How Many Lexapros are We Putting in the Go Bag?

Three essays I couldn't write with my dumbed late-summer brain

October 01, 2025

My critical thinking ability melts in hot weather, so we’re just going to do some sketches of essays I totally would have written.

When TikTok starts telling you to pack a go bag

I picked a hell of a month to read The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger, a novel written while the Nazis were coming to power in the Weimar Republic about a Jewish family in Berlin. It definitely/unfortunately has some eerie similarities to our present moment, including bitter fights over curricula, difficulties getting trustworthy information from a fractured media landscape, and trying to figure out whether/when to leave the country.

If you’re looking to (psychologically) escape the current politics, I wouldn’t recommend this one right now. But if you’re someone who is thinking about physically escaping to Estonia, definitely one to try.

Madness was never a personal affair: Frantz Fanon as socialist psychiatrist

Ever since reading Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor, I’ve been interested in how doctors and scientific authorities interact with capitalism, socialism, and fascism. TW: eugenics.

For example, Proctor references an Association of Socialist Physicians, a group of German doctors in the 1920s and 1930s who believed that “For the capitalist, health is equivalent to capacity to work… For socialists, medicine involves treating the whole man,” and that, under Nazism, "[biology] has been falsified, in order to eternalize the privileges of the propertied classes.”

As detailed in The Oppermanns and Proctor’s book, the Nazis were eager to eliminate resistance among Germany’s doctors early on, in part to enact their eugenic campaign to sterilize and murder disabled people, who they categorized as “unworthy of life" and “useless eaters.” These socialist physicians resisted this influence — their anti-capitalist beliefs clashed with the fascist biology, which I would argue was based on Social Darwinism, of the Nazis.

Unfortunately, I struggled to find more information about these or other socialist doctors, maybe excepting Wilhelm Reich.

Fanon loved to dance, but as rule, never did in front of colleagues

So you can bet my eyes widened when, in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz, I saw mention of “Communist psychiatrist[s]” like Lucien Bonnafé.

Fanon (1925-1961), a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique, calls psychiatry the “medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment” and tried to help his patients through a process he called “disalienation” (v Marx!).

If you’re thinking, wow, if a doctor really wanted to fight Marxist alienation in a colonized country, he would need to… join a revolutionary group fighting for independence and risk exile, that’s exactly what Fanon did, after treating men who had been tortured and men who had tortured. Check out the film The Battle of Algiers for more on a war I never learned about in school.

Shatz also quotes historian of science Georges Canguilhem, who “argued that the distinction we draw between normality and pathology is itself a social construction, not a medical reality” (58). This idea that pathology can be socially caused (e.g. from colonial oppression or racism) and socially constructed rather than strictly medical/individual fits well with the social model of disability, contra the (individual) bio-medical model. Even the line of who can “work” is socially constructed, as post-ADA accommodations have shown.

I underlined Fanon’s citing of an unnamed philosopher as saying “If you want to go deeper into the structure of a particular country, you have to visit its psychiatric hospitals” (113).

Fanon applies these ideas to race and colonization in still more interesting ways. A taste:

Fanon is scathing about this mimicry of whiteness, yet he also depicts it as an understandable reaction to being Black in a society where every conceivable value has been coded as white. And to be a mimic, of course, is to be in a relationship of alienation to one's own self. This is what Fanon means when he remarks that the destiny of the French Black man is to become white: it is his only way of being recognized as a man. But it is a Sisyphean labor that will leave him feeling thwarted -- whiteness remains forever out of reach. "Another situation is possible," Fanon hints, but the solution to a collective pathology cannot be individual; rather, "it implies a restructuring of the world."

Shatz 95, emphasis mine

This idea of mimicry (or passing) as an individual solution (whether effective or not) reminds me of a psychological concept called social identity theory and its “three types of strategies for overcoming group devaluation: individual mobility, social competition, and social creativity.” Just from the names alone we can guess which strategy Fanon would not recommend!

I learned about social identity theory from an enlightening book called Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice by Michelle R. Nario-Redmond, which I might write about in the future.

Where the Wild Things Are: Taking Childhood Seriously

What’s in Max’s go bag?

As more of my loved ones have children and I become uncle to more souls, I’ve tried to keep in mind the question that author Maurice Sendak “obsessed” over: “How do children survive?"

Sendak (1928-2012), a Jewish man who had family members killed by Nazis, took the fears, terrors, arbitrariness, and frustrations of childhood seriously, as he explains in this in a 1986 documentary.

A psychoanalyst (why not) quoted in that obituary writes of Sendak’s work: "It is this capacity, I believe, that contributes to the appeal of his work to children who are unable or unwilling to articulate these states, and to adults who have forgotten them or do not wish to know about them.”

As my French fiction reading list moved into the 20th century, I noticed authors seemed to be focusing on younger characters more, and taking their (interior) lives seriously. (Though, of course this could have been a result of my uncle-self picking the books.)

  • Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust famously begins very similarly to Where the Wild Things Are: our narrator-as-child worried about if he’ll get a goodnight kiss from his mother, who’s out where the wild things (other adults) are mingling

  • The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier is close to being a great novel.

  • Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Deepening Stream, but more so The Home-Maker, my favorite book I read last year

  • The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is as GRAND as I had always heard

  • Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, who, fun fact, took her pseudonym from a Proust character

  • The 400 Blows, directed by François Truffaut

Whether this trend was a result of exhaustion with the gritty, “grown-up” realism of late-19th-century Naturalism, led by Émile Zola, and/or Freud’s growing influence is an interesting question!

BONUS: A charming dirt-bag birder documentary

I want a mullet and mustache now?

I enjoyed watching this documentary!

October reading plans

I’m very excited to read The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Harvard lecturer and WSR subscriber John Samuel “Harp” Harpham!

After that, for October, I’m going to try The Monk by Matthew Lewis (free ebook here) and maybe My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier.