From social pathologies to individual psyches

Psychiatry navigating socio-political currents in 20th-century Latvia

Bibliographic Data

ID19445127
AuthorsAgita Luse (0000-0002-8896-0297, Riga Stradiņš University, Latvia,, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume22
Issue1
Pages20-39
Publication date2011-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory of Psychiatry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0957-154X • E-ISSN: 1740-2360
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0957154x09351045
PMID21879575
OpenAlexW2076278694
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited15

The paper explores psychiatry’s responses to the twentieth-century socio-political currents in Latvia by focusing on social objectives, clinical ideologies, and institutional contexts of Soviet mental health care. The tradition of German biological psychiatry in which Baltic psychiatrists had been trained blended well with the materialistic monism of Soviet psychoneurology. Pavlov’s teaching of the second signal system was well suited to Soviet ideological needs: speech stimuli were seen as a vehicle for moulding the individual’s mind. The transformation in diagnostic practices during the 1970s and 1980s reflected the demise of optimism about the capacity of the self to model itself to the needs of the society. Latvian psychiatry was prepared to embrace more individualistic and pessimistic theories of the self

Demise · Epistemology · German · Ideology · Individualism · Latvian · Mental health · Optimism · Pessimism · Political science · Politics · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Social psychiatry · Sociology · Wishful thinking · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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