Review of Cold War Freud, Psychiatry in Communist Europe, and Psiquiatría, Psicoánalisis y Cultura Comunista: Batallas Ideológicas en la Guerra Fria [Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Communist Culture: Ideological Battles in the Cold War

Abstract

Reviews the books, Cold War Freud by D. Herzog (2016), Psychiatry in Communist Europe edited by M. Savelli and S. Marks (2015), and Psiquiatría, Psicoánalisis y Cultura Comunista: Batallas Ideológicas en la Guerra Fria [Psychiatry, psychoanalysis and communist culture: Ideological battles in the Cold War] by H. Vezzetti. On the whole, the three books show how the Cold War influenced, in various ways, psychiatric and psychotherapeutic cultures. Beyond the Iron Curtain, as one can perceive from the book edited by Savelli and Marks (2015), politics explicitly set the agenda for the psychological sciences, using them even to invent ad hoc nosologies, useful for purposes related to power. In the United States, on the other hand, as Herzog (2016) pinpoints, the political situation affected the same field, even if indirectly, as in the Christianization of a discipline-psychoanalysis-the creator of which proudly declared himself an atheist Jew. In other Western countries, the relationship between psychiatry and power could bring about paradoxical results. From Vezzetti's (2016) book, one can ascertain that psychiatric culture might assume an overtly opposing stance toward political power. Vezzetti scans the case of Argentina, and partly of France, but they were not isolated cases. In Italy, for example, a movement of radical psychiatrists understood their role as a necessary opposition to political power, having as an aim the "liberation" of patients locked up in the psychiatric hospitals (Foot, 2015). (PsycINFO Database Record