Cold War in Psychiatry

Cold War in Psychiatry
Author: Robert van Voren
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2010-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789042030466

For 20 years Soviet psychiatric abuse dominated the agenda of the World Psychiatric Association. It ended only after the Soviet Foreign Ministry intervened. Cold War in Psychiatry tells the full story for the first time and from inside, among others on basis of extensive reports by Stasi and KGB ¿ who were the secret actors, what were the hidden factors? Based on a wealth of new evidence and documentation as well as interviews with many of the main actors, including leading Western psychiatrists, Soviet dissidents and Soviet and East German key figures, the book describes the issue in all its complexity and puts it in a broader context. In the book opposite sides find common ground and a common understanding of what actually happened. ¿The use of psychiatry to silence political dissenters was undoubtedly one of the most pernicious sides of the Soviet regime. No wonder that the leaders of perestroika believed that stopping this criminal practice was one of the most urgent priorities. Robert van Voren¿s book is the very first full investigation of this problem. I highly recommend this book.¿ Anatoly Adamishin, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR ¿Robert van Voren writes history in an innovative, effective, and vivid way. He weaves into the story of Western responses to the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR his probingly personal interviews with key players. Apart from presenting a skillfully interwoven succession of personal and institutional dramas, this book will also be valuable to students of the varied ways in which international professional bodies succeed or fail at upholding ethical standards of behavior by their members. In sum, this fast-paced and readable book combines the fruits of painstaking archival research with episodes of high-voltage human interest. It's hard to put down.¿ Peter Reddaway, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, George Washington University Robert van Voren (1959), a Sovietologist by education, has been a human rights activist since 1977 with a special interest in mental health issues. He is Chief Executive of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry (GIP) and has written extensively on Soviet issues and, in particular, issues related to mental health and human rights, and published a dozen books. His memoirs, On Dissidents and Madness, were published by Rodopi in 2009.

Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War

Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War
Author: Ana Antić
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030894495

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.

State of Madness

State of Madness
Author: Rebecca Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1609092333

What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Cold War Freud

Cold War Freud
Author: Dagmar Herzog
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107072395

This book provides a panoramic history of psychoanalysis at its zenith, as human nature was rethought in the wake of war and the global transformations that followed.

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind
Author: Paul Erickson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2013-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 022604677X

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.

The War of Nerves

The War of Nerves
Author: Martin Sixsmith
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2022-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1639361820

A major new history of the Cold War that explores the conflict through the minds of the people who lived through it. More than any other conflict, the Cold War was fought on the battlefield of the human mind. And, nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its legacy still endures—not only in our politics, but in our own thoughts and fears. Drawing on a vast array of untapped archives and unseen sources, Martin Sixsmith vividly recreates the tensions and paranoia of the Cold War, framing it for the first time from a psychological perspective. Revisiting towering, unique personalities like Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Nixon, as well as the lives of the unknown millions who were caught up in the conflict, this is a gripping narrative of the paranoia of the Cold War—and in today's uncertain times, this story is more resonant than ever.

Encountering Crises of the Mind

Encountering Crises of the Mind
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-09-24
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9004308539

Mental health and madness have been challenging topics for historians. The field has been marked by tension between the study of power, expertise and institutional control of insanity, and the study of patient experiences. This collection contributes to the ongoing discussion on how historians encounter mental ‘crises’. It deals with diagnoses, treatments, experiences and institutions largely outside the mainstream historiography of madness – in what might be described as its peripheries and borderlands (from medieval Europe to Cold War Hungary, from the Atlantic slave coasts to Indian princely states, and to the Nordic countries). The chapters highlight many contests and multiple stakeholders involved in dealing with mental suffering, and the importance of religion, lay perceptions and emotions in crises of mind. Contributors are Jari Eilola, Waltraud Ernst, Anssi Halmesvirta, Markku Hokkanen, Kalle Kananoja, Tuomas Laine-Frigrén, Susanna Niiranen, Anu Rissanen, Kirsi Tuohela, and Jesper Vaczy Kragh.

Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style

Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style
Author: Kateřina Lišková
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108576486

This is the first account of sexual liberation in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Kateřina Lišková reveals how, in the case of Czechoslovakia, important aspects of sexuality were already liberated during the 1950s - abortion was legalized, homosexuality decriminalized, the female orgasm came into experts' focus - and all that was underscored by an emphasis on gender equality. However, with the coming of Normalization, gender discourses reversed and women were to aspire to be caring mothers and docile wives. Good sex was to cement a lasting marriage and family. In contrast to the usual Western accounts highlighting the importance of social movements to sexual and gender freedom, here we discover, through the analysis of rich archival sources covering forty years of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, how experts, including sexologists, demographers, and psychologists, advised the state on population development, marriage and the family to shape the most intimate aspects of people's lives.

Mental Health and Human Rights

Mental Health and Human Rights
Author: Michael Dudley
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199213968

People with mental disorders often suffer the worst conditions of life.This book is the first comprehensive survey of the mental health/human rights relationship. It examines the relationships and histories of mental health and human rights, and their interconnections with law, culture, ethnicity, class, economics, biology, and stigma.