Mapping the Mind of the Other
Differentiation and Normalization in Early Twentieth Century
Dutch Colonial Psychiatry
Bachelor’s thesis
Timo Houtekamer
3996778
Supervisor: Dr. Remco Raben
Table of contents
Introduction
2
1. The ethical policy, Imperialism and Colonial Knowledge
6
2. Jacob Kohlbrugge, psychiatrist and political thinker
12
3. Petrus Travaglino, psychiatrist and political advisor
18
4. Running Amok
24
Conclusion
28
Bibliography
30
1
Introduction
Splendid and sublime in his fall, he gloried in the madness of his tragedy, he
stood, as though some explosive force had made him beside himself, half-naked,
with floating hair and great gestures of his crazy arms. He was no longer coarse
and bestial but became tragic, heroic, fighting against his fate, on the edge of the
abyss…1
In Dutch author Louis Couperus’ novel The Hidden Force (1900), this Javanese regent that
suddenly starts to display signs of madness is one of the many things happening on the island
of Java, that are completely inexplicable to the Dutch colonial rulers. Since the Dutch
characters in the novel are unable to comprehend and control these events, The Hidden Force
is often read as an anti-colonial novel. Couperus destabilized the claim to universal
applicability of Western rationality and presented Dutch colonial rule on Java as unnatural. In
The Hidden Force, there is a difference between Javanese and Europe that cannot possibly be
overcome when colonial power relations are being upheld. Otto van Oudijck – the character
that occupies the position of resident at Laboewangi and is a typical representation of the
austere, hard-working Dutch colonial ruler – is completely stupefied by the sight of this
madness and it is Addy de Luce – a half-Indonesian character that represents a Dionysian kind
of beauty and seduction – who manages to calm the regent down. While madness was not
uncommon to Europeans in the early twentieth century, Javanese madness seems to be new to
Van Oudijck. Since De Luce on the other hand easily manages to calm the regent down,
Javanese mental conditions are at least more understandable to Javanese. Couperus presented
the character of Javanese as significantly different from the character of Europeans, a
difference that was present in mental conditions as well.
Couperus’ association of madness with a Javanese otherness was not uncommon in the
Netherlands Indies. In 1926 Dutch psychiatrist Feico van Loon expressed a somewhat similar
view. He stated that ‘the [mental] illnesses that are to be seen on Java […] display a
significant quantitative and qualitative difference from those in Europe’.2 This emphasis on
psychological differences between Javanese and Europeans was present in the works of many
other Dutch psychiatrists who worked in a colonial context in the first half of the twentieth
century as well, which made colonial psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies actually a
1
Louis Couperus, The Hidden Force, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (Auckland 2013) 137-138.
Quoted in: Hans Pols, ‘Discriminerende Wetenschap in het Voormalig Nederlands-Indië’, Blind,
https://www.ziedaar.nl/article.php?id=219 (July 21, 2005). My translation.
2
2
comparative science. Psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies thus did not just distinguish
between who was sane and who was insane, but distinguished between who was European
and who was Javanese as well. This leads to the question why colonial psychiatry was
preoccupied with cultural differences between Javanese and Europeans at all. Why did early
twentieth century psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies make a distinction between Javanese
mental conditions and European mental conditions? This is the question that will be central to
this paper. The distinction between Javanese and Europeans was not only made in the context
of colonial psychiatry, but in the colonial society in general as well. In order to get a better
understanding of the differentiation in psychiatry, the differentiation in society needs to be
addressed first.
As Cornelis Fasseur (1992) argued, ‘the colonial Indonesian society was characterized
by a strong racial stratification. There was a comprehensive system of laws that made a
distinction between three groups of people: Europeans, Foreign Orientals [Vreemde
Oosterlingen], and Natives [Inlanders]’.3 Fasseur concluded from this observation that,
because of this legal system, the Netherlands Indies was a state of ‘native’ and ‘foreign’
subjects (inlanders and vreemde oosterlingen respectively) on the one hand, and just a few
European civilians on the other hand. 4 This argument closely resembled Partha Chatterjee’s
notion of ‘the rule of colonial difference’ (1993). According to Chatterjee, the colonial state
was fundamentally built on this rule of colonial difference, a principle that tended to maintain
the difference between an alien ruling group and a group of subjects, whereby the ruling
group preserved a strong racial distinction throughout the colonial society.5 Differences
between Javanese and Europeans were thus not only of a cultural nature, but were strongly
imbedded in the colonial state and society as well. This differentiation was further solidified
by all kinds of knowledge that were produced in a colonial context. According to Benedict
Anderson (1991) this tendency was noticeable in in the phenomena of the census, the map and
the museum:
Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate
the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The ‘warp’ of this
thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless
flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples,
3
Cornelis Fasseur, ‘Hoeksteen en Struikelblok. Rassenonderscheid en Overheidsbeleid in Nederlands-Indië’,
Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 105 (1992) 218. My translation.
4
Ibidem, 242.
5
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton 1993) 16-18.
3
regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the
grid was to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here,
not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore – in principle – countable.6
Anderson described how the development of a census worked to subdivide people in the
colony into different categories (comparable to Fasseur’s observation of the legal system), and
how the mapping of the archipelago and the archaeological museum that exhibited an
Indonesian history, helped to create respectively a geographical and a historical idea of the
Indonesian people, in order to develop a ‘totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied
with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control’. Knowledge
was thus used to solidify a differentiation that strengthened the power of a colonial system.
One could wonder whether the production of psychiatric knowledge about the
Javanese fulfilled a similar purpose as the census, the map and the museum (i.e. to strengthen
the possibilities of state control by means of emphasizing difference). However, since
psychiatry is a form of science that pre-eminently tries to normalize (by making a distinction
between insane and sane, or, normal), it appears to be paradoxical if it contributed to a rule of
colonial difference. With regard to the normalizing aspect of colonial psychiatry, it could be
characterized as contributing to the imposition of what Chatterjee called ‘a modern regime of
power’. He described this as a system that was ‘making social regulations an aspect of the
self-disciplining of normalized individuals’, which makes it ‘more productive, effective, and
humane’.7 However, Chatterjee argued that in the end, this modern regime of power was
‘destined never to fulfil its normalizing mission because the premise of its power was the
preservation of the aliennes of the ruling group,’ 8 whereby he referred to the rule of colonial
difference. Since it tended to normalize and at the same time to differentiate between Javanese
and Europeans, colonial psychiatry indeed displayed this discrepancy. Michel Foucault
already related psychiatry to modern forms of power, stating that ‘the interweaving effects of
power and knowledge [could not] be grasped with greater certainty in the case of a science as
dubious a psychiatry’.9 However, since Foucault did not examine psychiatry in the context of
a society that was built on a principle of differentiation, the discrepancy between the rule of
colonial difference and a modern regime of power with regard to psychiatry in a colonial
6
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London/New
York 2006) 184.
7
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, 17.
8
Ibidem, 18.
9
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Edited by Colin
Gordon (New York 1980) 109.
4
context did not appear in his accounts of psychiatry and power.
Hans Pols (2007) already wrote about the political aspect of colonial psychiatry in the
Netherlands Indies, whereby he paid specific attention to its exposure as part of a colonial
ideology by Indonesian medical students, but he did not specifically relate it to a modern
regime of power and a rule of colonial difference, or stress its paradoxical nature.10 Since
colonial psychiatry cannot be seen apart from phenomena such as power, normalization and
differentiation, I will attempt to relate colonial psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies to the
discrepancy between the modern regime of power and the rule of colonial difference. In the
first chapter, the imposition of a modern regime of power in the form of the so-called ‘ethical
policy’ in the Netherlands Indies will be addressed and more attention will be paid to the
production of knowledge about the colonial other and the intensification of control. In the
second and third chapters, I will try to make a discourse analysis of the work and thought of
Dutch psychiatrists Jacob Kohlbrugge and Petrus Travaglino respectively in order to establish
how the psychological differences between Javanese and Europeans were arrayed, and in the
fourth and final chapter, a closer examination will be made of how the knowledge that was
produced by psychiatrists like Kohlbrugge and Travaglino was actually put into practice in the
context of a modern regime of power.
10
Hans Pols, ‘The Nature of the Native Mind: Contested Views of Dutch Colonial Psychiatrists in the Former
Dutch East Indies’, in: Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (ed.), Psychiatry and Empire (Basingstroke/New York
2007) 172-196.
5
1. The ethical policy, Imperialism and Colonial Knowledge
In 1868 two Dutch physicians concluded after a survey on Java that the mental health care in
the colony was desperately in need of institutionalization. Individuals in need of mental health
care often found themselves in military hospitals, prisons, or not looked after at all. In 1882
the first mental hospital in the colony opened in Buitenzorg, and twenty years later the second
mental hospital opened near Lawang, on Java. Two more mental hospitals in the archipelago
opened in 1923, one near Magelang, also on Java, and one near Sabang on an island north of
Aceh. These hospitals accepted both European and Indonesians, but there was a difference in
the treatments they received. While European patients were provided with baths, bed
treatment and open air treatment, the Indonesian patients mostly received ‘occupational
therapy’ – which consisted basically of agricultural work.11 A similar differentiation occurred
in the colonial penitentiary system. Christien Bruinink Darlang (1986) described the
developments that occurred in this system during the first half of the twentieth century as a
‘humanization of the colonial prison system’. One of these ‘humanizations’ was the
foundation of the agricultural colony Noesa Kambangan in 1905. This island was especially
arranged for indigenous long-term prisoners. The work that had to be carried out there
consisted of the extraction of virgin forests and the creation of rubber plantations, which led
to high profits for the Dutch colonial government. When the prisoners got out, they should
have been able to continue the craft that they had learned in Noesa Kambangan.12 The
institutionalization of psychiatry and the ‘humanization’ of the penitentiary system in the
Netherlands Indies both tended to bring the rule of colonial difference in practice and put
confined colonial subjects to work. However, since this forced labour was characterized in the
psychiatric discourse as ‘occupational therapy’ and on Noesa Kambangan as ‘teaching the
Javanese a craft’, these systems proclaimed to be working in the interest of the Javanese
instead of in the interest of the colonial rulers. In order to get a better understanding of this
rhetoric, the so-called ‘ethical policy’ needs to be addressed.
The term ‘ethical policy’ referred to a political process in the Netherlands Indies that
was aimed at the modernization and development of the colony and its peoples. According to
the Encyclopaedia of the Netherlands Indies from 1918, the ethical policy was to be defined
11
Hans Pols, ‘The Development of Psychiatry in Indonesia: From Colonial to Modern Times’, International
Review of Psychiatry 18/4 (2006) 363-364.
12
It may be clear that what Bruinink Darlang calls a ‘humanization’ of the prison system was not humane at all.
It was still a colonial penitentiary system that made sincere racial distinctions. For her description of the
agricultural colony of Noesa Kambangan, see: Christien Bruinink Darlang, Hervormingen in de Koloniale Periode.
Verbeteringen in het Nederlands-Indisch Strafstelsel in de Periode 1905-1940 (Arnhem 1993) 161-180.
6
as an ‘honest, self-forgetful policy for the sake of the peoples of the colony’, whereby the
Indonesian taxes were to be spend in Indonesia and the development and the emancipation of
the colony was one of the main goals.13 This description of the colonial policy in the
Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century closely resembled the views of
Dutch Islam-expert Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, who envisioned a ‘politics of association’
in 1911. He argued that the upper classes of the Indonesian peoples needed to be brought into
contact with Western education systems and Western culture in general. This should lead the
colony to develop to a point of equality to the Dutch state itself within the borders of the
Dutch kingdom, but it should also withhold the Indonesians from developing radical Islamic
ideas. He thought radical Islam to be significantly dangerous to a modern society. Snouck
Hurgronje ethically motivated this policy as follows:
After all, for centuries they have been devoid of their own independent political
power or national life; and we, who took away from them what they may have had
in this respect, promising to respect their religious institutions, therefore accepted
the moral obligation to educate them so that they could participate in our political
and cultural life.14
According to Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch thus owed this educational policy to the Javanese.
It was a ‘moral obligation’ to let them participate in Dutch culture. This vision on the
development of the colonial subjects was clearly rooted in European imperialist ideas; the
colony should modernize and develop by means of education, but this education clearly had to
be based on Western principles.
Elsbeth Locher-Scholten (1981) effectively linked the ethical policy to an expanding
form of imperialism in the Indonesian archipelago, she called it ‘ethical imperialism’. She
stated that the ethically motivated development work and the expansion of Dutch colonial rule
in the so-called Outer Islands (Buitengewesten) could both be seen as expressions of a
regained Dutch colonial self-confidence. Dutch colonial rulers wanted to show how they
could effectively unite the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, maintain peace and order,
and be model-colonizers that effectuated modernization. The ethically motivated development
policy in the early twentieth century therefore often went hand in hand with a strong urge for
13
Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in Fragmenten. Vijf Studies over Koloniaal Denken en Doen van Nederlanders
in de Indonesische Archipel 1877-1942 (Zeist 1981) 184-185.
14
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, ‘The Ideal of Association’, in: Christiaan Penders (ed.), Indonesia. Selected
Documents on Colonialism and Nationalism, 1830-1942, (Queensland 1977) 160. The emphasis on ‘our’ was
Snouck Hurgronje’s.
7
organization and an extension of authority and control.15 As Fenneke Sysling (2013) pointed
out, the explorations of the Outer Islands that were part of the intensification of Dutch rule,
were often accompanied by groups of ethnologists and anthropologists who tried to
investigate these ‘lesser known regions’.16 This idea further invigorates the idea that an
increase in knowledge about the colonial subjects often was necessary for an increase in
control over the colonial subjects.
European imperialism was often strongly characterized by the search for a rhetoric of
legitimacy that could ascribe a certain sense of naturalness to colonial rule.17 This rhetoric of
legitimacy was often found in forms of knowledge that presented the colonial other as if they
benefitted from, and were in need of rule and guidance by a rational Western ruling class.
Snouck Hurgronje who presented this legitimation as a moral obligation and thereby actually
depicted Dutch imperialism as virtuous, proved to be a good example of this.18 An attempt at
explaining how rhetoric functioned to legitimize colonial rule was made by Syed Hussein
Alatas. In The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), Alatas observed an alleged indolence that
dominated the image of the Malay, Filipinos and Javanese, which was constructed by their
colonial rulers. He stated that this image, of course, did not correspond with reality and that
Javanese, Malays and Filipinos in fact worked very hard. Their working pattern just differed
from that of Europeans; they did not have fixed hours of work and they did not work in a
capitalist mechanized production system. Alatas stated that ‘the distortion arose either from
prejudice or from the influence of capitalist thinking’, of which he undoubtedly preferred the
latter as a sufficient explanation.19 He explained that in the Netherlands Indies, the myth of
the lazy Javanese was used eagerly as a moral justification for the cultivation system
(cultuurstelsel), an agrarian system of economic exploitation that was introduced in 1830 and
was kept intact for approximately forty years. Texts about ‘lazy Javanese’ started appearing
somewhere around that time, while earlier Dutch records on Java made no significant
15
Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in Fragmenten. Vijf Studies over Koloniaal Denken en Doen van Nederlanders in de
Indonesische Archipel 1877-1942, 194-199.
16
Fenneke Sysling, ‘Geographies of Difference: Dutch Physical Anthropology in the Colonies and the
Netherlands, ca. 1900-1940’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 128/1
(2013) 111.
17
Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas. Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942 (Amsterdam
1995) 119.
18
In British and French imperialism, this kind of rhetoric was found in ideas about ‘the white man’s burden’ and
‘la mission civilisatrice’ respectively.
19
Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native. A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese
from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London/Oregon 1977)
121-122.
8
reference to such a laziness at all.20 According to Alatas, the myth of the lazy native was used
to justify economic exploitation of the Javanese by a capitalist colonial ruling class. Although
his explanation certainly has its inconveniences,21 Alatas made a very interesting point by
suggesting that the image of the Javanese as formed by its colonial rulers was much more than
just a prejudice, it was indeed ‘a rhetoric of legitimacy’.
While Alatas made a striking observation, he only focused on one particular aspect of
the production of knowledge about the colonial other (i.e. their alleged indolence and
laziness). By highlighting only this aspect, he managed to relate the production of a certain
image to economic power, but since power in colonial societies had a much more versatile
character, his analysis does not hold sufficient explanatory possibilities with regard to the
modern regime of power that the Dutch tried to develop with their ethical policy. Since
Chatterjee noted that this kind of regime was based on the normalization and self-disciplining
of individuals, Foucault’s definition of power would be more applicable here:
If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no,
do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold
good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us
as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces
pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a
productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as
a negative instance whose function is repressive.22
Without denying that power was repressive, Foucault suggested that it was at least more than
that, it had a much more comprehensive and productive function. When taking Foucault’s
conception of power in mind, it could be stated that knowledge about the colonial other did
not exist in a societal vacuum that justified colonial power relations, it was instead actively
produced within the context of these power relations in order to maintain and reproduce
20
Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native. A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16 th
to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism, 61.
21
The main point of critique here is that a reduction of the function of image-formation to just an economic
one would be a considerable simplification of a very complex discourse. Economic profit was of huge
importance in the colonial system, this could hardly be exaggerated, but other factors, such as religious
convictions, international prestige, the formation of a national identity against the other, and so forth, were of
considerable importance as well.
22
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, 119.
9
them.23 It is this relation between power and knowledge that ‘justified’ a modern regime that
was based on normalization and self-disciplining of individuals.
A good example of how knowledge and power interact in this kind of relationship is
made by Frances Gouda (1995). She stated that Dutch colonial residents ‘argued that they
should accompany Indonesians on their [biological] evolutionary journey, because they were
knowledgeable about the path’s obstacles and pitfalls’.24 Such a statement had, as the term
‘evolutionary journey’ suggests, a rich background in the nineteenth century history of the
natural sciences. Charles Darwin already asserted that species and the differences between
them were not static, but subject to change over time, and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck later
added to this theory that all living organisms essentially habited a yearning for selfimprovement. Scholars such as Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer subsequently presented
the evolutionary process as consistently running along a linear path of progress, which made
the process a teleological one (something that Darwin explicitly denied).25 These additions to
Darwin’s theory often led to the conclusion that ‘less civilized people’ found themselves at an
earlier stage of human evolution than Europeans. This idea, as Gouda exemplified, strongly
echoed in the ideas of Dutch colonial residents. In the discourse of the psychiatric science,
this kind of thought resonated in the work of Sigmund Freud as well. In Freud’s view, the
developmental stages of an individual man mirrored those of the whole human race, which
meant that ‘primitive peoples’ represented a rather infantile stage, while ‘more developed
peoples’ represented a more adult stage of evolution. Because of this assumption, Freud took
great interest in the study of these primitive peoples, of whom he assumed that they were
almost always to be found in non-European areas.26 Although Snouck Hurgronje and many
other ethical thinkers in the Netherlands Indies did not literally adopt evolutionary-biological
terms in their formulations of the ethical policy, their argument is certainly comparable to
these visions. Political ideas and science in this case stemmed from the same kind of power
relations and invigorated each other in their ethical and truth claims respectively.
Freud’s rather dubious account of ‘primitive peoples’ indicates that scientific interest
in the colonial other did not restrict itself to ethnology and physical anthropology alone.
Knowledge about the colonial other was produced in the psychiatric discourse as well. In
23
Let it be clear that I do not literally mean that colonial knowledge was always produced within the
geographical boundaries of the colony itself; one could write about the colonial other in the metropole and
thereby contribute to a normalizing field of knowledge as well.
24
Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas. Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942, 138.
25
Ibidem, 128-130.
26
Freud elaborated on this in the fourth section of Civilization and Its Discontents, to be found in: Peter Gay
(ed.), The Freud Reader (London 1995) 722-772. Section IV on page 742-746.
10
1904 German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin published an article titled ‘Vergleichende
Psychiatrie’, which reported the results of his psychiatric research on Java. This article was, as
Wolfgang Jilek (1995) characterized it: ‘the proclamation of a new discipline of comparative
psychiatry focused on ethnic and sociocultural aspects of the human mind in health and
disease’.27 Kraepelin advocated that:
If the characteristics of a people are manifested in its religion and its customs, in
its intellectual and artistic achievements, in its political acts and its historical
development, then they will also find expression in the frequency and clinical
formation of its mental disorders, especially those that emerge from internal
conditions.28
Although Ana Oda, Claudio Banzato and Paulo Dalgalarrondo (2005) made a strong case for
the idea that the history of this form of psychiatry started much earlier than with Emil
Kraepelin,29 one could say that Kraepelin at least instigated a methodological tradition. This
tradition of Völkerpsychologie, as Kraepelin’s teacher Wilhelm Wundt called it, echoed
strongly in the work of the Dutch psychiatrists that followed Kraepelin in his method, in order
to make a characterization of the Javanese mind.
27
Wolfgang Jilek, ‘Emil Kraepelin and Comparative Sociocultural Psychiatry’, Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci
245 (1995) 231.
28
Quoted in: Jilek, ‘Emil Kraepelin and Comparative Sociocultural Psychiatry’, 231.
29
Without denying the importance of Kraepelin’s thought for psychiatry, they located the first
‘ethnopsychiatric expedition’ at least in 1836, when French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph de Moreau (nicknamed
Moreau de Tours) carried out an exploratory trip to Malta, Egypt and the Middle East. See: Ana Oda, Claudio
Banzato and Paulo Dalgalarrondo, ‘Some Origins of Cross-Cultural Psychiatry’, History of Psychiatry 16/2 (2005)
156-168.
11
2. Jacob Kohlbrugge, psychiatrist and political thinker
One of the first Dutch psychiatrists in the Netherlands Indies that tried to map the psyche of
the Javanese was Jacob Kohlbrugge. Kohlbrugge worked as a physician on Java from 1892 to
1906, with a two year hiatus from 1899 to 1901 in which he taught about tropical diseases at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He wrote texts about comparative brain anatomy
research and strongly propagated a larger role for psychological insights in the colonial
policy.30 In 1907, Kohlbrugge published Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner
Overheerschers (Views on the Mental Life of the Javanese and Their Rulers), in which he
exhibited his views on the psyche of the Javanese and the ways in which the Dutch colonial
rulers should base their policy on his observations. Kohlbrugge’s main argument was largely
based on his observations of the religious and spiritual life of the Javanese, which he
classified as ‘animism’. He considered this animism to be the key to understanding the mental
being of the Javanese:
While spending eleven years in the midlands of Java, treating and later also
teaching the Javanese, I found the key to the secret, and that key is called
‘animism’. Whoever manages to use that key, can read the soul of the Javanese as
an open book.31
Whereas Kraepelin wrote that the characteristics of a people that were manifested in its
cultural expressions (i.e. religion, customs, politics, et cetera), also expressed themselves in
mental disorders, Kohlbrugge clearly preferred to observe the former. After describing the
Javanese animism on the basis of several detailed observations, Kohlbrugge proceeded to
describe how the character of the Javanese could be deduced from his observations. He
concluded that the Javanese religious and spiritual life stemmed from an unbridled sense of
imagination that was the effect of the underdeveloped mental capacities and led to the
inability to make a distinction between dream and reality. Furthermore, he stated that the
Javanese were extremely practical, as evidenced by the ease with which they managed to
cheat on the various ghosts they believed in. Moreover, these ghosts desired nothing more
than the appeasement of their own desires, which led Kohlbrugge to argue that the Javanese
were materialist at heart, completely devoid of any form of idealism. This animism, according
30
Hiskia Coumou, ‘Kohlbrugge, Jacob Herman Friedrich (1865-1941)’, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland,
http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn5/kohlbrugge (November 12, 2013).
31
Jacob Herman Friedrich Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers
(Leiden 1907) 99. My translation.
12
to Kohlbrugge, could only occur among a people that was extremely suggestible, which
elucidated why the Javanese very easily took for truth what others tell them. This
suggestibility was alleged to be the consequence of a heavily underdeveloped capability of
logical thought.32
If a disengaged study of the character of a certain people would be possible at all,
Kohlbrugge’s work would definitely not fit this characterization; his study is overtly political
and it clearly fits into the ethical discourse of the time (principally the first two decades of the
twentieth century). An example of Kohlbrugge’s ‘ethical attitude’ is his segment about the
question whether the Javanese were a happy people or not. In order to answer this question,
he explicitly opposed the ideas about ‘nature peoples’ as proposed by thinkers like Rousseau
and Chateaubriand, ideas that, according to Kohlbrugge, still haunted the minds of
Europeans. According to these ideas, Western civilization had a corrupting effect on the
happiness of these peoples, who were, in contrast to Europeans, alleged to be essentially one
with nature.33 Kohlbrugge, however, believed that the minds of the Javanese were dominated
by folly and ignorance, which essentially stood in the way of reaching true happiness. True
happiness, according to Kohlbrugge, was based on a psychological balance that was
impossible to acquire when one was constantly bound to perform all kinds of rituals and was
haunted by all kinds of fantastical ghosts, as was the case with the Javanese.34 Kohlbrugge
proceeded to sum up all kinds of other inconveniences that stemmed from the Javanese
suggestibility, animism, and ignorance, and concluded that the goal for the Dutch colonial
government was to actively develop the mental life of the Javanese in order to free them from
this animism. This statement strongly resembled Snouck Hurgronje’s idea of a ‘moral
obligation’ of the Dutch to let the Indonesians participate in their culture. Kohlbrugge’s views
therefore worked, just as Snouck Hurgronje’s ideal of association did, as a rhetoric of
legitimation of European imperialism. These assertions both fit in what Locher-Scholten
described as a renewed Dutch national self-confidence that led to the so-called ethical
imperialism, a system that endeavoured to impose a modern regime of power in the
Netherlands Indies.
In the second part of his work, Kohlbrugge explored how the development of the
mental life of the Javanese was to be brought into practice. An adequate step away from the
32
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers, 29-31.
As Wolfgang Jilek described, Kraepelin was one of those thinkers that propagated the negative effect of
Western civilization on mental health as well. See: Wolfgang Jilek, ‘Emil Kraepelin and Comparative
Sociocultural Psychiatry’, 235-237.
34
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers, 37-40.
33
13
restrictive animism was, in Kohlbrugge’s view, the path of Christianity. The Christian
missions should have been teaching the Javanese that there are no other gods or ghosts beside
the Christian God, which should have effectively helped to develop a sense of individualism
and free the Javanese from their superstitions. Kohlbrugge claimed to have seen notable
differences between Christianized people and non-Christianized people on Java that supported
his views. According to him, Christianized peoples were indeed more mentally developed
than non-Christianized peoples. However, he recognized that it was practically impossible to
Christianize all the peoples Netherlands Indies, which led him to turn to education as the
primary means of Javanese development.35 Kohlbrugge explicitly stated that learning the
Dutch language alone was not enough to develop the capabilities he had in mind; it would not
rid the Javanese of their animist way of thinking. Instead of providing the Javanese with direct
Western education, the colonial rulers should finance private organizations that spread
education to the Javanese in their own cultural terms. Books should be written in the Javanese
language, not in Dutch or Arabic, and these books should be completely devoid of any fables,
myths or other fantasies that answered to the Javanese suggestibility. They should be obliging,
and urging the Javanese to develop their thinking capabilities and their individual personality.
Individualism was the key to reduce their animism, which was why one of the most important
things should be that the Javanese understood how they could help themselves. The supposed
books should, in the end, be written by the Javanese and for the Javanese.36
Kohlbrugge’s views on how Western education should be brought to the Javanese
notably differed from Snouck Hurgronje’s views, who propagated a top-down approach
through the Javanese ruling class, but Kohlbrugge’s ideas about self-help and individualism
were nonetheless far from unique. As Peter Boomgaard (1986) pointed out, many of welfare
the services that emerged with the ethical policy were eventually aimed at teaching the
colonial subjects how to ‘help themselves’. Boomgaard spoke primarily about agriculture,
irrigation and health care, but Kohlbrugge’s views on the mental development of the Javanese
properly fits in this mentality as well.37 Kohlbrugge’s emphasis on self-help thus makes him
indeed a representative of the relatively optimistic ethical policy that characterized the first
35
As Snouck Hurgronje pointed out in ‘The Ideal of Association’ as well, it turned out to be very difficult for
Dutch missionaries to convert Indonesian Muslims to Christianity and Kohlbrugge obviously saw Indonesian
Islam as a part of the animism that he described. In Kohlbrugge’s views, Allah was an entity that could be
compared to a kind of ‘fatum’ that determined all other kinds of gods, ghosts and spirits in the Javanese
animistic views. ‘Allah wants it’, would, according to Kohlbrugge, always be the final answer of a Javanese. See:
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers, 5-6.
36
Ibidem, 67-73.
37
Peter Boomgaard, ‘The Welfare Services in Indonesia, 1900-1942’, Itinerario 10/1 (1986) 65-73.
14
two decades of the twentieth century. This political climate would later, after 1920, become
considerably more pessimistic about Javanese agency.
Kohlbrugge presented the Javanese as desperately in need of mental development and
ascribed the responsibility to stimulate this unquestionably to the Dutch colonial rulers, a
tendency that was firmly rooted in a certain conception of difference. Nevertheless, he was
convinced that there was nothing in the psyche of Javanese that could not be present in the
psyche of Europeans and vice versa, all the differences between Javanese and Europeans were
to be seen as gradual, not essential. Kohlbrugge also did physiological research to differences
between European and Javanese brains, and concluded that there was not any difference to be
found in the anatomy of their brains at all.38 In spite of this notion, he insisted that the
Javanese could not possibly be made into Europeans, not ‘in their own environment, in their
own land, in their own climate’.39 In Kohlbrugge’s view, the mental development of all
human beings started at the same point at birth, and this development was subsequently
affected by ones environment. The Javanese backwardness was therefore largely the effect of
the tropical environment on Java. After this statement, Kohlbrugge proceeded to sum up a
number of essential differences between the West and the East in more general terms: the
West displayed an urge for progress, while the East was characterized by tranquillity and
indolence. In the West, there was freedom, independence and individualism, while the East
was dominated by collectivism and despotism. Subsequently, freedom of thought, reason and
intellect were highly valued in the West, while people in the East were emotional, and
actually feared these traits. The West had statesmen and scientists, while the East had seers,
prophets and tyrants. People in the West had vigorous and robust bodies, while in the East
everything was limp and sensitive. The West made nature subservient, while the East was
subject to nature. Eventually, the West was ‘shape and thought’, while the East was ‘colour
and fantasy’. Kohlbrugge traced all these oppositions to one single cause: climatological
difference.40 Striking about this characterization of the East, is that Kohlbrugge did not just
analyse how the tropical climate influenced the character of the Javanese, but that he took a
number of supposed differences between the East and the West and only afterwards stated
that these differences were caused by a climatological factors. This comparative ‘research’ is
38
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers. 90. The results of this study
can be found in: Jacob Herman Friedrich Kohlbrugge, ‘Die Gehrinfurchten der Javanen: Eine VergleichendAnatomische Studie’, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, section 2,
12/4 (1906).
39
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers, 90. My translation.
40
Ibidem, 91-92. My translation.
15
best to be explained in terms of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism (1978).
Kohlbrugge’s text, with its clear dichotomies between the East and the West is a
typical example of what Said would characterize as part of an orientalist discourse. In such a
discourse, the East and the West were presented as binary oppositions, two poles that define
each other. The East was thus defined against the West, and just as much was the West
defined against the East. By delineating the East as sensual, irrational, ruled by despotism,
and so forth, the West defined itself as the opposite to this. ‘European culture’, as Said put it,
‘gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate
and even underground self’. Orientalist discourses, however, did more than just define the
West against the East in order to increase Western self-consciousness. For Said, this way of
outlining the Western self and the Eastern other was essentially a legitimation of Western
imperialism in general. This discourse of legitimation was not only active in the West itself,
but it was present in the East as well; it was used to convince colonial subjects of the
universal values of Western civilization in order to let them willingly adopt a Western way of
life and accept a Western ruler.41 In this light, it becomes comprehensible why Kohlbrugge
deemed the mental life of the Javanese to be in need of development, while he unquestionably
assumed that the Dutch colonial rulers where the ones to stimulate them to pursue this
development. Said’s theory also helps to explain why Kohlbrugge – and others as well – laid
so much emphasis on promoting self-help among the Javanese, instead of plainly educating
them; the Javanese needed to figure the values of a Western-styled civilization and a Westernstyled way of thinking out for themselves, in order for imperialism to be accepted. This was
thus where the renewed Dutch self-confidence, ethical imperialism and the production of
knowledge about the colonial other came together. This makes the argumentation of
Kohlbrugge and others that produced this discourse understandable, but it does not mean that
the Western way of life was unquestionably accepted by all colonial subjects. Said (1993)
already wrote that ‘never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western
intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active
resistance’.42
A good example of a form of resistance to imperialist policy is Soewardi
Soerjaningrat’s 1913 text ‘Als Ik Eens Nederlander Was’ (‘If Only I Were a Netherlander’).
Soewardi ironically reflected upon how the Dutch celebrated their independence from the
French domination during the Napoleonic times and how they asked the Indonesians to join
41
42
Hans Bertens, Literary Theory. The Basics (Abingdon/New York 2014) 176-178.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York 1993) xiii.
16
these festivities. ‘If I were a Dutchman’, he wrote, ‘I would not organize an independence
celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen.’43 Soewardi’s
article managed to display the possible counterproductive aspect of the Dutch educational
policy that propagated the values of a Western way of life. Kohlbrugge wanted the Javanese
to adopt a Western way of thinking, which would free them from their 'backwardness’, but
when someone like Soewardi did step into the shoes of a Dutchman, some fundamental
paradoxes of the Dutch educational policy were effectively highlighted. Soewardi’s text
displays exactly the kind of paradox that Chatterjee referred to with regard to the modern
regime of power. Since Kohlbrugge was convinced that Dutch rule on Java was to be
maintained (differentiation), but nonetheless wanted the Javanese to develop by means of
education (normalization), one could say that the paradoxes that Soewardi unveiled, were
present in Kohlbrugge’s work as well.
43
Soewardi Soerjaningrat, ‘If Only I Were a Netherlander’, in: Christiaan Penders (ed.), Indonesia. Selected
Documents on Colonialism and Nationalism, 1830-1942, (Queensland 1977) 232-234.
17
3. Petrus Travaglino, psychiatrist and political advisor
While a policy that encouraged Indonesian organization and self-help on different levels
characterized the first two decades of the twentieth century – the political climate in which
Kohlbrugge’s writings have to be seen – the years thereafter could be characterized as
considerably more conservative and reactionary. A substantial fear of the rising nationalist
movements developped, in 1922 and 1923 several strikes were ruthlessly repressed and a
number of nationalist leaders were exiled. A good illustration of this political climate was,
according to Hans Pols (2007), the rise of the Politiek-Economischen Bond (Political
Economic Union, a political party that largely consisted of Dutch business owners and was
primarily committed to the maintenance of peace and order (rust en orde) in the colony. The
party was founded in 1919 and represented in the Volksraad – a parliament with an advisory
function that consisted of both Dutch and Indonesian representatives – by Dutch lawyer
Arnold van Gennep. The openly racist ideas that Van Gennep preached in the Volksraad – he
advocated for example that indigenous peoples were not ‘mature enough’ to exercise political
rights – were strongly inspired by Dutch psychiatrist Petrus Travaglino, who worked from
1915 to 1924 as medical superintendent of the Lawang mental hospital (the second mental
hospital that opened on Java). In Travaglino’s view, laws reflected too often only the desires
of lawmakers, which inevitably led to ineffective governance. Instead, lawmakers should
constantly keep the needs and nature of their subjects in mind in order to keep their policy
suitable. Psychiatry, which could provide extensive knowledge of the psyche of the colonial
subjects, could therefore be of crucial importance to colonial governance.44 Travaglino’s ideas
about the political role of colonial psychiatry thus strongly resembled those of Kohlbrugge.
Whereas Kohlbrugge tried to describe the psychological characteristics of the Javanese
on the basis of their cultural and religious life, Travaglino tried to describe these
characteristics as they were visible in the mental disorders that occurred among the
Javanese.45 He based his conclusions for a large part on his experiences with his patients in
the mental hospital at Lawang, and sometimes he referred to his Indonesian personnel as well.
44
Hans Pols, ‘The Nature of the Native Mind: Contested Views of Dutch Colonial Psychiatrists in the Former
Dutch East Indies’, 173-177.
45
As Kraepelin wrote: ‘If the characteristics of a people are manifested in its religion and its customs, in its
intellectual and artistic achievements, in its political acts and its historical development, then they will also find
expression in the frequency and clinical formation of its mental disorders, especially those that emerge from
internal conditions.’ (Jilek, ‘Emil Kraepelin and Comparative Sociocultural Psychiatry’, 231) While Kohlbrugge
focused more on the former form of expression of the characteristics of the Javanese, Travaglino clearly turned
to the latter. However, as Kraepelin stated that these different phenomena – cultural life and mental disorders
– express the same characteristics of a people, one could say that in the context of Völkerpsychologie in the
Netherlands Indies, Kohlbrugge and Travaglino could be placed within the same tradition.
18
Travaglino’s method was very systematic; he looked at a certain mental disorder, compared
its symptoms and its frequency among Javanese to its symptoms and its frequency among
Europeans and subsequently deduced a certain Javanese character from his observations. Paul
van Schilfgaarde, another Dutch psychiatrist that worked in the Netherlands Indies, wrote in
1925, referring to Travaglino’s method, that ‘the psychiatrist needs to understand the healthy
mind in order to treat the sick, but conversely, the deviations of one’s mind, by means of their
being different, often shed a striking light on the common mental life.’46 By using a method
in which the comparison between Europeans and Javanese was an essential part of its
argumentation in order to determine the character of the Javanese, Travaglino worked in and
reproduced the same kind of orientalist discourse as Kohlbrugge did.
In ‘De Psychose van den Inlander in Verband met Zijn Karakter’ (‘The Psychosis of
the Native in Relation to His Character’), a recitation that Travaglino did on a congress for
natural sciences in Batavia, which was published in 1920 in the Geneeskundig Tijdschrift voor
Nederlandsch-Indië (Medical Journal for the Netherlands Indies), Travaglino spoke about
what he called the ‘degenerative feeling psychosis, or, as they call it in Europe, the emotional
psychosis’. He described this kind of psychosis as follows: ‘they suddenly start screaming,
singing, talking, tearing up clothes, walking around naked and tending to curse. Sometimes,
they are aggressive, leading to violence. Mostly, they are disoriented an exhibit profound
attention disorders, and disorders in the association of ideas’.47 Travaglino continued to
describe how hallucinations, ideas of fear, mood swings, a lack of sleep and bad nutrient
absorption accompanied this psychosis as well. Besides, it was also often preceded by a fever,
although this was difficult to measure in the kampong, where a ‘civilized product such as the
thermometer is yet unknown’ (Travaglino’s words).48 When an individual was considered to
be insane, it was up to his or her family-members or spouse to request his or her inclusion in a
mental hospital. A judge subsequently had to determine whether the concerned individual’s
state of insanity was sufficient enough for the request.49 Travaglino’s remark about the
thermometer needs to be seen in this context; as it was the task of the people in the kampong
to determine whether a person was mad or not, it was, since he alleged them not to be
civilized enough to use a thermometer, often not determined with medical efficiency whether
a case of emotional psychosis was preceded by a fever or not.
46
Paul van Schilfgaarde, ‘De Psyche van den Javaan’, Djawa 2 (1925) 99. My translation.
Petrus Henri Marie Travaglino, ‘De Psychose van den Inlander in Verband met Zijn Karakter’, Geneeskundig
Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië 60 (1920) 101. My translation.
48
Ibidem, 102. My translation.
49
Jan Egbertus Jonkers, Handboek van het Nederlandsch-Indische Strafrecht (Leiden 1946) 215.
47
19
Travaglino determined that 111 of the 768 patients that he treated between the first of
January in 1918 and the first of July in 1919 displayed the symptoms of an emotion
psychosis. This was a percentage of fourteen and a half, which was, according to Travaglino
considerably higher than it was in Europe with regard to this ‘peculiar kind of psychosis’.50
As this psychosis was alleged to be primarily a form of heavy pathological reactions to
emotions, he deduced from these statistics that ‘the emotion is a very important factor in the
life of the Javanese’, or, in other words ‘that they are very emotional’.51 He stated that ‘this
conclusion, based on the observation of insane natives, completely confirmed what one would
suspect after studying the behaviour of the non-psychotic native.’52 Travaglino finished his
description of the character of the Javanese by describing several social benefits of knowing
that the Javanese are an emotional people, but, as he said it himself, the political use of his
insight was in the end the most important benefit. He concluded his argument by stating that:
Whenever a government realizes that it rules over a strongly emotional people,
then it knows how dangerous it is for its own power, but also how disastrous it
can be for this emotional people, when troublemakers and agitators are being left
vacant. 53
The emphasis that the Politiek-Economischen Bond laid on peace and order clearly echoed in
this conclusion.
Seven years later, in another recitation, titled ‘De Schizophrenie en de Javaansche
Psyche’ (‘Schizophrenia and the Javanese Psyche’), Travaglino made a comparable
methodological approach. He noticed that forty percent of the Indonesian schizophrenic
patients was cured within a year, a percentage that he alleged to be, just as the occurrence of
the emotional psychosis, considerably higher than among Europeans. After further
observation, Travaglino determined that Javanese schizophrenia was different from the
European schizophrenia on multiple levels. The difference in the period of remission was in
Travaglino’s view the effect of an absence of psychological ataxia (a lack of order) among
Javanese schizophrenics, which made them look like they were cured much more often than
European schizophrenics, while they were actually still sick. This lack of a psychological
50
Travaglino, ‘De Psychose van den Inlander in Verband met Zijn Karakter’, 101. He concluded that this
percentage was considerably higher than it was in Europe, but did not specify what this exact percentage in
Europe was. He did not even make a single mention of a comparable research to the emotional psychosis in
Europe, which makes one wonder where this comparison comes from at all.
51
Ibidem, 106. My Translation.
52
Ibidem, 106. My translation.
53
Ibidem, 108. My translation.
20
ataxia among Javanese schizophrenics was, according to Travaglino, the effect of the
simplicity of the life of the normal, healthy Javanese: ‘life in the kampong is rather
monotonous, without much variety, and the circumstances do not bring up any new issues to
reflect upon, or new difficulties to overcome.’ 54 He alleged that it was because of this
simplicity of life, that the Javanese schizophrenics were less likely to make disjunctive
connections between impressions, leading to less bizarre behaviour while suffering from
schizophrenia. This statement very much resembled the orientalist comparison between East
and West that was also present in Kohlbrugge’s work.
Another symptom that Travaglino characterized as typically Javanese, was the fact
that Javanese schizophrenics exhibited all kinds of affectional disorders. They laughed and
cheered while they were not truly happy and they cried while they were not actually sad.
Travaglino saw a clear incongruence between affect and thought, which he ascribed to a
psyche that processes its observations and impressions mostly on the affection that it has with
them. He described this kind of thought as a ‘typical primitive, magical thought […] a
remainder of an archaic period of human thought’.55 Travaglino added that this was consistent
with a weak staging of the self against the outside world, a self that did not stand as a whole
towards the exterior, leading to the placement of feelings not only in the self, but in the
outside world as well. Travaglino characterized this as an animist worldview, and contrasted
this to the European worldview, in which he alleged the self-image to be much stronger and
much more coherent.56 He concluded his argument with the statement that psychology and
psychopathology provided abundant material that indicated that the Javanese psyche was
much closer to the primitive, and was therefore located at an earlier stage of evolution than
the West-European people were.57 It is this statement that made Travaglino’s thought notably
different from Kohlbrugge’s.
Kohlbrugge was convinced that all human beings were essentially equal, and that the
differences between peoples were gradual and based on environmental factors (of which he
54
Petrus Henri Marie Travaglino, ‘De Schizophrenie en de Javaanse Psyche’, Psychiatrische en Neurologische
Bladen 31 (2007) 419. My translation.
55
Ibidem, 421-422. My translation.
56
While Travaglino’s description of Javanese animism was much more abstract than Kohlbrugge’s description,
their characterizations can, on an existentialist level, very well be compared. Kohlbrugge’s notion of a strong
suggestibility for example, fits in very well with Travaglino’s notion of a weak staging of the self against the
outside world among the Javanese.
57
Travaglino, ‘De Schizophrenie en de Javaanse Psyche’, 422-425.
21
thought culture was a product as well),58 while Travaglino believed that the psyche of man
was primarily based on his predisposition and his instincts, or, in other words, on biologically
essential factors. Environmental factors were of secondary importance in his thought. The
instincts that he referred to were, according to Travaglino, ‘collected and constructed
throughout the entire range of ancestors of a species and are therefore present at birth
already.’59 Travaglino isolated different character traits of the Javanese, such as vanity, a
strong sexuality, a lack of a sense of duty, and a lack of inquisitiveness, and deduced from this
that they pointed to a strong domination of ‘the simple and, from an evolutionary perspective,
more ancient instincts’.60 He made another point by ascribing a strong emotionality and a
great imagination to the Javanese mind – referring to his research on the emotional psychosis
– which, in his view, strongly represented typical childishness. Based on this alleged
infantility, Travaglino, assumed that the Javanese must have been at an earlier stage of human
evolution than Europeans.61 Since Sigmund Freud expressed ideas with regard to this
homology between ‘basic instincts’, infantility and backwardness in development as well
(whether this was explicitly characterized as evolutionary or not), one could say that these
phenomena were not unique in early twentieth-century psychiatry at all.62 Travaglino
concluded that the Dutch colonial rulers could not possibly control the evolutionary process of
the Javanese, but they could at least try to help them. Travaglino, just as Kohlbrugge and
many other ethical thinkers, suggested an improvement of the educational system, whereby
the development of the character of the individual was highly important. An increase in selfconsciousness was thus crucial, which made individualism again the key to development.63
As Kohlbrugge, with his relative optimism about the possibilities for mental
development of the Javanese and his emphasis on self-help represented the ethical rhetoric of
the first two decades of the twentieth century, Travaglino was certainly representative of the
reactionary climate that followed after 1920 (the period in which Indonesian nationalism was
more harshly suppressed). Travaglino definitely saw the differences between Europeans and
Javanese as essential and evolutionary biological, which led him to take a more sceptical
58
Kohlbrugge also published multiple critiques on Darwinism and evolutionary thought in general, which
contravened his conviction that every human being was created equal by God. See for instance: Jacob Herman
Friedrich Kohlbrugge, Critiek der Descendentietheorie (Utrecht 1936).
59
Petrus Travaglino, ‘Het Karakter van den Inlander’, P.E.B. Orgaan van den Ned.Ind. Politiek-Economischen
Bond 27 and 28 (1920) 343-344. My translation.
60
Ibidem, 358. My translation.
61
Ibidem, 358-359.
62
Gouda explicitly made this link between Freud and his followers and Travaglino as well. See: Gouda, Dutch
Culture Overseas. Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942, 124.
63
Travaglino, ‘Het Karakter van den Inlander’, 360.
22
attitude towards the extent of Javanese agency and lay an explicit emphasis on the principle of
peace and order, hence his conclusion from his research of the emotional psychosis and his
association with the Politiek-Economischen Bond. However, as Elsbeth Locher-Scholten
pointed out, there was no such thing as a specific historical caesura in the year 1920. There
did occur some important shifts of emphasis, but there were notable continuities as well.
Therefore, instead of speaking of the end of the ethical policy in the 1920’s, Locher-Scholten
proposed to use the term ‘conservative ethical policy’ for the more reactionary years after
1920.64
When looking at Kohlbrugge and Travaglino, there were indeed some significant
similarities between their views, notable examples being their emphasis on the value of
education and the promotion of individualism among the Javanese. However, the most
important similarity was that they both strongly emphasized the need of development. Both
Kohlbrugge and Travaglino propagated that it was the responsibility of the Dutch colonial
government to conduct a policy that was at least partly in the interest of the colonial subjects.
This could very well be characterized as an unconditional rhetoric of legitimacy for the
maintenance of Dutch rule in the Netherlands Indies, but their emphasis on the development
of the colonial subjects held something else in esteem as well. Since this development had to
occur along Western lines, this urge could very well be characterized as an attempt to make
‘social regulations an aspect of the self-disciplining of normalized individuals’, as Chatterjee
described it.65 In other words, since the political conclusion of their work consisted of the idea
that the Javanese were in need of development and it was the responsibility of the Dutch
colonial government to help them along this path, the cross-cultural psychiatric knowledge
that was produced by Kohlbrugge and Travaglino clearly attributed to the legitimization not
only of colonial rule an sich, but to the legitimization of the imposition of a modern regime of
power as well.
64
Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in Fragmenten. Vijf Studies over Koloniaal Denken en Doen van Nederlanders in de
Indonesische Archipel 1877-1942, 203.
65
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial, Histories 17.
23
4. Running amok
The psychiatric knowledge that was produced by Kohlbrugge, Travaglino and others,
scientifically legitimized the imposition of a modern regime of power based on normalization,
which makes this knowledge indeed, as Foucault described it, a product of power. However,
power also had a more practical function in the Netherlands Indies’ psychiatric system.
Foucault defined power as ‘a productive network which runs through the whole social body’,
which he elsewhere explained by stating that ‘the phenomenon of the social body is the effect
not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of
individuals.’66 The fact that Javanese mental patients for a large part were treated by means of
‘occupational therapy’ (agricultural work mostly) while European mental patients were
provided with baths, bed treatment and open air treatment, indeed indicates that the rule of
colonial difference operated on the bodies of individuals in the Netherlands Indies. When
trying to grasp how this power actually worked upon individuals, some clarification could be
offered by a look at how psychopathological behaviour that was threatening to the modern
regime of power – which was aimed at control and normalization – was consorted in practice.
Since Kraepelin argued that one could determine the characteristics of a people by means of
looking at its mental disorders, and a description of running amok appeared in almost every
description of the mental life of the Javanese in the tradition of cross-cultural psychiatry in the
Netherlands indies, the knowledge about this pathology was essentially intertwined with the
psychological knowledge about the character of the Javanese an sich. This lets the
phenomenon of amok lend itself very well for such an analysis.
Descriptions of amok already appeared in the seventeenth century in the writings of
Europeans who had to deal with Malay and Javanese insurgents in British India and the
Netherlands Indies. Running amok was in those times seen as a battle strategy whereby one
recklessly carried out a surprise attack while screaming the word ‘amok’. The meaning of the
term amok gradually changed over time until it officially became a term that indicated a
psychiatric condition in 1849.67 Pieter Van Wulfften Palthe, who occupied a chair in
psychiatry and neurology at the STOVIA (School Ter Opleiding Van Indische Artsen, the
school for education of Indonesian physicians) from its establishment in 1927 until 1942,
described the phenomenon in 1933 as follows:
66
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, 55.
M. Bartelsman and P.P. Eckhardt, ‘Geestesziek in Nederlands-Indië – Vier Psychiatrische Syndromen: Amok,
Latah, Koro en Tropenneurasthenie’, Nederlands Tijschrift voor Geneeskunde 151 (2007) 2846.
67
24
Suddenly, without a sign, without a suspicion of those in his surroundings, a
native leaps up, grabs the nearest weapon, usually a klewang [an Indonesian
sword] or a knife, and runs as if he is possessed through his house and yard onto
the streets. Like a mad dog, he attacks every living creature that comes near him.68
Those who ran amok, did not stop by themselves and the people around them knew this. If the
amok runner did not severely wound or kill himself in the process, he was therefore often
killed by those in his surroundings – if it the police was nearby however, he was ‘laid down’
(neergelegd) – which led to significant difficulties to research this phenomenon.69 According
to Van Wulfften Palthe, amok could only be restrained by means of a primitivism that
matched the pathology itself, which basically meant by means of force and overpowering.
One could not count on a slow regression overtime, because then the amok runner would
either mutilate him or herself, continue to act aggressively towards his or her environment, or
calm down and appear to be cured, only to jump up on a later moment and continue in his or
her aggression.70
Amok played a significant role in the analysis of the character of the Javanese by
Kohlbrugge. In his view, the Javanese underdeveloped capability of logical thought was
balanced by a strong sense of impressionism, he alleged it to be in the nature of the Javanese
that they were easily shocked and that minor events could cause them to erupt in an unbridled
anger. These character traits were, according to Kohlbrugge, undoubtedly the cause of the
Javanese tendency to run amok.71 In Kohlbrugge’s line of thought, the tendency to run amok
was thus the effect of the Javanese underdeveloped capability of logical thought, which was in
turn the effect of the tropical climate In South-East Asia. He literally stated that ‘whoever
desires steady thought from the eastern man, will drive him only to madness, suicide or
amok.’72 Travaglino described running amok as an epiphenomenon of the emotional
psychosis that he had researched. The fourteen and a half percent of the observed patients that
suffered from an emotional psychosis also comprised those who had run amok, which led him
to conclude that the tendency to run amok had the same origin as the emotional psychosis. In
his view, this was the emotional nature of the Javanese. He assumed ‘with a probability that
68
Pieter Mattheus van Wulfften Palthe, ‘Amok’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde 77 (1933) 983. My
translation.
69
Ibidem, 983.
70
Pieter Mattheus van Wulfften Palthe, Neurologie en Psychiatrie. Voordrachten van prof. dr. P.M. van
Wulfften Palthe (Amsterdam 1948) 280.
71
Kohlbrugge, Blikken in het Zieleleven van den Javaan en Zijner Overheerschers, 42-45.
72
Ibidem, 92-93. My translation.
25
borders certainty […] that the emotion was the cause of their sufferings.’73
Both Kohlbrugge and Travaglino thus saw the tendency to run amok as a very logical
consequence of the Javanese character. Running amok was in the psychiatric discourse not a
mental disorder that occurred differently or more frequently among Javanese than among
Europeans, it was instead a form of psychopathological behaviour that occurred only in
South-East Asia because of the different psychological character of the people there. Based
on various examples, Van Wulfften Palthe indicated that amok could have several different
direct causes; it could have its origins in a fever delirium, a psychosis (as Travaglino argued),
but it could be rooted in purely psychological conflicts as well. He named sexual tension and
the inability of a ‘simple mind’ to maintain itself in complex situations as important factors.
Since Chinese and Arabians ran amok in Indonesia as well, Van Wulfften Palthe excluded the
possibility that the tendency to run amok was a racial peculiarity. He noted how amok
occurred much more in the old hospital in Glodok (Batavia), which he characterized as a
‘typical indigenous environment’, than in the Centraal Burgerlijk Ziekeninrichting (Central
Civil Hospital) in Weltevreden, a hospital that thoroughly represented a more ‘modern
European style’. This led him to conclude that the tendency to run amok was at least partly
caused by direct environmental factors.74 This places his vision more in line with
Kohlbrugge’s ideas than with those of Travaglino.
Van Wulfften Palthe’s described how the Javanese themselves perceived the
phenomenon of amok as follows:
There is a certain rite in [amok], each phase is determined. The population has a
sacred reverence for the amok runner. They will try to kill him, but they do not
see a criminal in him. It is not just a massacre… it is amok.75
The criminality and pathological aspect of running amok was thus determined by the Dutch
colonial rulers, psychiatrists, police, and judges. While the Indonesian peoples would try to
kill those who ran amok, Dutch started to confine them, to treat them, and most importantly,
to criminalize them and to describe their behaviour as pathological. A similar tendency was
noticeable in Van Wulfften Palthe’s description of the so-called ‘honourable murders’ that
occurred in the archipelago. Anecdotally, he explained how the murder of a man who made
the inhabitants of a certain village in South Sumatra believe that he possessed magic powers,
73
Travaglino, ‘Het Karakter van den Inlander’, 345. My translation.
Van Wulfften Palthe, ‘Amok’, 989-991.
75
Ibidem, 990. My translation.
74
26
which made him able to terrorize the entire village, was perceived as honourable by the
suppressed villagers. When the murderer found out that he had magical powers that were
similar to those of the tyrant, this made him believe that it was his duty to kill him, and so he
did. The murder was not seen as dishonourable or criminal at all, he just did his duty. Despite
the fact that the man was considered honourable, the villagers would have sentenced this
murderer to death – the act still had to be punished. However, after being judged by a Dutch
legal court, the murderer was sentenced to twenty years in prison, where he was researched in
a psychopath department.76 Van Wulfften Palthe wrote about this case that ‘we can find a
justification of this punishment in our convictions that it will have a preventive effect and that
barbarian habits will be replaced by a more humane legal system.’77 The value of this
‘humane legal system’ was that it was aimed at preventing such misbehaviours in the future.
The criminalizing and pathologizing of certain aspects of Indonesian cultural life could
very well be seen as attempts to normalize by a modern regime of power, just as its tendency
to present the Javanese as in need of development along Western lines did. The operation of
power on the very bodies of the colonial subjects can subsequently be recognized in the ways
amok had to be treated according to Van Wulfften Palthe. Somebody who ran amok should
not be killed, but overpowered and afterwards be sent to a mental hospital. Someone who
committed an honourable murder should not be sentenced to death, but should be imprisoned
and be subjected to psychiatric research. On the one hand confinement and psychiatric
treatment made the criminalized and pathologized individual available to psychiatric research,
which made the colonial rulers more able to prevent certain misbehaviours in the future, while
on the other hand the individuals that did misbehave, were normalized by confinement and
treatment instead of sentenced to death. This made colonial power indeed a productive
mechanism instead of just an oppressive force.78 The fact that colonial subjects were often
treated by means of ‘occupational therapy’ in the form of agricultural work that yielded huge
profits for the colonial government, fits this idea of power as a productive mechanism as well.
If a confined individual could in any way be productive to society, the mechanism of power
would enforce this productivity rather than killing him or her.
76
The first psychopath department in the Indonesian penitentiary system was created in 1930 in the prison in
Glodok. A Javanese psychiatrist, Mohammed Amir, was appointed as superintendent. See: Christien Bruinink
Darlang, Hervormingen in de Koloniale Periode. Verbeteringen in het Nederlands-Indisch Strafstelsel in de
Periode 1905-1940, 263-267.
77
Van Wulfften Palthe, Neurologie en Psychiatrie. Voordrachten van prof. dr. P.M. van Wulfften Palthe, 279. My
translation.
78
I do not mean to say that power was not oppressive, in accordance with Foucault I mean to say here that it
was at least more than that.
27
Conclusion
Having analysed the discourses of Kohlbrugge and Travaglino, it could be stated that a form
of knowledge was created in colonial psychiatry that presented the Javanese as emotional,
suggestible, superstitious, simple-minded, and so forth. Most importantly was that all of these
aspects according to both psychiatrists led to the conclusion that the Javanese were backward
in their mental life and were therefore in need of development. This presentation of the
Javanese did not create an image of them that stood on its own, but it created an image of the
Javanese that put them in a binary opposed position to the dominant Europeans. This brings
back my proposed research question: why did early twentieth century psychiatry in the
Netherlands Indies make a distinction between Javanese mental conditions and European
mental conditions? Because the Javanese were consistently presented as backward or
underdeveloped compared to Europeans, Kohlbrugge, Travaglino and many others ascribed
the responsibility to guide them in this development to European colonial rulers, which
provided a ‘legitimization’ of the European position of power. By providing a rhetoric of
legitimacy for European power in the Netherlands Indies, colonial psychiatry confirmed the
rule of colonial difference and thereby indeed practiced a form of differentiation. However,
the presentation of the Javanese as in need of development did not only differentiate, but at
the same time tended to normalize as well. In the end, everybody in the colony had to adopt a
Western lifestyle and a Western way of thinking. The tendency to normalize and incite selfdisciplining was visible in the psychiatric practice as well. By imposing legal and medical
systems on the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago and thereby criminalizing and
pathologizing individuals that, for example, ran amok or committed ‘honourable murders’,
these phenomena could be studied and prevented in the future. Furthermore, by not killing
them, but confining and treating them, the criminalized and pathologized individuals were
made subject to a power that worked on their very bodies in a productive instead of a
destructive way.
Early twentieth century psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies thus made a distinction
between Javanese mental conditions and European mental conditions to both differentiate and
to normalize at the same time. The aspect of differentiation confirmed the rule of colonial
difference and thereby solidified a fundament of the colonial state, while the aspect of
normalization helped to impose a modern regime of power and thereby secured colonial state
control. The differentiating tendency and the normalizing tendency of colonial psychiatry thus
both functioned to maintain and reproduce power relations in the colonial society. However,
28
by normalizing and differentiating at the same time, colonial psychiatry in the Netherlands
Indies created a glass ceiling in the process of normalization that, in Chatterjee’s words,
‘destined [the modern regime of power] never to fulfil its normalizing mission’.79 Kohlbrugge
made this explicit by stating that the Javanese could never be fully made into Europeans in
their own land. Travaglino did something similar by stating that the Dutch colonial rulers
could not possibly control the evolutionary process of the Javanese and therefore would not
be able to fully Europeanize the Javanese. The difference that was made between Javanese
mental conditions and European mental conditions by early twentieth century colonial
psychiatry in the Netherlands Indies was thus used to differentiate and to normalize in order to
maintain and reproduce power relations in the colonial society, but this inevitably led to an
internal paradox as well. As Soewardi made clear with his text ‘If Only I Were a
Netherlander’, this paradoxical nature could in the end very well be counterproductive and
actually be destructive to these colonial power relations. In order to get a better conception of
this counterproductive aspect of the paradoxical nature of the early twentieth century colonial
system in the Netherlands Indies, a subaltern perspective such as Soewardi’s could offer more
clarification. However, since this perspective deserves a text of its own, it would make an
excellent topic for further research.
79
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, 18.
29
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