The New Socialist Citizen and ‘Forgetting’ Authoritarianism: Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Revolution in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

This chapter explores the importance of revolution and ideas of radical reform for the development of socialist psychiatry, focusing on the case of post-1945 Yugoslavia. It looks at how the experience of social and political revolution transformed the clinical practice and intellectual frameworks of Yugoslavia’s ‘psy’ disciplines but also how the concept of revolution and reform was worked into psychiatric theories and initiatives. Following the Second World War, Yugoslav psychiatrists’ theorisation of the interplay between broader societal influences and individual psyche developed in a direction much more radical than mainstream social psychiatry in western Europe had ever seen. At the same time, in addition to reshaping psychiatry, the revolution became one of its central themes, and Yugoslav psychiatry dedicated significant efforts to describing, interpreting, and treating psychological consequences of the socialist revolution.