Pathologia religiosa: Medicine and the Anti-religious Movement in the Early Soviet Union

Abstract

The interwar secularist-religious clashes across Europe were often perceived as a conflict between religious and scientific worldviews. The interactions and tensions between religion and science are analysed in this article through an examination of the impact of medicine on the secularist project of Russian communism. According to Marx, the religious consciousness was tantamount to the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’. Soviet physicians diagnosed the believer as a sufferer, as someone plagued by chronic ‘religious feelings’. Small wonder then that a fixed association between religiosity and morbidity could arise. Under these premises Soviet physicians felt predestined to do direct battle with every form of ecclesiastically determined phenomenon as a health risk factor or manifestation of disease. By using various sources of specialist medical and atheist discourse, this contribution seeks to conceptually understand this confluence of health and atheist propaganda, secularization, and healing in terms of a ‘medicalization of religious faith’ in the early Soviet Union. It will address the various fields of discourse within the Soviet pathologia religiosa, that is, constructions of religion and religiosity as pathological phenomena particularly within psychiatry.