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, by D. Herzog (2016), edited by M. Savelli and S. Marks (2015), and 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

“A disease of our time”: The Catholic Church's condemnation and absolution of psychoanalysis (1924–1975)

“…Some recognized that a new field of study had opened up and it was impossible not to consider it; the new techniques could be useful even for the study of vocations. Others were interested in turning the new ideas against materialistic experimental psychology and psychiatry and were sensible to unorthodox psychoanalytic disciplines, like Adler's individual psychology, Jung's analytical psychology, or even ego psychology, which tried to restore the consciousness as the leading force of actions, downsizing drive theory (for a history of ego psychology and the desexualization of psychoanalysis during the Cold War, see Herzog, ; Innamorati, ).…”