When astronomy feared a psychiatrist telling them about the past and banned his books
3/8/2022
Most readers are certainly aware of Immanuel Velikovsky, who started his professional life as psychiatrist and psychoanalyst around the time of Sigmund Freud, but then later applied his experience to history, especially in the field of of geology and astronomy. He arrived there after observing psychological markers in ancient written and mythological traditions where he detected hints for a recent catastrophic past, mankind was recovering from on the mental level, similar to an individual suffering with from traumatic amnesia.
Books to start with:
- Earth in Upheaval (1955)
- Worlds in Collision (1950)
- Mankind in Amnesia (1982, his last monograph)
​From his purely analytical historian’s point of view he saw hints for giant electrical discharges in space between the planets and predicted that Venus is a relatively young and hot planet. I mean with high surface temperature to melt lead. Only years later, this was confirmed by the first probes landing there.
Astronomers reacted in panic to his first book publications and forced Macmillian, the largest academic publisher at that time, to retract it. It became a bestseller then at Doubleday 2 months later.
Carl Sagan was his most prominent opponent and it peaked around 1974 when scholar astronomy introduced “modern” astronomy with black holes, dark matter and all the spooky stuff we are told today.
