freud criticized the "lack of critical reflection and tendency of Stekel to generalize at all costs". Responding to Fliess, Freud wrote simply: "I still can not accept your interpretation on the left".
However, these associations -either of the sciences or religious texts- became worse and found their ways in the classrooms, where they somehow remain today.