Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War

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 ofthe 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.