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Frederik Willem van Eeden (3 April 1860,Haarlem – 16 June 1932,Bussum) was a late 19th-century and early 20th-century Dutch writer and psychiatrist. He was a leading member of theTachtigers and theSignifics Group, and had top billing among the editors ofDe Nieuwe Gids (The New Guide) during its celebrated first few years of publication, starting in 1885. Van Eeden adoptedvegetarianism in 1890 for health reasons, later promoting it as an ethical stance in works likeHet Vegetariaat (1896), but gradually distanced himself from it in the early 20th century as his philosophical views shifted.
Van Eeden was the son ofFrederik Willem van Eeden, director of theRoyal Tropical Institute in Haarlem.
In 1880 he studied Medicine inAmsterdam, where he pursued a bohemian lifestyle and wrote poetry. Whilst living in the city, he coined the termlucid dream in the sense ofmental clarity, a term that nowadays is a standard term in the study of dreams, meaning dreaming while knowing that one is dreaming. In his early writings, he was strongly influenced byHindu ideas of selfhood, byBoehme's mysticism, and byFechner'spanpsychism.
He went on to become a prolific writer, producing many critically acclaimed novels, poetry, plays, and essays. He was widely admired in the Netherlands in his own time for his writings, as well as his status as the first internationally prominent Dutch psychiatrist.
Van Eeden's psychiatrist practice included treating his fellow TachtigerWillem Kloos as a patient starting in 1888. His treatment of Kloos was of limited benefit, as Kloos deteriorated intoalcoholism and increasing symptoms ofmental illness. Van Eeden also incorporated his psychiatric insights into his later writings, such as in a deeplypsychological novel called "Van de koele meren des doods" (translated in English as "The Deeps of Deliverance"). Published in 1900, the novel intimately traced the struggle of a woman addicted to morphine as she deteriorated physically and mentally.
His best known written work, "De Kleine Johannes" ("Little Johannes"), which first appeared in the premiere issue ofDe Nieuwe Gids, was a fantastical adventure of an everyman who grows up to face the harsh realities of the world around him and the emptiness of hopes for a better afterlife, but ultimately finding meaning in serving the good of those around him. This ethic is memorialized in the line "Waar de mensheid is, en haar weedom, daar is mijn weg." ("Where mankind is, and her woe, there is my path.")
Van Eeden sought not only to write about, but also to practice, such an ethic. He established a commune namedWalden [fy;nl;it], taking inspiration fromHenry David Thoreau's bookWalden, inBussum,North Holland, where the residents tried to produce as much of their needs as they could themselves and to share everything in common, and where he took up a standard of living far below what he was used to. This reflected a trend toward socialism among the Tachtigers; another Tachtiger,Herman Gorter, was a founding member of the world's firstCommunist political party, the DutchSocial-Democratic Party, in 1909. In 1902, Van Eeden wrote the introduction for the first Dutch translation of theWalden, byJeanne Reyneke van Stuwe, the wife of the poetWillem Kloos.
Van Eeden visited the U.S. He had contacts withWilliam James and other psychologists. He metFreud inVienna, whom he practically introduced in the Netherlands. He corresponded withHermann Hesse,Charles Lloyd Tuckey (medical hypnotist),Harold Williams and was a friend ofPeter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist living in London.
Van Eeden also had a keen interest inIndian philosophy. He translated many ofTagore’s works, includingGitanjali and short stories.
In late years of his life, Van Eeden became a Roman Catholic.[1]
Van Eeden became avegetarian in 1890, initially for health reasons, influenced by his exposure toTheosophy. However, by 1896, he shifted to viewing vegetarianism as an ethical stance, arguing that eating meat was morally akin to practices like cannibalism and vivisection.[2]
In his 1896 workHet vegetariaat, he wrote:[2]
There is too much dispute about the question of whether meat eating is useful and healthy, and whether the human organism is destined for meat food. This is not the question at all. Eating people may also be useful and healthy. Why does no one dispute about that?
He believed that the instinctive aversion to harming animals was suppressed by society and that living without causing animal suffering aligned with both moral evolution and higher human values.[2]
Although he was a prominent advocate for vegetarianism, his personal commitment waned in the early 1900s, likely due to his changing philosophical views and medical background. Despite his early activism, Van Eeden never joined theDutch Vegetarian Association, critiquing its approach as overly rigid.[2]
2 ^ Augustinus P. Dierick: "Self-Stylization and Narrative Strategies in Frederik van Eeden's roman à thèse De nachtbruid." Papers from the Third Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies (ed. Ton J. Broos). Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1988, 45-54.
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