Voices and comments
on the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) and on the Patients’ Front (PF)

(Addendums selected by the editorial collective KRRIM for the 5th German edition of SPK – Turn Illness into a Weapon, 1987)

Ingeborg Drewitz (1986): The concept of illness, as it was developed by the SPK and worked out by the Patients’ Front, shatters all the basic foundations of the entire rotten building.

People’s University at Goettingen (1985): The Patients’ Front is the radicalization of the SPK. The Patients’ Front attacks the ruling system as the power of the medical doctors’ class, that is to say it attacks any power [… alles Aerztliche …].

David Cooper (1983): I have indeed welcomed the SPK-Huber-thesis: "Doctors need patients, but patients do not need doctors”, but nevertheless I regarded it as impossible that it can be carried out in reality. Meanwhile, however, realizing what the Patients’ Front has achieved by doing, I must confess that the above mentioned statement indeed has been proven right.

Felix Guattari (1974): What the Paris Commune was in 1870, the SPK was in 1970 – in a way more developed (100 years later, no wonder).

Jean-Paul Sartre (1972): SPK … the only possible radicalization that no antipsychiatry whatsoever can achieve … Illness, the only possible form of life in capitalism. Indeed, … abolition of the doctor-patient relationship … Illness becoming a revolutionary force.

Senegalese Liberation Movement (1983): The SPK is the inalienable foundation for every successful revolution in the Third World and for every revolution that has yet to be made there.

Comments from other

CONTINENTS:

“Death is omnipresent in life. The SPK is not fetishing a situation. It is exposing this cathedral of death.”
SPK (music group in Australia, 1981)

“… liberation struggle of the PATIENTS’ FRONT in order to abolish psychiatry and medicine …”
Madness Network News (San Francisco, U.S.A., autumn 1986)

STRATA:

“ … for comparatively naïve relations like ours too much SPK.”) [“… fuer unsere Leutchen …”; and also: “… fuer unsere Verhaeltnisse …”] RAF (1974)

“Let’s learn from the revolutionary experiences of the SOCIALIST PATIENTS’ COLLECTIVE.”
Curcio / Valentino (Brigate Rosse – Red Brigades – Italy 1984)

TIMES:

“The most important … achieving changes on the practical level … Nevertheless, we prefer politicizing the workers by drawing advantages from the existing hierarchy in the factories. That’s the thing”. Failed.
Ex-Arbeitersache Munich ( Workers‘ Cause) 1972, gone since 1973.

“… we shouldn’t have made compromises, but SPK … a lot of SPKs …”
Release Heidelberg/Hamburg 1971, gone since 1972

“… in order to learn from the mistakes of the SPK by now making clear distinctions between what is politics and what is psychoanalysis”. Student Help Centre Dr. Spazier / Bopp, Heidelberg 1975, gone since 1975

“ALTERNATIVE” “NEWSPAPERS”:

Instead of SOCIALIST PATIENTS’ COLLECTIVE, “SOCIALIST PATIENTS’ COLLECTIVE” = put between quotation marks (“…” – an-Fuehrungszeichen = marks of discrimination), from 1970 to1987 et seq.

UNIVERSES (IN BETWEEN, NOT NEXT TO):

“It’s by illness and warmth that I was immediately able to understand what occultism is about … If only I had known about it before … then I would have made PATIENTS’ FRONT, and if I had that, they never would have had any cause to frame me with religious mania because of all the Bhagwans and Aurobindos I had been with, and they never would have succeeded in locking me up for years in mental hospitals, during the last 12-years’ period, which I had to go through and during which I had to suffer from all these terrifying experiences, if we all together …” Ex-Sannyasin (public communication, 1987)

INTERVIEWS:

Question: “… things that have not (yet) existed in the SPK?”

Patients’ Front: We are in the resistance for illness, and from that follows quite automatically that we are against the doctors and the Nazi and the fascists and against everything that has to do with overkilling sick people ... The procedure for that, the means and methods, which are not those of occultism, and certainly no therapeutic methods and means, but nevertheless occult means and methods, because they are the means of pathopractice which we use, and that’s what we were talking about already several times here, in our two discourses.” Patients’ Front to a Swiss journalist, 1987

REPETITIONS:

"You will have to struggle with all means, because the rulers of our society intend to prevent you from continuing your practical work.” Jean-Paul Sartre 1972 (see his preface to SPK – Turn Illness into a weapon).