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 roles as central to raising a new, revolutionary generation of Yugoslav citizens. The author argues that socialist psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia played an important political part in contributing to the core discussions on democratic socialism, workers’ self-management and Marxism. She demonstrates that 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 therefore 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.weiterlesen