Communist Europe and Transnational Psychiatry

In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, historian Greg Eghigian posed the question: was there a Communist Psychiatry? Specifically, he was asking if there was “something essentially ‘communist’ about East European psychiatry” and if a distinct and identifiable school or system of mental health practice existed across Eastern Europe.1 Eghigian raised his query against a backdrop of opinion that assumed that psychiatric policy across the Eastern bloc originated in Moscow and spread outwards.2 Imagined hallmarks of Communist Psychiatry might include the misuse of the profession for political ends, the wholesale rejection of Freud, Pavlovization and strict adherence to physiological approaches to mental illness in accordance with ideological materialism, and a stress on work as the primary means of therapy. The extent to which the countries of Eastern Europe underwent shared or unique experiences of Communism is highly debated among historians, but, as of yet, psychiatry and mental illness have rarely figured into this debate.3 Given psychiatry’s prominent role in regulating deviance (and thus helping to create and defend the norms of a society), this development is somewhat surprising. Historians of psychiatry and medicine have also been relatively slow in addressing the topic of mental health care in the former Communist world. When compared against the voluminous material on psychiatry in Western Europe, North America, and the colonial world, this shortfall is especially remarkable.