An Obituary for Mardi
Posted July 20, 2010 by John Menick
Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, Experimental Psychologist and “Psychic Explorer”, Dies at 99
Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, an experimental psychologist who studied the dream life of the Yanomami and wrote the best-selling book Repetitions, died Tuesday at his home in North Haven, Conn. He was 99.
His family did not give a cause of death, but according to articles published by Mr. Mardisen, in recent years he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Mardisen gained prominence as a psychologist, but in his long and extravagant career his controversial research embraced disciplines as far-flung as anthropology, parapsychology, pre-Columbian history, sexology, chemistry and poetry. His often bizarre and academically marginal research took him to every continent and to the floors of several seas. Although his non-poetic work was written in dense academic prose, Mr. Mardisen insisted his work was best understood as autobiography, stating in a 1972 interview with Michel Leiris, “Everything I have written is, ultimately, memoir.”
Born in 1911 to a wealthy Danish family, Mr. Mardisen, or “Mardi” as his friends and colleagues called him, was a precocious student and a gifted child. After his family immigrated to the US in 1915, he attended Harvard University at age 16, eventually majoring in psychology. During his studies, Mr. Mardisen began a letter correspondence with fellow Harvard graduate Alfred Kinsey. The letters, later published by Harvard University Press, show the two men’s interest in biology and contain hints of their future researches in sexology. Mr. Mardisen went on to receive his doctorate from Harvard, and his unorthodox and groundbreaking thesis, The Dream Life of the Yanomami, transformed multiple disciplines, including anthropology and psychoanalysis. The following year Harvard hired him as an Assistant Professor of Psychology.
During his brief time in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, Mr. Mardisen began using himself as a research subject to a greater and greater degree. He began studying esoteric and occult practices globally, which resulted in a series of articles on bilocation, or the supposed ability some mystics have of being in more than one place at a time. The research also led to his first volume of poetry, Divided Songs, a slim volume containing verses dictated by bilocating shamans.
Mr. Mardisen’s use of himself as a test subject divided his field as well, causing fierce debates concerning his research’s objectivity. His 1947 book on addiction, Routine Pleasures, was based on Mr. Mardisen’s addictions to heroin and cocaine, dependencies he created for the sole purposes of writing the book. A reviewer from the New York Times called the book “a work of monumental irresponsibility and self-loathing,” and called for the revocation of Mr. Mardisen’s tenure. Scandalized by the book’s frank admissions of drug use, Harvard University dismissed Mr. Mardisen, a move some would say foreshadowed Timothy Leary’s dismissal almost two decades later.
Leaving academia, Mr. Mardisen adopted the moniker “psychic explorer” and set about, as he put it to Mr. Leiris, “spelunking the caverns of human desire.” His rhetoric was often grandiose, and many psychologists accused Mr. Mardisen of writing books that were little more than sensationalist pornography. His 37 books published in the next half-century explored fetishism, addiction, violence, primitivism, and perversion – subjects that brought Mr. Mardisen an improbably large audience.
Many times over Mr. Mardisen’s career, he claimed all his books were variations on one theme: repetition as the fundamental quality of life. As he wrote in his introduction to Repetitions: Fetishism and Desire, “The pleasure of life is its repetition. Repetition gives life its form and its dependability. The problem is, of course, that repetition is also the source of life’s terror.”
Mr. Mardisen’s personal life was extremely eccentric. According to his first wife, Elizabeth Doren, he kept a record of every orgasm he experienced, noting both the orgasm’s qualities and intensity. After divorcing Ms. Doren, he lived ménage à trios with the modern dancers Karen Hildengaard and Doris Haalen, both of whom later left Mr. Mardisen. They claimed that his personality “befitted more a cult leader than a husband.” In her memoir, Living with Mardi, Ms. Haalen described that everything he did was “a kind of experiment,” and that he kept notebooks detailing everything he ate, thought and encountered.
During the last decade of his life, Mr. Mardisen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As he did throughout his career, he took his illness as an opportunity to continue his research. He immediately left his home in Connecticut for Robison Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. He lived with a nurse and kept notes on his approaching forgetfulness. Excerpts of these writings were published in both academic journals and online in Mr. Mardisen’s blog. When he was too sick to continue writing, his family had him moved to his former home in Connecticut. His final blog entry states, “Forgetting is not death. It is the beginning of life.”
The collected writings from Robison Crusoe Island will be published in the fall by the University of Chicago Press.
For more contributions to Raimundas Malasauskas’ Pompidou exhibition, Repetition Island, click here. – JM
