nasty morning in borrington on sea

          Nasty Morning in Barrington on Sea

The freighter was small, no more than a football field in length, painted dark red which hid the rust stains fairly well if you didn’t have binoculars.  It appeared to have dropped anchor where as far as he knew ships of that size never had done so before.  Staring hard through the high power binoculars, he could see the crew lowering a boat on the port side, the side nearest him; though from that anchorage it was still a long pull to shore.  Barrington on Sea was not equipped with docking facilities for ships of any size beyond the pleasure boats and the few fishing boats, mostly shell fishers, which plied the local waters.  At this time of year, the harbors were full of moored and docked yachts and sailboats and speedboats, a few trawlers, some as large as forty feet, and the tiny quahog skiffs that went out each morning, winter and summer alike.  Freighters could be seen moving up and down the bay, heading to or from Providence terminals to offload vehicles and heating oil and some to pick  up the only major exports of the USA nowadays, scrap iron and garbage, recycled, of course.

          He watched as the skiff was pulled by its ten straining oarsmen toward the shore from which he was gazing and wondering what in heaven’s name they were heading this way for.  There were several private docks some with their owners’ powerboats tied up, some empty.  The large houses that were set back from the water were surrounded by trees and shrubbery along the street side to protect the occupants from the few idle motorists who might make their way along what was essentially a private road.  Toward the water their lawns, rolling and green, sloped downward like parks set off on the sides of the property lines by rows of bushes maintained by Mexicans or Hondurans or whatever Hispanics were least expensive in this decade.

          What on earth, he wondered aloud this time, was a boatload of scruffy men – they appeared pretty rudely clothed and mostly unshaven through his powerful lenses – be doing in this neighborhood of suburban delights?  He was soon enough to find out though satisfaction was not be had by what he learned.

          The skiff was pulled ashore by the small party of men who leaped from their oars into the waist deep water and manhandled the large boat, more a whaleboat than a skiff, he could now see, onto the sand and tying the craft securely to the side of the longer of the two nearest docks, they all of them splashed through the water and up onto the lawn of the Stanley Myersons’ house, increasing their pace as they slogged through the reeds first and then onto the shelf and finally onto the lawn  where they began to fan out and run toward the long stone patio that comprised the front of the large house.

          He trained his binoculars on the front lawn sweeping them to the right side of the house where a back door led to a garage connected to a breezeway.  The men on the lawn had slowed to a walk now and he could see they were holding weapons, pistols most of them while one or two held short double barreled shotguns.  A woman appeared in the window that faced onto the now occupied patio or deck.  She was shouting something in a high pitched scream, something about the police.  He was transfixed by the impossibility of this scene.  A man appeared at the door to the patio, opened it and pointed a gun of some sort at the occupiers who shot him, blowing him back into his comfortable well appliance kitchen.  The woman was screaming now.  A high pitched and even at his distance from the actual events very annoying sound that ended with a similar” bang bang” from another shotgun.

          The raiders entered the house breaking glass, he could hear, and firing their shotguns as they went.  The woman at the window stopped screaming and disappeared from his view.  He noticed someone else at the window upstairs.  She was holding a cell phone to her head.  A mistake he thought to himself and seconds later she too was blown back into the doubtless comfortable bedroom.  Just visible in the circle of his binoculars he noticed a woman sitting on a lawn chair by the side of the garage closest to him.  She appeared not to have noticed anything amiss for she kept on reading her magazine or newspaper.  One of the men was walking slowly up to her holding a pistol in his right hand.  She did not look up as he drew near.  He said something to her evidently establishing that she was not only elderly but hard of hearing as well, possibly deaf, for she did not look up even when he stood by the side of her chair, the sort of cheap lawn chair you can buy in a big box store, the kind with webbing that doesn’t last.  He remembered he had given away all those type of chairs when he had moved to Barrington on Sea from his previous home in Pawtucket, a mill city very far down on its luck, a gritty decaying place distinguished nowadays by its prior history as the birthplace, so the city claimed, of the American industrial revolution, and the first place to have a factory or “works” clock high on a tower, the result of the first strike by women workers in the long, bloody, and largely forgotten history of the labor movement in America.

          The elderly woman in the chair was now apparently talking with the intruder who had bent over her to be able to speak directly into her ear.  He watched fascinated as she leaned her ear toward the man, young, dark skinned like herself he noted, and pointed toward something in the front of the house, something he could not see. 

          She was smiling; laughing even and the intruder shared her joke, said a further few words, and walked toward the front of the house now completely taken over by the band of raiders.  He heard one or two more gun shots, cracks rather than booms suggesting pistols being fired not shotguns, and then silence, only the resumption of bird calls from the trees and brush where he was standing.  Then the intruders, all of them, appeared again on the back lawn. Two of them were carrying a trunk or chest: the others held various smaller articles in their free hands, and the whole group joined by the elderly lady from the lawn chair walked without haste back the way they had come, toward the waiting boat.  They put their acquisitions into the stern of the boat and one by one they climbed in.  The dark skinned man, they were, he would see, mostly all dark skinned except for one or two who appeared to be white men whose skin had been browned by sun and salt, assisted the lady from the lawn chair into the stern as well where she sat comfortably it seemed on the stern sheets while the men still on shore pushed the craft into the deeper water before climbing in and taking up their oars.  Together they pulled the boat, a larger craft than he had at first thought, out into the still calm water of the inlet heading toward the freighter which had begun to emit engine noises, loud clanking sounds as the anchor was drawn up.  In less than five minutes they were along side.  The davits had been lowered, the crew in the boat secured the lines to the fore and aft of the boat, and he watched while boat and occupants were slowly hoisted up to the boat deck level.  By this time the freighter was underway, the rhythmic beat of her engines driving the ship back out toward the bay.

          Behind him he could hear the faint sound of sirens, police or ambulance or perhaps both he hoped, and the occasional slamming of a door.  He watched, waiting to see if perhaps a Coast Guard vessel or a police boat would appear to intercept the freighter slowly making its way back out to the channel that would bring her down toward Newport and the open ocean, but none appeared.

         

Hello, said the tall man, I am O'Malley and I am in punishment

 He wasn't called O'Malley, of that I am sure, but he was a professor of psychology at Brown University where at the time of this incident with which I have begun today's reflections, and indeed he was in "punishment" or "aversive therapy.  Brown's department of psychology specialized in experimental psychology.  I suspect the name and word Freud and Freudian were rarely used and if so then somewhat condescendingly, examples of old fashioned, pre scientific psychology.  I think from what I later learned during a long career at Brown as a teacher and professor of German and Media Studies (the latter very late in my forty year career there) he inflicted pain on rats to see if painful or pleasurable rewards were the better motivators in rat behavior.  This exchange took place in the early part of the 1970s or perhaps even earlier and the various experiments such as the Millhaven team from Yale, I believe, performed on their volunteers still resounded in the growing study of baseline human behavior.  Were people otherwise thought of as good people capable of administering violent electric shocks to other people while these other people were apparently strapped to chairs with a wire or wires attached to them?  It seems that the supposedly good people were indeed quite capable and even willing to apply high voltage shocks to the allegedly willing volunteers who cried out and writhed in apparent agony while their tormentors, the good people, simply obeyed their white coated scientist mentors and pressed the levers connected to the wires and the victim volunteers ever higher.

The point of the experiment, or a point, was to discover what otherwise good people chosen at random and with enough mental intelligence to know that pressing an electric lever would cause increasing pain to the person who was in any case visible behind a glass partition.  The victim was trained in the correct forms of screaming and twisting while the shocks were administered, though the victims were reacting to a series of light bulbs of different colors or diefferent gradations of height which told them how great the shock was supposed to be.  The volunteer torturers were all assured that the seated victims were volunteers, knew what would happen to them, and that in the end none of them would have any lasting effects from the shocks administered to them.

The Nazi period was not very far in the past at the time of these experiments and the experience of the death camps and the ways in which otherwise good people became vicious toward others while imprisoned in the camps intrigued many people.  "How could the Germans do those things?" summed up the background of the experiments; and how could and can other non-German good people do thse things in other parts of the world including in the good old USA?  Obedience to authority was said to be a German trait though it was clearly known to many people that it is not at all confined to one part of the globe or to one nationality or ethnicity.  It is an ancient problem for human beings and in most cases the answer that came most often from the torturers was something akin to "I did what I was ordered to do."  The orders were given by people with the right to have authority - doctors, scientists, policemen, camp guards, prison guards, dictators, presidents of republics - in fact by all manner of people.  The question that arose therefore was is there nothing in the human being which rises up against such horror and says no no matter what the cost to the nay sayers?

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing posed this question in his 18th century dramatic work, "Ugolino,"  about the execution of a father and his son in an Italian court.  They are starved to death in order for the despot who hates the father to see to what depths of immorality his enemy will sink in order to live.  In fact in the play the father kills and eats his child which had a depressing effect on those followers of the Enlightenment who had hoped for a better ending.

I think of this in the past week because I am once again like most of us in this country, the USA, and the wider world are learning of the "treachery" of an intelligence analyst who in the grips of a moral crisis about his job at a place with the unlikely name of "Booze, Allen, and Company" in which among other things he had access to e-mails, telephone conversations, and other electronic communications of Americans and could selectively "spy" on them to gather mega data for the NSA, the government contractor of his work for Booze, Allen, and Co.  Some hail him as a hero for standing up to big government and its invasion of personal privacy.  Others speak of him as a traitor because he had taken some sort of oath never to reveal what he did.

Of course, America at least was founded by a gang of traitors with a price on their heads.  Washington, Adams,Jefferson and all the founding fathers, so called, faced hanging by the British if caught because they too had taken oaths as officials of various types of the British Monarch and had broken those oaths by rebelling against their lawful master.  They were not spies, of course, but traitors much like Benedict Arnold of the Continental Army was a traitor to the rebel cause and escaped hanging by fleeing to England.

But history is not the strong suit of Americans generally and generally cited only when it is on the "right side" which is to say, truth and treason are all and always relative.

So those who call for the arrest and rendering of this young man who broke his oath not to tell of government spying programs believe that he should accept his possible fate because he knew what he was doing was illegal.  Civil rights advocates in the USA accepted jail terms and worse in the name of a righteous - to them - cause and did not flee to England or Hong Kong or Iceland.  Surely this chap, had he any dangling male parts of sufficient proportion, should also accept his legal fate, being rendered which somehow sounds terrible.  I think of rendering as the creation in cooking of a sauce from a piece of meat or a vegetable which must be cooked down to yeld up or to render it suficiently liquid to be called gravy, for example.

In any case, rendering has sufficiently negative connotations to be something to avoid as this "traitor/hero" is attempting to do while admitting that "the other side" believes it must do this to him because he broke a law.

But then there is a streak of meanness in people which historically has always made numbers of us attend executions or slow down to gape at victims of traffic accidents.  Religions historically are about right and wrong and have clear and concise views of them as anyone reading, for example, Leviticus or Deuteronomy in the Old Testament knows.  We witness Islamic Sharia Law being imposed on people in those countries which support such a body of law and must in witnessing these executions admit that there is some kind of vicarious pleasure (real pleasure for the executioner?) in watching someone hanged, beheaded, stoned, etc.

I don't know what to do with this hero/traitor.  He has at the very least generated a most interesting debate about government power to do as it pleases with privacy.  As usual in these cases the head of state, in this case President Obama has defended the practice of spying on citizens by saying something like the choice is either the reign of terrorists or a bit of intelligence gathering and relative security from the terrorists.  What price freedom?

I think I would not renew his contract with his present employer, the USA government in fact.  But I would also ponder the usefulness of the contract the government has with its intelligence gathering agencies if the head of state has to defend unconstitutional acts by saying this hurts me more than it hurts you or some such empty adage. 

Our prisons are not better than those of other countries and far worse than those of countries such as Denmark or Sweden, for example.  Rendered to a maximum facility in deepest Colorado, for example, the imprisoned person's life is over as far as it can be called a human life.  The humiliations surrounding the rendering and imprisonment will effectively end human life for him, his family and friends, many of them, and perhaps for those who support such methods of punishment. 

Will aversive therapy work to prevent others from emulating his foul acts?  I don't know what Professor O'Malley found out.  The evidence so far is that aversive conditioning does lttle more than besmirch the aversive conditioner, be that a single human being or a government or nation.

As a reader of those wonderful stories of Leaphorn and Chee, Navajo Tribal Policemen in the American south west, I am always impressed by the concept of restoring the troublesome individual to harmony with his traditions, his people, his way of life.  What good does it do to lock someone up for years or put him to death?  Does he change?  Is the society better off because it did this to him?  Do unto others, etc.  Well, the Code of Hamurabi believed that thousands of years ago.  It is an understandable primitive reaction to violence done by someone to us and ours.  If the violence or misdeed actually helped the person or persons to whom it was done, or generated useful community wide meditation and thought and resolve about changing the society and community for the better, would that suffice to make the misdeeds understandable and bearable without killing or punishing the individual who acted against the prevailing laws and customs?

Not yet, I fear in America.  Not in Russia or in many places outside of the Navajo reservation?  Perhaps we could appoint him professor, visiting or guest, of psychology at Brown or some similar place, in many ways a most terrible punishment indeed.  And make him study and give lectures and sit on committees to ponder redesigning curricula including the curriculum of psychology.  Make him think and talk about this matter of what he did and why, engage with students anf colleagues and a broader public - then we would punish him in ways most people cannot imagine but insiders can.  But his punishment would produce more of what his original acts intended  namely to stir up a debate about the limits of government in an age of corporate and religious terrorisms.  We need this debate and we need these professors - not teachers, that is something different but people who profess something and are allowed to do so by virtue of a degree or family or money or other entitlement and who in professing may if not overpaid as so many are today help bring about rethinking and then even reshaping the nature of our social contract.



Introduction to the reflections of and on G. A. Dormu, father of the Defectology movement

Georgiu Antonescu Dormu, father of Defectology, died, of course, decades ago.  Despite rumors to the contrary he did not reanimate in human form but remains dead though his many writings are available selectively to those with an interest in his biography, writings, and his few remaining followers one of whom is the author of this "blog."

In the initial attempt to bring to a reader's attention the important and overlooked if not completely forgotten story of Dormu, the technology lags behind the intentions of this writer thus far leading to a far longer selection, that is, the entire first chapter with photos or pictures that do not appear in this text.  The writer hopes He or She will be able to rectify this in later posts and that the reader will be patient as the merger of mind and technology becomes more effective.  This first chapter may however provide an opening in to the forgotten history of Defectology and its founder, Georgiu Antonescu Dormu.

Chapter I

The Family Origins and Early Childhood of Dormu

Dormu Family Home in Bucharest

            The earliest records of the Dormu family date to the 16^th century in the small town of Kolomea, halfway between L’viv and Chernivtsi in Galicia (cf. map below).  The church records of what was then a very small community indicate that a certain Nicholas Dormat was interred in the church burial ground in the year 1597, three hundred years before the birth of Georgiu Antonescu Dormu.  The record indicates that Nicholas Dormat died of ‘debilities of the brain’ brought on by blows to the head received while serving as a member of the local baron’s bodyguard. Maria Penetentia Dormu, born Polofski, is listed as the surviving wife together with thirteen children whose names are not recorded beyond that of the eldest son, Anton.  The family name thereafter disappeared from the Kolomea church records, but in the 17^th century archives of the city of Lemberg, capital of the region in which Kolomea was then located, there are frequent mentions of the Dormu name included an execution order of 1658 against one Nicholas Anton Dormat - the Galician form of the Dormu family name - for engaging in acts of “a bestial nature with a local prostitute and her pig.”  The order was rescinded, and Dormat was condemned to military service in a Galician regiment where he served initially as company rat catcher. It is noted in the records that this regiment was to be dispatched to fight against the Turks in what is now Hungary and Bulgaria.  Other references to a Dormu family contained in these early Lemberg records mention frequently occurring first names in the previous and subsequent Dormu families of record including Nicholas, Georg, and Anton, while the name Penetentia and Flagellanta occur with marked frequency among the female members of these families.

Central Europe, the homeland

 of the Dormu Family

           

The records of the Imperial army from these early days are, of course, sparse indeed save for the officer corps in which in the entire 17^th and 18^th centuries there is no mention of the name Dormat or Dormu or any other version of the name such as Dormski, Dorm(s)berg, Dormut, Dormier, Dormant, or Dorminant, but there are occasional mentions of Galician units serving with the Imperial forces in wars against the Turks, against the French, and finally in the middle of the 18^th century, against the Prussians under Frederick the Great.  But remarkably there is in military records of the imperial forces in the wars against Napoleon a rather detailed report of several Galician units whose long history of service with the Imperial forces warranted fuller mention by archivists and military historians.  One such unit, the 4^th Lemberg Hussars, whose record of service dates back in various forms to “at least the middle of the 16^th century (“wenigstens bis zu der Mitte des 16ten Jahrhunderts,”) was cited in various military histories written after the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813.

Polish (Winged) Hussar

            In that history, located in the military archives in Vienna, the units most distinguished officers and non-commissioned soldiers are mentioned often by name either for deeds of bravery or for acts of brutality and untoward violence against the civilian population, the punishment for which was from time to time, expulsion from the regiment and death by beheading, the latter at times commuted to penal servitude in various more unwholesome parts of the empire.  The Dormu name appears in both registers, that of meritorious and distinguished service and the list of those dishonorably expelled and punished for various crimes.  Among the former are several Dormus, Rittmeister or Cavalry Captain Anton Nicholas Dormat, who single-handedly rode through the French lines at Jena and put two batteries of guns out of action before being speared through the breast by the bayonet of a French voltiger, and another Artillery Lieutenant, Georg Anton Dormu, who forestalled a French counter-attack at Auerstadt  by standing resolutely with his guns in the face of overwhelming French power, receiving several blows to the head from French sabers, the results of which wounds forcing him to retire from military service and become personal attendant - Leibdiener - to the Colonel of his unit.

            The most prominent of the Dormu names listed under those who were dishonorably discharged from this unit is that of Captain Anton Georg Nicholas Dormat who is described as a “pervert and lecherous officer whose conduct on all occasions was characterized by a dog-like appearance of devotion to his leaders (hundsmaessige Unterwuerfigkeit den Vorgesetzten gegenueber) and an equally canine tendency to bite them from behind when unobserved” (und eine merkwuerdige und fuerchterliche Gewohnheit, sie von hinten mit den Zaehnen anzugreifen und zwar sogar oft in ihre Hintertheile zu beissen.”) This Dormu was in charge of the guard detail before the tent of Major General von Unterkieferberg, head of the Imperial Cavalry at Jena, and was so debauched while on duty, that a French forward unit was able to enter the camp and take most of the horses and equipment while severely frightening the elderly Major General who barely escaped with his life.  Captain Dormu, who was in company of a number of grossly overweight local prostitutes of both genders and acutely drunk as well, apparently attacked the fleeing General biting him severely on his retreating posteriors, and the victorious French soldiers were so amused by this that they made him their mascot, a post in which he served for some weeks until he was captured by some Hungarian irregulars and returned to his unit for punishment.  He was demoted to the ranks and posted to the burial details from which he deserted and was never found.  No further records of this Dormu exist.

            The civil register of the city of Czernowitz list four Dormat names and two Dormu names as well, one of which appears to be the former artillery lieutenant who carries the rank of Major, retired and further the rank of Rittmeister (cavalry captain) Dormu who from the dating appears to be the son of the retired major and who in 1893 was serving with the Austro-Hungarian forces on the Russian border.  That Rittmeister Dormu is referred to in 1897 as still being in the military garrison of Czernowitz but on extended service in Galicia, indeed in Kolomea, to which the unit, the 9^th Hussars, was assigned. It was this Rittmeister Dormu who was the father of Georgiu Antonescu by his marriage with Maria Theresa Polofski, who astonishingly bears the same family name as the wife of one of the original Dormats with which this brief genealogical record began.  Records of this Polofski family are however scanty.  There is a known White Russian Polofski family some of whose members left Russia at the time of the pogroms under Nicholas II and immigrated to the United States where a branch continues to this day in the states of Rhode Island (“The Big Jew Polofski”), Tennessee (“Football Polofski”), and Georgia and Florida where they may be countless younger Polofskis).

Rittmeister Dormu, center rear,

 surrounded by his men at the front in WWI

The Kolomea Polofskis, whose members include the mother of Georgiu Antonescu, are listed in the city records as merchants and dealers in alcohol and tobacco.  Since the earliest records from Kolomea indicate as well a Polofski family though without designation of any trade or commerce specialties, we may safely assume that members of the Polofski family were regular residents of Kolomea and may or may not have been connected to the White Russian Polofskis.  The trade in alcohol in which the White Russian Polofskis also engaged at least upon their arrival in the United States (Central Falls in the State of Rhode Island) suggests a tenuous connection but much more research would have to be done to establish an actual connection among these families.

Rittmeister Dormu and his wife, Maria Theresa, remained in Kolomea until 1905 when hostilities between Russia and Japan afforded the Austro-Hungarian government an opportunity of removing some troops from the sensitive Russian border and stationing them                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         elsewhere in the vast multi-ethnic empire where other tensions required their presence.  It was for this reason that Georgiu Antonescu at the age of six came to Laibach in Slovenia where he spent the formative years of his childhood.  His father, by then a Major in the mounted artillery, seems to have been a person of some standing in the city and upon his death on the Russian front in 1917 a statue was erected to him in a small square near the garrison in which he had served from 1905 until 1914.  When the war broke out, the Major moved his family, by then consisting of his wife and his eldest son and six daughters,  first but briefly to the city of Graz within the Austrian portion of the empire and finally to Vienna where they spent the remainder of the war years.

 

Map of Slovenia showing Laibach or Ljubljana

           

The Kolomea years, the infancy and earliest childhood of Georgiu Antonescu, were by all accounts happy ones for the growing family save for the birth of the second of the six daughters who came into the world with several abnormalities including multiple thumbs on both hands and apparent mental abnormalities alluded to in the then Rittmeister’s letters to his wife while the former was away on maneuvers with the army.  The letters, only a few of which survived the families’ frequent moves both before and after the Great War, contain touching and at times frustrated remarks about the condition of this daughter,  Obligatia Gloria.  Several operations are referred to one of which removed the additional thumbs from the right hand but for some reason not the left,

multiple thumbs in diagram form

and one of which was intended to redress some aspect of the mental abnormalities which by inference from the letters - the exact details are not spelled out - had to do with a set of peculiar obsessive behaviors.  These behaviors, which included a familiar counting ritual but applied to the rats and mice with which all households had to contend until quite recently in human history, kept Obligatia - (whose name is derived from a Catholic Saint of the 13^th century who kept her vows of chastity, poverty and obedience even after being found out as the wayward daughter of a wealthy local baron who attempted in vain to reclaim her for a secular life including marriage to her enormously fat cousin - much at home lest she be exposed to the ridicule and physical abuse of the disabled that typified the age and the place and indeed all ages and places up to the present day.  These rituals together with the presence of the multiple thumbs were quite obviously of such severity that Obligatia was unable to attend school and was kept at home where she seems to have been a constant companion to her older brother. Certainly, Dormu’s later intense interest in the presence of multiple thumbs and in obsessive rodent numbering

unnumbered rats

 stems from these earliest days with his favorite sister though both maladies were prevalent through the Ruthenian and Galician regions and beyond until recent times when advances in pre-natal care as well as more careful regard for marital consanguinity, reduced the incidences of these conditions.

Young Dormu attended school in Kolomea for two years from the ages of four to six.  He was taught the rudiments of mathematics and became conversant in the Galician dialect as well as in German and Latin and some Russian.  These linguistic accomplishments were in fact quite normal for the times, with the exception of the Latin, for the multi-ethnic border regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as the demands of military service required some familiarity with up to ten different languages depending on the number of re-postings and the ethnic mix of the ordinary soldiers in any garrison. Two of Dormu’s sisters were born during the Kolomea years, the aforementioned Obligatia Gloria and Honoria Gloria (all of Dormu’s six sisters bore in addition to their given names the middle name of Gloria indicating the traditional Roman Catholic piety of the Dormu family) in 1901 and 1903 respectively.

Dormu’s father and mother saw little of each other during those Kolomea years since the border tensions between the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were especially pronounced at this time.  Georgiu and his sisters grew up in the care of their mother, who appears to have been a distant maternal influence and made much use of her prayer bench in the local church of St. Boniface the Adroit (named for a 12^th century monk of the Benedictine Order who had on repeated occasions escaped by his swiftness of foot and wit the ravages of marauding bands of sodomite Orthodox Kiev soldiery). Care of the young Dormus was entrusted to a Sorbian peasant woman, imported by a German merchant family from her homeland further to the west as a serving girl and then cast off when she became pregnant. Since she was nursing at the time of her removal from the merchant family’s home, she was an ideal candidate to become a wet -nurse for young Dormu and remained in that capacity for his two sisters born in Kolomea.

Dormu’s wet nurse

She later accompanied the family to Laibach where she continued in her dual capacity as wet-nurse and nanny for the other four sisters born during the Laibach years.  She was in many ways Dormu’s real mother, for his birth mother appears to have lapsed into greater and greater religious fervor over the years according to all reports in letters from herself to her husband and to her few relatives in Czernowitz in which she repeatedly vowed to become a nun in fact if not in law and so to escape the attentions of her husband whenever the latter appeared at his home on leave from his postings or from the barracks where he apparently resided for much of the time in Laibach.

 This Sorbian woman, whose name is recorded in all written documents mentioning her as Adversa - not her real name and clearly implying some animadversion toward her on the part of her employers or some reference to her early condition as a cast-off pregnant serving girl - functioned in fact as the mother of the large family, caring for the seven children, cooking, cleaning, and or else tending to their needs and the needs of the household.  The Rittmeister met his financial obligations as well as his marital ones well enough to provide ample food and adequate shelter for his offspring and his increasingly demented wife but otherwise played but a small role in their upbringing leaving all of that to the supervision of Adversa.

If the Kolomea years are characterized by a paucity of information about the conditions in which Georgiu and his sisters as well as their mother and their caregiver Adversa lived, the Laibach decade presents the opposite - a fuller picture of family life, of schooling, and of various incidents attendant upon these ten years.

Georgiu Antonescu, who appears to have been named for a grandfather and a great-grandfather respectively on his father’s side, was enrolled in the local imperial school where he received instruction in the usual subjects from Biology to Mathematics of all sorts.  He was a bright child and achieved high marks.  This much is known due to the extant letters and missives sent to his father by the school officials and which were preserved in the collection of family letters and documents passed on to Dormu after his mother’s death in 1937.  

There are several anecdotes about Dormu recorded from these early Laibach days including one that may shed some light on the famous defectologist’s later career.  During the summer holidays in 1912, when Georgiu was fifteen, he fell in love with a hatter,

 

Dormu’s beloved hatter

 a young lady four or five years older than he who was apprenticed to a popular and prosperous firm where she had been working for a little over two years.  Dormu seems to have met here while accompanying Adversa to the shop to pick up several bonnets and hats made for his mother who, though she seldom went anywhere beyond the threshold of her own home, nevertheless continued until the end of her life to display an inordinate affection for headpieces of all types, taking her collection with her during her many journeys to the various places of residence before and after her husband’s death.  Dormu may have been in this shop, therefore, rather often, as he was devoted to his otherwise distant mother and may have tried to bond with her more closely than she otherwise allowed over her interest in hats.

 On the particular day of which this recorded anecdote tells, however, he was accompanying his caregiver or “nanny,” Adversa, who till the end of her days refused to wear any sort of hat or headpiece at all, refusing   to go to church because of the requirement that women in church cover their heads.  Instead, she remained outside the portals of the building and recited her rosary and the Latin words to the mass that she knew as well as any priest, and occasioning Dormu initially some embarrassment at her remarkable behavior.  Later, when his own mother refused for other reasons to enter the church at all or to leave the house even for ordinary errands, he took to staying with Adversa reciting with her all the familiar lines and chants to the various services and, as this habit began when he was a young boy of only eleven, subjecting himself to curious and irritated glances from other devout church-goers and finally to rigorous interrogations by the priest himself, Father Flagellantus,

Catholic priest enraged

and a threat of excommunication if the lad did not return to more regular habits.  The results of this strange intermezzo were striking both at the time and in later life.  Georgiu explained first to the irate priest and later to a team of clerical commissioners who became involved in the case when the threat of excommunication was made, that he was not in fact being irreverent but was intrigued by the strange behaviors of Adversa who was in any case known locally as something of an eccentric woman given to odd habits and actions and who while walking anywhere would mumble incessantly and wave her arms about as if in some earnest conversation with invisible others whose voices could not be heard but whose words had a notable effect on Adversa.  The young Dormu in defending his decision to remain with Adversa stated to the commissioners who reported on the entire matter both to the local Bishop and to the boy’s father, that he only wanted to make careful note of the ways in which Adversa when reciting the words to the mass, would resolutely and continuously repeat any words including the words of the services which were spoken to her. 

The young Dormu was in fact undertaking an early step in his ongoing investigations of Latah by interjecting words and phrases, even commands, in Latin and German and in rather primitive Sorbian dialect, into Adversa’s spoken reveries.  To prove his point, he invited the commissioners and his father - the priest refused to participate in such obviously Satanic work - to witness the activities the following Sunday, June the 27t^h, and observe how Adversa could be moved from the simple recitation of a well-known text to a recitation of anything Dormu suggested to her in any language he chose to use including several that were unknown to Adversa such as Greek or French which Dormu was studying at the Kaiser Leopold Gymnasium. By inflecting his voice in those languages, regardless of any content he chose, he could obligate the strange woman to echo his words exactly and to leap slightly up and down or side to side as she did so.

Needless to say, these early investigations into Untimely Jumping and Latah were abruptly terminated by the church officials who forbade either the young Dormu or Adversa any further such experimentations resulting in Adversa carrying out all her religious duties and observances in her own room at the Dormu house while the young scientist was returned to his rightful place in the interior of the church there to attend to the word of God and His Church rather than to  such foolishness.

But though the hierarchy of the Church was unimpressed, Dormu’s father was struck by his son’s curiosity, so much so that he decided then and there to direct his offspring’s energies toward the medical profession, enlisting for him several medical colleagues in the regiment to which he was attached to begin giving the boy rudimentary lessons in the art and science of this field.  Georgiu was delighted by this unexpected benefit of his earliest recorded scientific research and thereafter for the next two years while he remained in Laibach spent several evenings each week and every Saturday afternoon with one or the other of the two medical men, even attending dissections and diagnostic interviews.  Though he showed great promise according to these men in every area he was most intrigued by interviews with those patients, mostly soldiers or their families, who exhibited odd behaviors that led to confinement or to discharge from the service or who had taken up certain habitual actions that on occasion disrupted the smooth flow of everyday military life.  It was to these cases that Dormu’s attention was most strikingly directed, and he was encouraged by his mentors to consider a course of study that, new enough in some circles, nevertheless since Charcot, Kraepelin,

Kraepelin unshaven

 and others in both France, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were fomenting interesting and stimulating controversies about the nature of mental or emotional states.

One of the young medical men, a resident of Vienna, gave Dormu a copy of Freud’s early work on the Pathologies of Everyday Life, a book that Dormu memorized and copiously annotated making it clear to his mentors and his father that the young man would be well served by a course of study at the medical schools in Vienna, though none of his supporters were in any way advocates of the strange theories of this man Freud.

Dormu’s first written work on the subject of pathologies, in an early and unpublished form the manuscript of which was lost and is known only from a letter from one of the Laibach medical doctors to his father concerning Georgiu’s progress, dealt with his sister, Obligata Flagellanta’s multiple thumb disorder, a condition which had persisted on the left hand though surgery had corrected the right hand symptoms.  Dormu’s investigation according to the reporter dealt with the relationship of this multiple thumb symptoms to his sister’s general mental state which even then was markedly worse and taking a decidedly downward course.  The thumbs on the right hand had r-grown perceptibly and Obligata refused to leave her room any longer as she was constantly tormented by passers-by who remarked callously about her hands and the presence of the multiple thumbs.  In addition, as the thumbs re-grew, Obligata took up a number of obsessive or compulsive behaviors sometimes joining with Adversa in strange sideways walking along the corridors of the house or in the garden dipping and stretching as they went in a gait that had become as one between them and accompanied by a keening sound interrupted by choral shouts that subsided as soon as they had begun and were replaced by peculiar small leaps or jumps done unison while emitting muffled groans or throaty murmurs.  Such behaviors, in addition to saddening the young man who had always been devoted to this particular sister, stimulated his curiosity about what later would become defectologies of the person and provided him with a tragic but fascinating laboratory for his interests and his research in his own home.  Certainly the later work on MTD (Multiple Thumb Disease) and UJ (Untimely Jumping) for which Dormu became famous if controversial owing to his belief in certain treatment modalities, was in many ways inspired by his sister Obligata Flagellanta and her tragic colleague in distress, Adversa, two women who in the absence of any real maternal relationship with his own mother, much influenced Dormu’s entire life.

With the outbreak of the First World War the Dormu family moved first to Vienna where from 1915 until 1917 they lived in the tenth district

 Coat of arms of Vienna’s 10^th district

in a rented house of considerable size with a vast garden, untended since the owner, two brothers of minor nobility had been killed on the Carpathian Front early in the tragic war.  A distant cousin, the only surviving relative, a certain Countess Terasky, had inherited the gloomy old villa and had been only two delighted to rent it out to the Dormu Family, when Major Dormu (he had been promoted on the eve of his departure to that same Carpathian Front, informed of the house’s availability upon  his arrival at regimental headquarters in Vienna, called upon the elderly lady and proclaimed his interest in acquiring a temporary residence for his family during his absence on war duty.

Into this dark building, therefore, the family consisting of a by now reclusive mother and an eccentric caregiver and younger sister, the young Dormu now age seventeen, and his three remaining sisters, moved.  Adversa, no longer able by herself to care for the family, was given charge of the kitchen and of Obligata Flagellanta, and Major Dormu, shortly before his departure for the Carpathian campaign, employed a second maid to care for the needs of the remaining family members and to tidy the living quarters in the vast house.  This maid, Theresa Habicht, the daughter of a seamstress whose husband was fighting in Italy, was only a few years older than the young Dormu, and it is therefore perhaps not so very surprising that a friendship, inappropriate, of course, by the standards of the time and the differences in station of life between them, sprang up which soon enough became Dormu’s first sexual adventure and of which he kept a fastidious and even perhaps too keen an account in his journals.

Theresa Habicht, Dormu’s first love

Deprived of maternal care by both his own mother, now unwilling to leave her room at the darkest part of the already foreboding mansion set in an overgrown garden and surrounded by high plane trees shielding the house from the sultry heat of the Viennese summer but providing a bleak aspect to the building in harsh urban winters of the war years, his mother from the few allusions we have to her from her husband’s letters and from Dormu’s own journals, appears to have become a terrifying apparition.  Her face coated with a dark beard-like growth, her own thumbs swollen to immense proportions, and demonstrating the same startling jumping behaviors exhibited by his sister and by Adversa, Madam Dormu received no visitors and engaged not at all with the members of her own family save to observe one habit regularly and that was to appear nightly at the supper table and intone a version of some religious chant while her family bowed their heads respectfully and both Adversa and Theresa Habicht, from their refuges in kitchen or scullery, remained mostly silent save for the rustling motions of Adversa’s long black skirts which swayed against cabinets and counters as she leaped in harmony with the strange music of Madam Dormu’s chants.  After this nightly ceremony, Madam Dormu immediately rose from the table without any nod of recognition toward   her five children and returned to the dark recesses of the building, leaping and swaying the length of the corridors and staircases and muttering strange sounds and imprecations as she went.

Such an apparition cannot but have had some persisting psychological effects upon the young Dormus who however continued so long as they all remained together in that dark villa to oblige their mother by their presence at this evening ritual.  It was, after all, the only contact they were to have with this sadly afflicted woman until the day she or they died, for she survived into extreme old age, living at the end of the 1960s again in Poland, in a small village outside Wroclaw formerly Breslau, while her son and three of his sisters, preceded her in death, only Obligata Flagellanta, by then a nun in a convent near Quebec City, surviving her until her own death in 1997. She had become a holy woman by then, renowned in her order and throughout certain branches of Roman Catholic Christendom for her piety and for her strange trance-like behaviors during the course of which the truly devoted alleged they could make out from her grunts and shouts and her leaps and jumps the very body of the Blessed Mother, tormented by grief and yet struggling to bless other tortured souls.  Pilgrims flocked to the huge convent outside Victoriaville

Convent in Quebec

and took away with them for a substantial contribution they were only to happy to make, an imprint of Obligata Flagellant’s multiple thumbs on a wafer of unconsecrated but blessed bread under which was inscribed in German, for that had been her own language while she still had speech, “Ordnung und Leiden,” the interpretations of which filled countless tomes of sacerdotal lore.  Obligata Flagellanta has been proposed for canonization, a lengthy procedure and one whose outcome is in doubt until the tribunals have overcome the arguments of the Devil’s Advocate appointed to investigate and to debunk any claims made for miracles and saintly behaviors on the part of those made candidates.  At this writing it is unclear whether the process, just begun, will result in sainthood for this strange Dormu sister, though were this to be the case, it would be an interesting aspect of Dormu’s own rather forgotten life that he was the brother of a Catholic Saint, and one we can well imagine would have been of considerable interest to Dormu himself.  He remained all his life an “unbeliever” assessing the bizarre behaviors of those alleged to be saints or otherwise “holy men and women” from a strictly materialist perspective which he outlined in fullest detail in the Principles of Defectology (Six volumes, Bucharest and London, 1938-1943) the first volume of which is devoted precisely to the study of miracles and their organic causes.

In such a household, the young Dormu, facing the inevitability of military service in his immediate future and deprived of feminine and maternal care, experienced his first erotic impulses, for until that time he had been remarkably unconcerned with the opposite sex.  His school days in Laibach were devoted to his biological and other scientific studies, and unlike his colleagues, he had not visited the local brothels in which young men of good family were introduced to the mysteries of sexual union, disdaining even his mentors’ suggestions that one such visit at least would have happy consequences for the young man’s perhaps too feverish occupation with his beloved scientific experiments, an opinion in which his father, then still a captain, joined.  But the young man overrode their zealous concern for his welfare and shunned the portals of fleshly pleasure (die furchterregende Tore der fleischlichen Begierden und Krankheiten) as he referred to them in his journal for the year 1914, in favor of the delights of the hard physical realities of the material universe (die harten Begebenheiten des wirklichen Weltalls) which he accessed through his many hours in the tiny and primitive laboratories of his two mentors.

But conditions in Vienna were different.  Separated from his mentors and with access only to the laboratory of the Kaiser Joseph Gymnasium

Dormu’s Vienna Gymnasium

where he completed his secondary school studies in 1918, the young man had time on his hands.  He took over several rooms on the upper story of the vast villa and converted them to laboratories for both biological and physical sciences furnishing them with equipment he bought with monies provided him for that purpose by his father who wrote regularly despite the hardships of the campaigns in which he distinguished himself, reaching the rank of Colonel in charge of entire regiment of Hussars on the always dangerous Russian Front by the end of 1917.  It was in the biological laboratory, appropriately enough, that his first taste of sexual pleasure (“mein erstes Erwachen zum Genuss des Weibes”) occurred, for, as he relates in his journal for the year 1918, he came upon Theresa Habicht engaged in dusting the various books and pieces of equipment contained in that room.  Upon being asked by the young woman, then twenty one years of age, about certain drawings depicting copulation between animals, what these “devilish” (teufelisch) representations were doing on his desk, he a mere stripling pupil, Dormu seems to have become embarrassed and tried to cover them while Theresa, intent upon her own purposes which included but did not end with carnal knowledge of her employer’s son, proposed that seeing a thing and doing a thing were different matters with which he had  best become acquainted and opening her dress to expose her delightful bosom(ihre fantastisch schmeckende Brueste) she soon took the young man into her,

 

Theresa’s breasts
	th desire

he confessing that he was not able to withstand such a sudden engulfment without ejaculating into her (ich war nicht in der Lage, in der gegebenen Situation, in der mein Glied ploetzlich und gaenzlich in ihre Mutterscheide verschwand, umgeben von einer suessen Feuchtigkeit, die einer doppelten Feuchtigkeit meinerseits sehr bald begegnete, durch die ich diesen Menschen besaet habe, wie der Regen ein fruchtbares Stueck Ackerland, und somit ihr armseliges Leben bereichert habe, ihrer Lust und Freude nein zu sagen.)

Theresa embracing Dormu

  After this introduction to adolescent sex, as might be expected, young Dormu was preoccupied with his new experiments for the next three to four months.  His journals record his daily and nightly adventures and record as well a growing dissatisfaction with the usual forms of sexual practice that increasingly brought him only moderate satiation.  He pressed Theresa for more and more unusual sexual practices

 

Aberrant sexual acts

reading whatever he could find about deviance and inferring from those few volumes available to so young a lad, what he could not find in print.  Theresa at first cooperated but became restive as the games assumed more and more the aspects of certain of the paraphilias with which the young scientist had become acquainted.  The matter came to an abrupt end when Theresa, after a particularly long session with her paramour, packed her bags and left the house.  Dormu was flabbergasted but relieved, as his diary records, for by now he was for the first time in his life doing poorly at his school work and had abandoned altogether his own scientific researches into defectologies of the person.

            For the next weeks and months, following Theresa’s departure and the hiring of yet another maid who was, however, lacking in both youth and bodily charms and more a companion of Adversa’s than an alternative, Dormu returned with a fierce intensity to his studies, both at school and in his own laboratories and succeeded in changing his standing in the school so much that by the time of the final examinations upon which admission to the medical faculty at Vienna or Budapest depended, he was once again first in his class.  His diary entries for this period, from September of 1917 until May of 1918 record in addition to a routine listing of his daily occupations and the day’s events, a repugnance with his former sexual practices as well as his own notes on that repugnance, in which he interprets his behaviors in a manner that paralleled much of the work done by Dr. Freud with whose still slender opus the young Dormu was increasingly becoming acquainted.

            He passed his examinations (Abitur) with highest honors and was accepted to the medical faculty at the University of Vienna where he was scheduled to matriculate in October of that year, 1918, his military service obligation having been transmuted to an obligation to undertake certain duties in the military hospitals with which Vienna, like all European cities in the theaters of war, were saturated at that time.

            Since the departure of Theresa, Dormu had shunned the company of others, women and men alike, and devoted himself single mindedly to hiss work.  This self-imposed isolation had certain consequences, however, for Dormu fell into what was the first of a long cycle of mood disorders which, while not preventing him from carrying out his obligations at school and later at university, compromised almost entirely his social relationships with others including his family members.  He shunned his mother, Obligata Flagellanta, and Adversa and was barely civil to his three remaining sisters, none of whom appear to have manifested any signs of defectology and all of whom appear to have been normal and charming girls and young women.  He tolerated them but having matriculated at the university, took rooms in the city’s first district, closer to his laboratories and classrooms and rarely visited the dark mansion, from which in any case the family had departed for Budapest in the late summer of 1918.

Dormu’s student room

           

These childhood and adolescent years of the great Dormu were marked by an early introduction to the issues and problems of defectologies at the level of personal experience.  His beloved sister, his mother, his nanny and later caregiver - all of these people whose lives directly affected the child and the youth and the young man, were in some measure victims of illnesses and conditions that may easily be seen as highly influential in Dormu’s selection of a career and his subsequent dedication to his profession. His father’s obvious concern for the development of his only son was mitigated by his long absences from home in the service of his country, but it was largely due to this man’s persistent support of the young Georgiu Antonescu’s early interests that the initial studies and researches and the subsequent enrollment in the medical faculty at first Vienna and later Budapest (after 1919) were accomplished.

Of friends and mentors we know little save from what has been alluded to above, the two mentors at Laibach and, of course, the brief but torrid affair with Theresa after which for some time Dormu had no further relations with the opposite sex until his final years of medical study which will be described in the next chapter.

We may safely assert, however, that certain peculiarities of the later man emerge clearly from this sketchy picture of the child and the adolescent - maternal neglect complicated by a consuming strangeness in the maternal figure herself and reinforced by the condition of both the sister, Obligata, and the nanny and maid, Adversa.  That Dormu did not entirely despair and abandon himself to some less rigorous forms of work and career only speaks for the internal character of the man challenged but not subdued by circumstances of great sadness.  The initial love affair with the second maid may be viewed as a normal process of expressing the emotions he felt arising in him as a result of these early losses, and it must be stated here this early in the work, that Dormu’s later admiration for the work of John Bowlby, especially the volume On Loss, voices intensely repressed feelings about his own losses.

Dormu’s Birth: The first loss