Soviet psychiatry and psychoanalysis during the Cold War: debates and dissident narratives in Yugoslavia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/0103-6564e230162Keywords:
history of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis, Pavlov (Ivan), Freud, psychiatryAbstract
This paper analyzes how psychoanalysis theories were perceived by some soviet psychiatry representatives during the Cold War, and how some psychoanalysts and psychiatrists from Eastern Europe became dissidents from the soviet Pavlovian approaches. “Freudism” was deemed a bourgeois ideology by soviet psychiatry and thus poorly accepted in USSR and other socialist states during the Cold War. However, restrictions to psychoanalysis were not reserved to Eastern Europe, as Freud was also severely criticized by Western European psychiatrists. Hence, we intend to study this intellectual debate from a global historical perspective, avoiding the common dichotomization “between blocs” regarding mental health. To do so, we analyze the article “Freudism – A Reactionary Manifestation of Bourgeois Ideology” (1958) written by D. Fedotov, and some recent findings about Yugoslavian psychoanalysis between 1960s and 1980.
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