| Socialist Patients' Collective | |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1968 – June 1971, (1973–) |
| Motives | 'Liberation from Iatrocapitalism' |
| Active region(s) | Heidelberg University, West Germany |
| Ideology | 'Pro-illness'. Illness vs. Capitalism. |
| Status | Self-dissolved in 1971. Continued as Patientenfront from 1973, currently SPK/PF(H) |
The Socialist Patients' Collective (in German Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) was a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber. The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan Turn Illness into a weapon, which remains actively practiced. The SPK emerged from the Patients' Front, that was founded in 1965. The SPK declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but the SPK continued to exist as Patients' Front, which is currently known as the Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective (PF/SPK(H)). For the SPK, illness really exists as an undeniable fact and it is caused by the capitalist system. The SPK is pro illness, in favor of illness, considering illness as the protest against capitalism and considering illness the anticipation of the human species that does not yet exist but that should be created through illness. The SPK fights against capitalism and against all doctors considering them to be the ruling class of the system and poisonous to the human species. The most widely known text of the PF/SPK(H) is the book SPK – Turn illness into a weapon with prefaces by both the founder of the SPK, Wolfgang Huber, and Jean-Paul Sartre.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
Contents |
The group was officially founded on 2 March 1970 at Heidelberg University by Wolfgang Huber, his wife Ursula Schaefer, two other colleagues, along with 40 ex-patients from the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic. They were reacting, in part, in response to the backlash following the new left revolts of 1968, which sought to drive the revolutionary left from the university.
In a 4-room apartment at Heidelberg, the SPK aimed to establish a free space for political therapy, re-framing illness as a contradiction created by capitalism, which could be embraced to bring an end to the system which gave it life. They believed that the sick formed a revolutionary class of dispossessed people, who could be radicalized to struggle against oppression. Organizing by sickness instead of socio-economic class allowed middle-class, student leftists to articulate their own feelings of psychic and political oppression and struggle against the status quo in their own right, along with other oppressed groups. Additionally, sickness had the advantage of being, according to the SPK, familiar to everyone, and so everyone was a potential revolutionary, so long as they disavowed the medical establishment. Like other anti-psychiatry experiments, such as Kingsley Hall and Villa 21, they questioned the patient/doctor division, going so far as to call for an end to the "doctor's class".
The collective produced leaflets, held teach-ins, and petitioned the school to increase awareness and gain recognition for their experiment, which was informed by Hegel, Marx, Freud, Reich,.[10] They conducted individual and group agitations, called "single" and "group agitations", working from 9 am to 10 pm or later.
They soon came under fire from the school and the psychiatric clinic, and the SPK's funds, the doctors' salary, and meeting space were threatened. In the autumn of 1970, the university convened a panel of 3 experts who suggested the SPK should be institucionalized in the University. Meanwhile the medicinie faculty convened 3 persons who pronounced against SPK. The Minister overseeing the panel ultimately sided with the SPK's critics coming from the Medicine Faculty and against the dictamen made by the 3 experts convened by the university, and ended their funding and ordered an eviction.
The decision provoked a confrontation between the SPK and the university, which led to a sit-in and attracted the attention of a wider audience, including the police, in a climate of hypervigilance brought about by radical left-wing extrajudicial actions. Ultimately, the collective moved out of the university and into the homes of its members. When, on 24 June 1971, a mysterious shooting at Heidelberg police station was attributed to the Baader-Meinhof group, the police began conducting raids on SPK members' houses. Three hundred fifty officers were charged with finding the shooter. At its peak, the SPK counted about 500 members; of these, 7 were arrested in the raids, including Huber and Schaefer on 21 July 1971. By some accounts, the arrests were the end of the SPK.
As part of a disinformation campaign aimed at reducing West German support for the Red Army Faction, the SPK was alleged to have conducted working circles based on explosives, radio transmission, photography, judo and karate, using group therapy sessions on dialectics, Marxism, religion, education and sexuality as a cover. The rhetoric denouncing the SPK as engaged in terrorist activity and a precursor to the RAF emerged after the arrest of Kristina Berster, who crossed the US border illegally seeking asylum from West German counterterrorism operations. Berster was acquitted of all conspiracy charges, and the disinformation campaign was exposed by Greg Guma.[11]
"By all accounts," including the admission of a West German embassy spokesman, the "SPC was fairly harmless."[12] Kristina Berster explained that "the purpose of the Socialist Patients Collective was to 'find out the reasons why people feel lonely, isolated and depressed and the circumstances which caused these problems.'"[11]
Even before Huber was arrested in June 1971, the SPK dissolved. The IZRU or Information Zentrum Rote Volks-Universität (in English; Information Center of the Red People's University) was founded with some former SPK members, but the IZRU was neither the official or unofficial SPK. It organized international congresses, founded a newspaper: RVU (or Rote Volksuniversität, Red People's University), it supported prisoners and reprinted some SPK literature.
Since 1973 the SPK was continued as PF, means Patientenfront (Patients' Front), proclaimed by Huber in solitary confinement (Stammheim Prison). Huber himself, founder of the SPK, has entrusted all juridical matters concerning the SPK to Mrs. Ingeborg Muhler, attorney and MA in Computer Science, being herself an active member of the SPK already since 1970/71.