Antonio Vallejo-Nájera

Antonio Vallejo-Nájera Lobón (20 July 1889 – 25 February 1960) was a Spanish physician, first full professor of Psychiatry at the University of Valladolid. Vallejo-Nájera "became one of the most influential figures in Spanish Psychiatry and Psychology in the forties and fifties: his name is among the 16 founders of the Spanish Psychological Society."

Biography

Vallejo-Nájera was born in Paredes de Nava in 1889. He studied medicine at the University of Valladolid, where he obtained his degree in 1909. He then joined the Military Health Corps, performing his duties with notable merit, mainly in epidemics and war actions of the time, for which he obtained several national decorations. He served in Morocco as a member of the Military Health Corps. In 1917 he was appointed attaché of the Spanish embassy in Berlin, as a member of the military commission that was to inspect the prisoner of war camps; for the fulfillment of this mission he received several other decorations from different European countries.

During his stay in Germany he had the opportunity to visit psychiatric clinics, as well as to listen to the lessons of Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer, Hans Walter Gruhle and Gustav Schwalbe, whose work left a deep influence on him. These circumstances determined in Vallejo-Nájera his definitive vocation for Psychiatry. There he translated the works of Curschmann, Gruhle and Schwalbe into Spanish. Back in Spain, he moved to Madrid and directed, from 1930, the psychiatric clinic of Ciempozuelos.

He cultivated his relationship with Franco by dedicating to him his book on the psychopathology of war, to which he incorporated some previous studies on the relationship between Marxism and mental deficiency, "in respectful homage of admiration to the undefeated Imperial Leader, Generalissimo of the Spanish Armies of Land, Sea and Air". Vallejo-Nágera also maintained close ties with Social Aid, the regime's organization in charge of caring for war orphans, through his friend, the psychiatrist Jesús Ercilla Ortega. Ercilla, a good friend of Onésimo Redondo, was one of the founders of the JONS. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of Social Aid, as a medical advisor, and the liaison man with other groups of the regime. After the war, Ercilla was appointed medical director of the psychiatric clinic of San José, in Ciempozuelos, a hospital officially run by Vallejo-Nágera.

In 1931 he was a professor at the School of Military Health Application, a center where the first teaching of the specialty was given. During the Civil War Colonel Vallejo-Nájera directed the Psychiatric Services of Franco's Army and wrote extensively on the degeneration of the Spanish race, which, according to him, would have occurred during the Republic, a position also adopted by other psychiatrists at the time, such as Juan José López-Ibor, Ramón Sarró, José Solé Segarra and Marco Merenciano. This does not mean that the personal or academic relations between the different professors were fluid. As his son Juan Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, also a psychiatrist, revealed, the intellectual circles of both (Vallejo Nájera and López Ibor) had a profound rivalry that led them to bitterly oppose each side, something that was common in medicine and in the Spanish academy when two note professors were dedicated to the same branch of specialization.

Franco was enthusiastic about the charity work carried out with the Republican orphans by Social Aid, and he saw it as an essential piece for the definitive redemption of the political errors committed by the Spanish people. Within the framework of this mission, on December 14, 1941, a law was passed allowing the change of name of Republican orphans, of the children of prisoners, who could not take care of their children, and of babies separated from their mothers in prisons immediately after birth.

In 1947 he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Madrid, a position he held until 1959; he is, therefore, the first full professor of this specialty at the Spanish University. His teaching activity is evident in the enormous number of courses and conferences he organized. In 1951 he was elected member of the Royal National Academy of Medicine.

Thought

On August 10, 1938 he wrote to Franco requesting permission to create the Psychological Research Office, and two weeks later he received the expected authorization. The results of his investigations provided the psychological profile of Republican prisoners. According to Vallejo-Nájera the body type is associated with personality and mood disorders (schizothymic and cyclothymic) and that is related to Marxist political fanaticism. In his paper "Biopsychism of the Marxist Fanaticism," he asserted that Marxist ideology and the social equality that it advocates, favors its assimilation by mental inferiors and the culturally deficient, incapable of spiritual ideals.

He stated that Republican women had many points of contact with children and animals and that when the social brakes were broken they were cruel because they lacked intelligent and logical inhibitions, as well as having pathological feelings. To carry out the study, he subjected the prisoners to various psychological tests when they were already on the verge of physical and mental collapse. Vallejo-Nájera's team included two physicians, a criminologist and two German scientific advisors. They selected their clinical subjects from two groups: one of prisoners who were members of the International Brigades of San Pedro de Cardeña, and the other composed of 50 female republican prisoners from Málaga, 30 of whom were awaiting execution. The study of the women, based on the premise that they were degenerate beings and, therefore, prone to Marxist delinquency, served the psychiatrist to explain "female revolutionary criminality" in relation to the animal nature of the female psyche and the "marked sadistic character" that was unleashed in females when political circumstances allowed them to "satisfy their latent sexual desires".

In addition to arguing the biological basis for political choices, his texts contributed to the idea of women's inferiority:

Women's intelligence atrophies like the wings of the butterflies of the Kerguelen Islands, since their mission in the world is not to fight in life, but to cradle the offspring of those who have to fight for it.

Vallejo-Nájera also wrote on subjects other than psychiatry. Thus, in 1938 he published Divagaciones intrascendentes, a political pamphlet in which he exalted those who fight under Franco's command: "We must all unite in the Army and in its Leader, builder of the Fatherland". Eduard Pons Prades affirmed in his book Los niños republicanos (2005), that Vallejo-Nájera proposed the creation of an Inquisition for the press, the tribune and the radio, and presented the war as necessary to reconquer the principles of Christianity. Finally, he was confident that the enemies of the Fatherland (anarchists and communists) "would suffer the deserved penalties, the most bearable being death".

He was strongly influenced by the constitutional typology of Kretschmer and developed his own eugenics called Eugamia with which he wanted to harmonize German racial hygiene with Catholic moral teaching and favored the use of biopsychological diagnoses before marriage. Vallejo-Nájera believed he could achieve a slow and steady improvement in the national psychological genotype through premarital classification and orientation.

Part of Spain's racial problem was that there were too many Sanchos Panzas (rounded physique, big-bellied, sensual and careerist), and too few Don Quixotes (chaste, austere, sober and idealistic), characters imbued with a militarism, identifying military culture as the ultimate expression of superior race.

In his book Eugenesia de la hispanidad y regeneración de la raza, Vallejo defended "positive eugenics", whose aim was to "multiply the select and let the weak perish", in particular the communists, whom he considered "mentally inferior and dangerous individuals in their intrinsic evil". The dramatic conclusion of his theories was set out in La Locura y la Guerra, in which he advocated the separation of children from Communist parents, since "the segregation of these subjects from infancy could free society from such a fearsome plague".

His approach, more environmental than biological, postulated that race was the result of a set of cultural values. The values that in Spain contained the indispensable requirements for national health were hierarchical, military and patriotic. Any value defended by the republicans and the left was considered hostile and had to be eradicated. Devoted to what he called "this so transcendent work of sanitizing our race," his model was the Inquisition which in the past had protected Spain from poisoned doctrines. He called for "a modernized Inquisition, with other orientations, aims, means and organization; but Inquisition".

Works

• Valor curativo de la piretoterapia en las esquizofrenias (1928)
• La demencia precoz y sus manifestaciones clínicas (1929)
• El tratamiento de la parálisis general y otras neurosífilis (1929)
• La psiquiatría en el nuevo Código penal (1929)
• El caso de Teresa Neumann a la luz de la ciencia médica (1935)
• Propedéutica clínica psiquiátrica (1936)
• Eugenesia de la Hispanidad y regeneración de la raza (1937)
• Eugamia: selección de novios (1938)
• Política racial del nuevo Estado (1938)
• El factor emoción en la España nueva (1938)
• Divagaciones intrascendentes (1938)
• Tratamiento de las enfermedades mentales (1940)
• Higienización psíquica de las grandes urbes (1941)
• Niños y jóvenes anormales (1941)
• Psicosis de Guerra (1942)
• Tratado de psiquiatría (1944)
• Locos egregios (1946)
• Literatura y psiquiatría (1950)

References

• Caballero de la Torre, Vicente; Robles Rodríguez, Francisco José (2015). "El factor emoción en la España nueva de Antonio Vallejo-Nágera," Res Publica: Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, pp. 529–44.
• Caro Morente, Jaime (2020). "La idea de raza en la obra literario-política de Antonio Vallejo Nájera y su influencia en el primer franquismo." In: Carmen de la Guardia Herrero, Florencia Peyrou & Pilar Toboso Sánchez, eds., Escribir identidades: Diálogos entre historia y literatura. Síntesis, pp. 281–92.
• Huertas García-Alejo, Rafael (2002). Los médicos de la mente: de la neurología al psicoanálisis : Lafora, Vallejo Nájera, Garma. Tres Cantos, Madrid: Nivola.
• Martín, Francisco Javier Clemente (2013). "Antonio Vallejo Nájera y la higiene racial de posguerra." In: Amparo Gómez Rodríguez & Antonio Francisco Canales Serrano, eds., Estudios políticos de la ciencia: políticas y desarrollo científico en el siglo XX. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés, pp. 105–24.
• Tremlett, Giles. Ghosts of Spain. Faber and Faber. London. 2006. ISBN 978-0-571-22169-1
• Vinyes, Ricard; Armengou, Montse; Belis, Ricardo. Los niños perdidos del franquismo. Random House Mondadori. Barcelona. 2003.

External links

• Antonio Vallejo-Nájera
• Works by Antonio Vallejo-Nájera at Gallica
• Works by Antonio Vallejo-Nájera at Biblioteca Nacional de España