Klaus Holzkamp smiled: Soviet psychology in the Federal Republic of Germany in the Cold War era.

Abstract

This article understands the reception of Soviet psychology in the Federal Republic of Germany as a contribution to a transnational Soviet psychology that is closely linked to a "Western Communist culture," broadly understood, and further elaborates on this term, which is borrowed from Luciano Nicolás García. Critical Psychology (Kritische Psychologie) was developed at the Free University of Berlin starting in the late 1960s by the Marxist psychologist Klaus Holzkamp and others and represents a central focus of this form of appropriating the writings of Soviet psychologists. However, there has also been intense interest in Soviet psychology in West Germany beyond this Communist culture. This article reconstructs several different lines of reception to sketch a more complex picture of Soviet psychology in West Germany than that offered by previous one-sided narratives. In any case, reconstructive efforts in this field of investigation must take the historical situation of the Cold War era and its important influence on the discipline of psychology into account. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).