Psychology and Politics

Intersections of Science and Ideology in the History of Psy-Sciences

Anna Borgos, Ferenc Erős, Júlia Gyimesi, Anna Borgos, Júlia Gyimesi

• Publisher: Central European University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9789633862827
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psy-sciences (psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminology, special education, etc.) have been connected to politics in diverse ways during the 20th and 21st centuries. Besides episodes in the history of psychoanalysis in politically troubled times, the chapters in the book explore the full variety of "psy" disciplines in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, East European communist regimes, a Latin-American military dictatorship, and the South African apartheid regime, discussing psychology's role in legitimating and "normalizing" dictatorships. The essays' authors also explain the ideological and political foundations of ideas concerning mental health and illness in Russia, Hungary, post-war Transylvania, and Germany. Currents of critical psychology are also discussed, which try to understand how academic, therapeutic, and everyday psychological knowledge is produced within the power relations of modern—market or state—capitalist societies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (by the editors)
• I. CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS IN PERSONAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY
• “A Museum of Human Excrement”
• Anomalies of Demarcation in Light of the Nineteenth-Century Occult Revival
• Psychoanalysis in Representative Organs of the Hungarian Press between 1913 and 1939
• Alice Bálint at the Intersection of the Personal, the Professional, and the Political
• II. FERENCZI AND RÓHEIM REVISITED
• Violence, Trauma, and Hypocrisy
• Sándor Ferenczi’s Epistemologies and Their Politics: On Utraquism and the Analogical Method
• “Tell Them That We Are Not Like Wild Kangaroos”: Géza Róheim and the (Fully) Human Primitive
• Géza Róheim: Alienness as a Source of Political Attitude
• III. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND PSY-KNOWLEDGE IN SOFT AND HARD DICTATORSHIPS
• Psychoanalysis in Troubled Times: Conformism or Resistance?
• Psychoanalysis and Taking Sides: Two Moments in the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement
• How Ideology Shaped Psychology in Times of Wars and after Wars
• The Social Roles and Positions of the Hungarian Psychologist-Intelligentsia between 1945 and the 1970s: A Case Study of Hungarian Child Psychology
• Remembering the Reinstatement of Hungarian Psychology in the Kádár Era: Reconstructing Psychology through Interviews
• IV. THE POLITICS OF PSYCHIATRY—BODIES, ILLNESSES, AND MENTAL HEALTH
• The Hygiene of Everyday Life and the Politics of Turn-of-the-Century Psychiatric Expertise in Hungary
• Who Is Mentally Ill? Psychiatry and the Individual in Interwar Germany
• Russian Psychiatry beyond Foucault: Violence, Humanism, and Psychiatric Power in the Russian Empire at the End of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
• Patients and Observers: Specific Data Collection Methods in an Interwar Transylvanian Hospital
• Contemporary Criticism and Defenses of Psychiatry’s Moral-Medical Kinds in Light of Foucault’s Lectures on the Abnormal
• V. CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF PSY-KNOWLEDGE
• Neoliberal Governmentality, Austerity, and Psycho-Politics
• Psycho-Politics and Illness Constructions in the Background of the Trauma-Concept of the DSM-5
• Is Integration Possible for Psychoanalysis?
• Parallels, Intersections, and Clashes: Journeys through the Fringes
• About the Authors
• Index of Names
• Back cover