Andrew Lakoff

Every individual in the human species is, in a certain way and to a certain extent, a simulator.

--José Ingenieros, La simulación en la lucha por la vida

     In 1903 the young criminal psychiatrist José Ingenieros published La simulación de la locura (The Simulation of Madness) , a work of criminal psychiatry based on the author's observations of inmates in a Buenos Aires penitentiary. The book was a catalogue of the variety of forms simulated madness could take, as well as a treatise of neo-Lamarckian sociology. Its basic premise was a simple one: that sane people sometimes simulated madness as part of the evolutionary "struggle for life." The task of criminological expertise was to distinguish such simulators from the truly mad. The book was an immediate sensation, winning the National Academy of Medicine prize and going through eight editions by 1918 as well as translations into several languages, including Italian and Russian. Soon after its publication, Ingenieros was appointed director of the Observation Room of the Buenos Aires police prefect, where he remained until 1913.

     Aside from its theoretical claims to extend evolutionary sociology into criminology, the book seems, at first glance, to be structured as a guide for medical-legal experts in determining the responsibility of defendants. Its chapters are devoted not only to cataloguing cases but also to various physiological and psychological techniques for making a differential diagnosis between true madness and its simulation. But the sheer size and widespread popularity of the work are somewhat perplexing. Why would so many readers have been interested in this catalogue of the varieties of ways that madness was linked to simulation? The chapter headings provide little clue to its appeal: for example, "Over-simulation and Dissimulation by the Truly Mad," "Juridical Conditions of Simulation of Madness by Delinquents," and "Differential Characteristics between True Madness and the Simulation of Madness."¹

     In reading the cases themselves, one comes upon certain hints that this was not a straightforward text of positivist criminal psychiatry. In the first chapter, after citing a number of literary exemplars of simulated madness, including Ulysses and Hamlet, Ingenieros describes a series of cases that fall under the heading, "the simulation of madness, in general, as a technique in the struggle for life." There is one case of a young woman who pretends to be hysteric in order to avoid forced induction to a convent and another in which a worker who has gotten his pay in advance simulates mania in order to avoid fulfilling his contractual duties. These are followed by a description of the feigned sexual psychopathologies of a striving modernist poet. And then Ingenieros comes to a very curious case of "experimentally induced" simulated delusion. He uses the case, "Observation Five," as an example of the general category "madness through suggestion," a rubric that includes collective delusions such as those of religious sects, as well as folie-à-deux, when a susceptible victim--whom Ingenieros calls the succubus --falls prey to the suggestions of a madman, the incubus. In these cases, the agent of simulation is not a willful and manipulative subject but an external force--a transmitted idea.

Here Ingenieros notes that in addition to folie-à-deux there can also be cases of madness through suggestion in which a sane incubus performs suggestion on a predisposed subject. He then turns to the case itself. It begins with the story of a bohemian youth from Montevideo who wished to meet the "literary personalities" of Buenos Aires and was introduced to the poet Rubén Darío and his coterie. "He claimed to be new in the city, and told Darío about his adolescent adventures, exaggerating them in a novelesque form," reports Ingenieros. The young poet's delicate qualities and literary fantasies indicated to the group of literati that they had before them a promising subject for an experiment:

Darío, taken by the nebulous fantasy of the youth and by his neuropathic appearance, invited us to meet him, thinking that it could be a "case" for psychopathological observation. We agreed to suggest to him some novelesque and false ideas related to his own person, in order to study his susceptibility to suggestion. [ SL , p. 32]

The story is at first puzzling: what are these literary personalities doing collaborating with the author of a casebook in criminal psychiatry? It is not clear where psychiatric description ends and literary experiment begins. In the heady circles of the porteño intelligentsia, the spaces of salon and clinic had merged.² Darío, the Nicaraguan poet who led the modernist movement in late nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, was the author of a book called Los raros, a tribute to a series of artistic heroes whose eccentricity bordered on the psychopathological. He was among a number of literary figures that gathered in the library of the Argentine National Institute of Hygiene, which was directed by Ingenieros's mentor, the psychopathologist José María Ramos Mejía. The institute was a place where poets, thinkers, and social hygienists met regularly, forming what Ingenieros called "agapes."³ He later recalled the atmosphere there: "In the last years the lunch of the Institute--colored with more socialite attendees--was converted into a required address for European intellectuals and conferees visiting the country."⁴ Such traffic between expertise in psychopathology and modernist subjective exploration was not unique to the Argentine milieu, but the institute was distinctive in its intermingling of personalities and forms; not only were poets inspired by case reports here, but case reports could also become works of literature.

     Ingenieros's description of Observation Five continued: in order to study the poet's susceptibility to suggestion, the group invented a story based on the legend of the Chants de Maldoror, a book "whose paternity was attributed to one Comte de Lautréamont, who--it was said--died in an insane asylum in Belgium." Darío had included Lautréamont, who was born in Uruguay, among his "raros" along with Poe, Rimbaud, and others, having discovered the infamous poet through the French critic Léon Bloy.⁵ In Los raros, Darío wrote of Lautréamont: "He lived in misfortune and died mad, he wrote one book that would be unique, if the prose of Rimbaud did not exist: a diabolic and strange book, mocking and howling, cruel and painful, a book in which one sees at the same time the groans of pain and the sinister ringing of madness."⁶ As a hero of the rioplantense avant-garde, Lautréamont was an attractive model for the "neuropathic" young poet from Montevideo. Darío implanted the delusional idea upon which the group had agreed, suggesting to the poet a fantasy of literary inheritance. As Ingenieros reports: "Rubén Darío pointed out to the psychopathic youth his physical resemblance to the Comte de Lautréamont, of whom Bloy had published a portrait. He also noted his suspicion that, through some family mix up, the two of them must be brothers" ( SL , p. 33). As we will see, the suggested delusion found a welcome host. It offered the young poet the opportunity to simulate a modernist legacy.

1See José Ingenieros, La simulación de la locura: Ante la criminología, la psiquiatría y la medicina legal (Buenos Aires, 1918), hereafter abbreviated SL .

2See Sylvia Molloy, "Diagnosticos del fin de siglo," in Cultura y Tercer Mundo, vol. 2, ed. Beatriz Gonzalez Stephan (Caracas, 1996), which traces this same case, for an insightful discussion of this intersection. See also Horacio Gonzales, Restos pampeanos: Ciencia, ensayo y política en la cultura Argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires, 1999).

3Its librarian was the poet Enrique Diaz Romero, director of the modernist review El Mercurio de America. Ingenieros wrote that this post allowed Romero to ignore the bibliography on sanitation while passing afternoons reading poets like Paul Verlaine and Gabriele D'Annunzio.

4Ingenieros, "La personalidad intellectual de Ramos Mejía," La universidad del porvenir y otros escritos sobre filosofía, educación y cultura (1915; Buenos Aires, 1956).

5Lautréamont was born in Montevideo in 1846 as Isidore Ducasse, son of the French consul there. He moved to France at the age of fourteen and died in Paris in 1870 after having published only the maniacal Chants de Maldoror. His mother committed suicide when he was just a year and a half old, one of many members of the family who would suffer this fate, as Argentine psychiatrist Enrique Pichon-Rivière would later discover. See Enrique Pichon-Rivière, Psicoanálisis del conde de Lautréamont (Buenos Aires, 1992).