Andrzej Łobaczewski
Andrzej M. Łobaczewski (25 May 1921 – November 2007) was a Polish psychiatrist.
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Biography
Andrzej Łobaczewski was born in Kraków, Second Polish Republic. Dedicated to beekeeping, he was a soldier during World War II and under the German occupation participated in the Armia Krajowa, an organized underground resistance group. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, the family farm was confiscated and his family expelled from their home.
He studied psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow with the still uncensored professor of psychiatry Edward Brzezicki; later communist dirigism implemented the theses of Pavlovian behaviorism in psychiatry. Government oppression directed his interest towards psychopathology, especially the role of psychopaths in a totalitarian governmental system. He worked in a psychiatric hospital, a general hospital and a mental health service, which enhanced his skills in clinical diagnosis and psychotherapy. He then became part of a secret circle of psychiatrists who began to study the pathology of totalitarian governments. The group included Kazimierz Dąbrowski (1902–1980), Stefan Szuman (1889–1972), Stefan Błachowski (1889–1962) and many other anonymous collaborators. But the political authorities were too suspicious of him and forced him to emigrate in 1977.
An initial manuscript with the findings of this group had been thrown into the fire minutes before a raid by the communist secret police; a second copy, painstakingly rewritten by these same scientists, was mailed to the Vatican, but receipt was never acknowledged and the manuscript and all the valuable data it contained were lost. The scientists of the group eventually died except Andrej, who with all the information he remembered wrote his most famous work, Political Ponerology, in New York in 1984.
Andrzej Łobaczewski died in Rzeszów.
See also
Works
- Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes (2006)
- Logokracja. Koncepcja ustroju państwa (2010)
