"That uncertainty, that confusion about what will happen next, has had a very negative effect on the personality structure of people who have been waiting all their lives for it to burst. Suddenly, when it burst, they themselves fell apart. So we had a full ward of people with these borderline personality structures for whom, when it was black and white, it was stupid, but it was clear - the boundaries were clear - and suddenly the boundaries weren't there. So there were a lot of people from both sides, both former communists and former dissidents, who just had this kind of partial mild, or sometimes strong, psychotic personality decompensation. So you could see how that brought with it such a broad reaction from society."
"So it was maybe on June 1, when I get up, I go to the ward where I expect to be greeted by the chief, a friend of ours. And suddenly there was a completely different being. A man in a white coat who was ordering floats, that is, the boys who were shaving or fighting or something, the support staff, who were sort of muscle men locally, farmers, so they were drowning them in the bath, in cold water. That was terrible - like the whole system was terrible. I had no concept of human rights or what was going on, but this was very clear to me that this was not right." - "You mean they were dunking them in the bathtub to calm them down?" - "Well, they calmed them down, they were basically drowning them in there. There was a lot of..." - "Was that like a punishment?" - "That was the whole thing, At that time, there was already a kind of scoring system, and most of the points were awarded for reporting on your roommates."
"I guess, back in like 1966, 1967, [my parents] started a troop called Kruh (Circle), which still exists today - not under Scouting, but under, I think, Rovers - and hundreds of people have gone through that, and hundreds of people see my parents as their parents. So it wasn't exactly easy for us, even though I was in that troop too and went on camps. But I actually kind of had to share with about a hundred or two hundred other people. I started talking about my mother, who sometimes had these depressive states at home, but she was wonderful in that troop, and she was still in her eighties or whatever when she was a Girl Scout Chief and she would go to camps and do outreach. So that was pretty special. But then sometimes she fell into these states at home that were challenging. So when I was sort of hinting at that in my speech over her coffin, a girl from that troop came up to me and said, `Well, listening to that, I guess we were licking the cream.'"
Jan Pfeiffer was born on 22 June 1957 in Prague to doctors Jana and Jan Pfeiffer. During his childhood he attended the Kruh hiking club, which was founded in 1966 by his parents and was run in the Scout spirit. During the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops he stayed with his family in Italy. He graduated from the twelve-year high school in Štěpánská Street (Academic Gymnasium Štěpánská) and then entered the Faculty of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1982. He started working as a psychiatrist and experienced disillusionment with the appalling conditions that prevailed (not only) in the children‘s psychiatric hospital in Opařany. He then worked in the clinical department of the Research Institute of Psychiatry in Prague, where he had access to Western literature and was able to train in psychotherapy. He worked with the Prague Botanical Garden, which employed their patients and thus involved them back into society. He lived through the Velvet Revolution in Prague, founded the Civic Forum (OF) with his colleagues, attended demonstrations and was involved in changing the leadership of the institute. In the early 1990s, he was involved in the founding of the Fokus association. In 2004, he was named one of the Heroes of Europe by the American Time magazine for his activities in the field of human rights for people with mental illness. He has been involved in many Czech and foreign projects. In 2024 he lived in Prague.
