Yugoslav Psychiatry in the Middle: Non-aligned and Post-Colonial Psychiatry During the Cold War

Abstract This chapter explores the emergence of transcultural psychiatry in the middle of the twentieth century and sheds light on its complex relationship with colonial frameworks and assumptions. While early transcultural psychiatry was Western dominated, this chapter discusses the contributions made by socialist transcultural psychiatry from Eastern Europe and looks at how this alternative body of knowledge influenced the making of global psychiatry in the post-colonial age. Post-WWII transcultural psychiatry attempted to distance itself from erstwhile colonial frameworks and insisted on identifying and debating universal psychological mechanisms and traits that would be shared across cultures. But within this framework of universalism, which could serve a variety of progressive and anti-colonial political aims, a number of colonial concepts and practices were often perpetuated. While socialist psychiatry from Eastern Europe certainly did not overcome colonial assumptions and hierarchical thinking, which it explicitly criticised in Western psychiatry, this chapter argues that it rested on a new sense of solidarity between the socialist world and the decolonising territories. This solidarity was based on shared experiences of political marginalisation and shared concerns regarding modernisation and produced a different kind of transcultural psychiatric interventions.