LISTENING TO THE SILENCES

About to step centre stage is a man who did much to provide the means and methods by which knowledge of the realities of this all pervading, all surrounding world could be exposed and defined. And what a man! One of my heroes: at whose funeral three Nobel Laureates would address their tributes to "one of the outstanding intellects of the world, who paved the way for many of the technological developments of modern times": whose notebooks are still being studied by engineers who are looking to see if there are, even now, brainchildren of his inventive mind waiting to have life breathed into them: whose name you should bless each time you switch on a light, a television or radio, or, additionally, any electrical appliance that has a motor in it: a man who discovered much about the electrical nature of the air around us and the earth on which we live, and who, even, has a unit for the measurement of magnetism named after him: one who in a colourful life experimented with techniques that were the forerunners of today's 'Star Wars' techniques, aimed at disabling enemy aircraft before they could drop their bombs.

Born in Croatia not many miles south of Freud's birthplace; born in the same year as the Austrian, and surviving him by just four years, Nikola Tesla produced much of note, both in Europe and in the United States of America, where he eventually settled. It was Tesla who devised the concept of alternating current, which is now universal in the generation and supply of electricity, and who invented the induction motor, a type that powers just about everything that rotates by electrical means today. The scope of his work and his many patents are widely described in numerous books, but I intend to confine myself only to two areas of influence in our lives that are of relevance to my story.

The first branch of knowledge that Tesla uncovered, and which is relevant to my tale, relates to various aspects of the electrical nature of the air around us and of the earth upon which we live. It was knowledge that allowed others to make further discoveries, and to open wide the doors that he had unlocked. For example, from an understanding of the behaviour of air in certain naturally occurring electrical situations, it can be derived that molecules of the air divide into two parts called ions, one positive and one negative. This can happen during thunderstorms and heavy rainstorms; through exposure to ultra-violet light and cosmic rays; beside waterfalls, or on a surf-washed shore, and in other locations and situations. In our original evolutionary state, there were very many more ions created in those earlier times than now, because of the naturally occurring radioactivity, which has subsequently been decreasing with time. We need a natural balance, with preferably an excess of negative over positive ions. Much research has been, and continues to be done into this topic, particularly, for example, when designing the living environment of astronauts or nuclear sub-mariners, but also where it impinges upon the wider field of human, animal and plant health.

The relevance of this knowledge to the topics of which I am writing can be seen when one considers the consequences to humans and other forms of life of a gross imbalance between the types of ions. From the human point of view, a significant excess of positive ions can have a calamitous effect. (I should point out that individual people vary greatly in their response to the conditions that I shall outline - about forty percent are particularly sensitive). The specific relevance to the 'world' that Freud was in the process of analysing and mapping, the human mind and human behaviour, can be seen in the fact that the region of Europe in which he lived is in the path of the Föhn wind (as also is the region where Jung lived in Switzerland). It is now fully appreciated and understood that this wind, together with a number of other well known ones world wide - the Sharav, Chinook, Santa Anna, Sirocco for example - produces a severe excess of positive ions, a fact that now gives an actual explanation for effects which have long since been recognised and have passed into folklore.

There is well researched and documented evidence that says that sensitive people, and other people whose response is perhaps less obvious, can be severely influenced, to the extent that sleeplessness, depression, suicide, aggravations of unknown origin, can all increase dramatically when these winds blow - or even in many cases, as the weather system is approaching and is yet some way off. In Switzerland and Southern Germany, people blame almost everything unusual on the Föhn wind - fights at home, suicides, murders, traffic accidents, depressive states. One can read that in Munich and many other parts of Central Europe north of the Alps, surgeons actually postpone major operations if a Föhn is forecast, because of problems with blood clotting.
An American, Fred Soyka, experienced at first hand the effects of the Föhn wind, and wrote about them in his book The Ion Effect, which begins…

"The search for information that led to this book actually began in 1970 as an attempt to prove to myself that I was neither a manic-depressive nor a hypochondriac. For ten years I had lived and worked in Geneva, and almost from the moment I moved there from New York I suffered totally inexplicable fits of anxiety, depression, physical illness, and the kind of bottomless despair that at times even led me to flirt with the idea of suicide. Neither doctors nor a psychiatrist could explain what was happening to me, but when one said vaguely that it might be "something electrical" in the air of Geneva I seized upon it as a possible explanation and spent five years travelling through Europe, the Middle East, and North America meeting scientists and amassing an awesome pile of scientific literature.

I made three discoveries. The first was that in certain places at certain times - in Geneva, in a large part of Central Europe, in southern California, alongside the Rocky Mountains and in at least a dozen other parts of the world - the air becomes sick not because of the pollution we all know about, but because of imbalances in the natural electrical charge of the air."

What, then, I am suggesting is that many of the patients who were being seen by Freud and his Central European contemporaries were, in fact, suffering from conditions whose cause originated outside themselves. Unable to explain these 'neuroses', it was perhaps logical that subjective causes should be examined, or that analysts should look for explanations within the often limited or circumscribed experiences of their own lives - possibly imbuing their patients with their own personal deficiencies and quirks. It must also be borne in mind that analysts and associates of patients could also be sensitive and react to the influences of the air imbalance, or that staff in hospitals for the disturbed could become aggravated and provocative, sparking off confrontations that would be laid, naturally, at the doors of the inmates, who, after all, were the ones assumed to be need in need of treatment.

I shall write more about these and other relevant matters in later sections, relevant to us in Britain for, although we do not have named winds to blame, nevertheless we have identifiable patterns of air flow which, by their electrical nature, produce effects comparable to those of the Föhn and similar winds. In the meantime, I shall lightly skim over those of Tesla's discoveries that are relevant to my theme. He discovered, and demonstrated, that electricity can be transmitted through the air, and that the earth itself is an electrical conductor; and he had wonderful ideas for using the earth to distribute electrical energy without the need for cables. To digress briefly, I never fail to laugh when I read of the consequences of one phase of his experiments.