Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War: Revolution, Emancipation and Re-Imagining the Human Psyche

ISBN-13: 9783030894511 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 331 str.

Ana Antic

Opis

This book explores the relationship between socialist psychiatry and political ideology during the Cold War, tracing Yugoslav ‘psy’ sciences as they experienced multiple internationalisations and globalisations in the post-WWII period. These unique transnational connections – with West, East and South – remain at the centre of this book. The author argues that the ‘psy’ disciplines provide a window onto the complications of Cold War internationalism, offering an opportunity to re-think postwar Europe's internal dynamics. She tells an alternative, pan-European narrative of the post-1945 period, demonstrating that, in the Cold War, there existed sites of collaboration and vigorous exchange between the two ideologically opposed camps, and places like Yugoslavia provided a meeting point, where ideas, frameworks and professional and cultural networks from both sides of the Iron Curtain could overlap and transform each other. Moreover, the book offers the first analysis of East European psychiatrists’ contacts with and contributions to the decolonizing world, exploring their participation in broader political discussions about decolonization, anti-imperialism and non-alignment.The Yugoslav brand of East-West psychoanalysis and psychotherapy bred a truly unique intellectual framework, which enabled psychiatrists to think through a set of political and ideological dilemmas regarding the relationship between individuals and social structures. This book offers a thorough reinterpretation of the notion of ‘communist psychiatry’ as a tool used solely for political oppression, and instead emphasises the political interventions of East European psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

Spis treści

1. Introduction

2. Primitivism, modernity and revolution in the twentieth century 

3. Psychotherapy as revolutionary praxis

4. Authoritarian psychiatry

5. Global imaginations and non-alignment

6. ‘Psy’ sciences beyond the consulting room

7. Epilogue

8. Conclusion                                                                                                            

O autorze

Ana Antić is a Professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She is a social and cultural historian whose research focuses on the history of modern Europe and the Balkans, the history of war and violence, and the history of psychiatry. 

Blurb

This book explores the relationship between socialist psychiatry and political ideology during the Cold War. In the context of Yugoslavia’s traumatic split from the Soviet Union in 1948, the authorities embarked on a period of theorising and constructing a different form of socialist society, and clinicians and researchers from the ‘psy’ disciplines saw their role as central to raising a new, revolutionary generation of Yugoslav citizens. This study argues that socialist psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia played an exceptionally important political role and contributed to some of the core discussions of democratic socialism, workers’ self-management and Marxism. It argues that the Yugoslav brand of East-West psychoanalysis and psychotherapy bred a truly unique intellectual framework in order to think through a set of political and ideological dilemmas regarding the relationship between individuals and social structures. The book therefore offers a thorough reinterpretation of the notion of ‘communist psychiatry’ as a tool used solely for political oppression and emphasises instead the original political interventions of East European psychiatry and psychoanalysis.