They were a doctoral thesis on Huxley’s political thought and Huxley’s novel ‘Brave New World’. More recent readings, as far as I was concerned at the time completely unrelated to Bogdanov or Berdyaev, brought me back to both those texts that were instrumental to establish a link between Bogdanov and psychiatry. It emerged that my inclination towards idealism and metaphysics, he considered to be the symptoms of an incipient mental disorder, and he wanted to establish how far this malady had progressed.” I noticed that he systematically put to me incomprehensible questions: how I felt in the mornings how did I sleep what were my reactions to this and that, and so on. He had originally qualified as a psychiatrist. For Bogdanov this was a completely abnormal phenomenon. “Somewhat curious were my relations with Bogdanov” – wrote Berdyev – “I was considered to be an “idealist” imbued with metaphysical seekings.

A passage by Berdyaev reported in Red Hamlet : the life and ideas of Alexander Bogdanov (2019) helps elucidate how Bogdanov conceived the relation between philosophy and psychiatry: In his 1919 “Socially Organised Society: Socialist Society”, a chapter of his book on economics, Bogdanov made clear how there was no need for special legal safeguards to deal with the “mentally diseased” and that it would have been “not necessary to have special ‘laws’ and organs of ‘authority’ to remove such a contradiction the teachings of science are sufficient to indicate the measures by which to cure that person, and the social sense of the people surrounding him will be sufficient.”

Julian huxley brave new world pdf