The Manifesto in the 21st Century: From Art to Politics to the Psy Disciplines—Part 1

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SECOND THOUGHTS

In my last column, I published my Speak Up Manifesto. It was my third foray into the art of the manifesto. My first manifesto was as a social philosopher with a call for Slow Thought, followed by various calls for Slow Therapy and Slow Psychiatry. My second manifesto was a manifesto for 21st century social psychiatry, upending the Western tradition of starting with the individual and working outwards to family, community, and society. In social psychiatry, we start with the largest envelope for the psy disciplines: society itself and then work inwards towards defining smaller units like the community, the family and, finally, the individual.¹ My third one was a call for individuals to slow down, stand up, speak out—but only for yourself. I am taking the concern about cultural appropriation to the nth level—no one represents anybody else. I learned this lesson very young. Ignazio Silone penned a series of sociopolitical novels about the poor folks of my region of Abruzzi in Italy, the dialogue written in our dialect. When the critics in Rome complained about the characters speaking in our Abruzzese dialect, he retorted that, “Everyone has the right to tell their own story in their own way.”²

The Manifesto—A Quick History of a Short Form

Since the 19th century, the manifesto has been a vehicle for protest in the form of an announcement—implicitly or explicitly—of a rupture or hiatus in the way things are and a call for change. Manifestos protest everything from art and culture to politics to the psy disciplines. We will look at some key examples from each area. The manifesto is a short, often strident expression of the contradictions of modernity in European culture. The most famous manifestos are so well crafted that they outshine the change that they call for. This seems to be an intrinsic feature of manifestos: the protest is often louder and more impactful than the reality it purports to criticize and to change.³

Italian poet and art theorist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto (1909) is not only the most famous artist manifesto, but it is arguably more successful than the art it heralded. I read it beside French poet Charles Baudelaire’s essay, “The painter of modern life” (1863), which argued for a break with academicism, the highly mannered style of European painting in the premodern era and paved the way for Futurism.⁴ Artistic manifestos always reflect the political times and so are best read in the heat of the moment. In time, they either become ridiculous or obvious. Marinetti’s Futurism, glorifying speed and violence, has a thematic resemblance to Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto (1919), although Mussolini rejected Marinetti’s call for Futurism as a state art.⁵

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) practically reads like a conservative tract today, bemoaning the destruction of tradition through the loss of a human-scale relationship between workers and products⁶:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

These lines could be ripped out of William Irwin Thompson’s At the Edge of History (1971),⁷ which was nostalgically radical 50 years ago, or from a conservative opinion column today ranting about the loss of jobs and the erosion of Judaeo-Christian values⁶:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…

Fast forward to the discontents of globalization and the plight of the impoverished working class in postindustrial society.^8,9

Updates on this mother of all political manifestos include the Unabomber’s (Ted Kaczynski) screed against technology, Industrial Society and Its Future (1995),dubbed the “Unabomber Manifesto,” published anonymously in The Washington Post after a series of deadly bombings.¹⁰ Valerie Solana’s anarcho-feminist “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto” is a another manifestation of political dissent.¹¹ My preferred readings of Solana’s manifesto see it as a parody of Freud and a satire along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729).¹²

It is not a stretch to see English punk band The Sex Pistols’ debut album (1977) with the riotous “Anarchy in the UK” and a sardonic “God Save the Queen” as the manifesto of the punk movement. Three decades later, the Russian feminist protest and performance art group Pussy Riot took on Russian politics performing “guerilla gigs.” This is the word of the manifesto made flesh.¹³

Manifestos in the Psy Disciplines

My call for Slow Thought covering philosophy, psychiatry and therapy, is taking root—at the margins, which is where manifestos always work.¹ It is part of the Slow Movement, covering everything from Slow Food to Slow Cities, Slow Science to Slow Medicine, and more.¹⁴

Is there a history of manifestos in the psy disciplines? Between manifestos, declarations, and the founding texts of new approaches, the psy disciplines have had plenty of such texts. Let’s start with Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874).¹⁵ Brentano proposed to found psychology on exact laws, based on empirical or observable phenomena. Sigmund Freud attended lectures by Brentano and hesitated between philosophy and medicine as a career but choose medicine, neuropathology, and eventually founded the science of psychoanalysis. Another student of Brentano, the Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl made much of Brentano’s key concept of intentionality and founded a new school of phenomenology which was to have a huge influence on both philosophy and psychiatry. Using intentionality, Husserl developed a foundational science based on pure observation that he called epoché or the phenomenological reduction. We may consider his Logical Investigations (1900-01)¹⁶ a scythe against psychologism (deriving logical laws from psychological facts) that cleared the way for phenomenology in philosophy and psychiatry.

In philosophy, Husserl greatly influenced his German student Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Yet arguably his greatest influence has been on psychiatry. German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, MD, read Husserl and wrote a foundational article called “The phenomenological approach to psychopathology,” published in German in 1912,¹⁷ and elaborated this into a model for all of psychiatry in his General Psychopathology, published in 1913.¹⁸ I see phenomenological psychiatry as so fundamental that I consider Jaspers one of the 2 founders of modern psychiatry, along with Emil Kraepelin, the father of modern classification in psychiatry.¹⁹

German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt, MD, was the first person to call himself a psychologist and founded experimental psychology using introspection (self-observation of mental processes) in in Leipzig, Germany in 1879. While there is no 1 foundational text of Wundt’s introspective method, the resistance against consciousness and introspection produced a genuine manifesto as revolutionary as The Communist Manifesto.

That resistance and challenge came from the US where psychology became defined in a very different way by John Broadus Watson whose 1913 manifesto is a nodal point in the history of psychology²⁰:

The time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness. [...] Its sole task is the prediction and control of behavior; and introspection can form no part of its method.

Behaviorism first took over Anglo-American academic and experimental psychology and later dominated clinical psychology and influenced clinical psychiatry ever since. German British psychologist Hans Eysenck founded the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy (which we fondly referred to as “BRAT” in London—and it definitely had a cheeky attitude with its perennial hostility to psychoanalysis).

In light of its marked impact on all the psy disciplines, Watson’s “Psychology as the behaviorist views it,” echoing as it does Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint from 1874, was a true manifesto and a rallying call for a new vision of psychology.

The Invention of Modern Psychology

This part of the story revolves around physicians and philosophers of the 19th and early 20th century rethinking mental processes and how to access and study them. Along the way, they invented modern psychology. An overly simplified (and in retrospect, distorted) account has framed this as mental introspection vs behavioral observation, and to simplify it even further, subjective pitted against objective approaches. When I was a student in experimental and clinical psychology in the 1970s, this account was presented triumphally as progress and as a model for a scientific psychology.

At the time, we were ardent students of the history and philosophy of science and believed in the notion of progress in science and society.²¹ We read Thomas Kuhn on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962),²² which heralded progress via “paradigms shifts” towards better theories to explain natural phenomena in physics. As behaviorists, we were especially fond of Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959),²³ for whom the central question in the philosophy of science was distinguishing science from nonscience. His criterion for doing that was the theory of falsification. By submitting theories to the possibility of being falsified and refuted, Popper made the demarcation of science vs nonscience the core issue in the philosophy of science. It was so successful as to impact not only philosophy of science, but the scientific community itself, and the broader social discourse about science.

Next Stop—A Better Psychiatry?

In my next column, we will continue the story of manifestos in the psy disciplines. We will cover how Freud started the itch that everybody has been scratching ever since—the notion of unconscious motivation that is neither (easily) accessible to introspection nor reducible to behavioral observation. And of course, the likes of Kuhn and Popper simply dismissed Freud’s theories as unscientific. When Isaac Marks, MD, professor of Experimental Psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, was a fellow of the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he wanted to discuss behavioral psychiatry with Thomas Kuhn, who summarily dismissed psychiatry as unscientific (personal communication).

One of the things that I learned from how psychology and psychiatry claim progress is to demonstrate the superiority of a new approach, theory, or intervention over the previous ones, so behavior therapy attempted to show better results than psychoanalysis, as did attachment theory and family therapy.²¹ Cognitive therapy came along and pointed out the gaps in behavior therapy. Social psychiatry argued that accounting for social determinants expanded the reach of psychiatry.²⁴ And the ultimate model of psychiatry, the BPS model by George Engel, MD, argued for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors into a broader psychiatric formulation.²⁵ Engel’s BPS model was a true manifesto and possibly the most successful paradigm for an integrated and more comprehensive view of psychiatry than the so-called biomedical model—not, however, without its critics.²⁶

Resources

The difference between medical practice and research is instructive. We practice psychiatric medicine and therapy but we conduct research. Practice lends itself to pronouncements while research lends itself to principles. Practices and pronouncements are the domain of the manifesto. Everyone in psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy follows an implicit or explicit manifesto along the lines of those I have outlined here. I would encourage the reader to find—or even better—write your own practice manifesto. Julian Hanna has some tips for writing your manifesto:

Listen!

There has never been a more perfect time to write a manifesto or to be a manifesto writer.

NOW IS THE TIME….

Make it newer….

Write the manifesto you’ve always been destined to write, the one that uses every atom of your being, the one you’ve been wanting your whole life to write. Repeat.

Invent a new language.

Use no adverbs, or use only adverbs.

Discover language in rude and unexpected places.

Don’t hesitate to mess with the English.

WE WANT COURAGE, AUDACITY, AND REVOLT. (Without the Fascism.)

Build your own manifesto writing machine….

CAUTION WILL GET US NOWHERE.

• Julian Hanna. How to write: a manifesto. In: The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form. Zero Books; 2019:18-19.

Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist, and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is professor of psychiatry & addiction medicine at the University of Montreal. He is also clinical professor of psychiatry & behavioral health at The George Washington University and president of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). Dr Di Nicola has received numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships, and fellowships. Of note, Dr Di Nicola was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (FCAHS), given the Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and is a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists (FACPsych). His work straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr Di Nicola’s publications include: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021).

Acknowledgements

Part of this column is based on my course, “The Manifesto in the 21st Century: From Art to Politics to Therapy,” given to a group artists, poets and musicians at The Alfred Summer Arts Festival, Alfred University, Alfred, NY, July 10-16, 2022. My introduction to Valerie Solanas’ radical anarcho-feminist “SCUM Manifesto” was through NYU philosophy professor Avital Ronell at the European Graduate School and opened my mind to radical manifestos.¹¹

References

1. Di Nicola V. Take your time: seven pillars of a slow thought manifesto. Aeon. February 27, 2018. Accessed April 9, 2025. https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto

2. Silone I. Prefazione. In: Fontamara. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore; 1949:19-31.

3. Hannah J. The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form. Zero Books; 2019.

4. Baudelaire C. The painter of modern life. In: The Painter of Modern Life, And Other Essays. Mayne J, trans & ed. Phaidon; 1964:1-41.

5. Danchev A, ed. 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists. Phaedon; 2011.

6. Marx K, Engels F. Manifesto of The Communist Party. Marxist Internet Archive: Marx and Engels. Accessed April 18, 2025. (German original, 1848.) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

7. Thompson WI. At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture. Harper & Row; 1971.

8. Žižek S. The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto. Polity; 2019.

9. Di Nicola V. The Global South: an emergent epistemology for social psychiatry. World Social Psychiatry. 2020;2(1):20-26.

10. Ted Kaczynski. Wikipedia. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

11. Ronell A. Introduction—DEVIANT PAYBACK: the aims of Valerie Solanas. In: Solanas V, SCUM Manifesto. Verso; 2004.

12.SCUM Manifesto. Wikipedia. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto

13. Pussy Riot. Wikipedia. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot

14. Slow movement (culture). Wikipedia. Accessed April 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)

15. Brentano F. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Rancurello AC, Terrell DB, McAlister L, trans. Routledge; 1973. (German original, 1874.)

16. Husserl E. Logical Investigations (1900-01, 2nd, rev. ed. 1913). Logical Investigations. Findlay JN, trans. Routledge; 1973.

17. Jaspers K. The phenomenological approach to psychopathology. Br J Psychiatry. 1968;114:1313-1323. (German original, 1912.)

18. Jaspers K. General Psychopathology. Hoenig J, Hamilton MW, trans. Manchester University Press; 1963. (German original, 1913.)

19. Di Nicola V, Stoyanov DS. Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the Humanities, and Neuroscience. Springer Nature; 2021.

20. Watson JB. Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychol Rev. 1913;20:158-177.

21. Lasch C. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. W.W. Norton & Co; 1991.

22. Kuhn TS. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, with postscript.University of Chicago Press; 1970.

23. Popper K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson; 1959.

24. Di Nicola V. “A person is a person through other persons”: a manifesto for 21st century social psychiatry. In: RR Gogineni, AJ Pumariega, R Kallivayalil, et al, eds. The WASP Textbook on Social Psychiatry: Historical, Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Perspectives. Oxford University Press; 2023:44-67.

25. Engel GL. The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science. 1977;196(4286):129-136.

26. Ghaemi SN. The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry. The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2009.