Freud in Bulgaria: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Translation: An Experience with the Singular.

This contribution considers a monthly seminar, Literature and Psychoanalysis, that has been taking place at Sofia University (Sofia, Bulgaria) since 2017. Three of the seminar's founders reflect on the transferences between literature and psychoanalysis, and on the ways in which literature and psychoanalysis can meaningfully converse. The exchange also touches on the fate of Freud's textual legacy in communist and post-communist Bulgaria.

The racial economy of psychological care: Professionalism, social justice, and political action during american psychology's communitarian moment.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the overt "politicization" of the American Psychological Association as an organization. Politics in this context carried a dual meaning referring to both political lobbying to promote the interests of psychology as a health profession and grassroots political action to advance social justice causes. In the years between the passage of the Community Mental Health Act (1963) and the Vail Conference on levels and patterns of professional training in psychology (1973), these two forms of politics were intertwined. The first significant political mobilization of professional psychologists in the postwar era occurred over the staffing of community mental health centers in the mid-1960s. These creations of the Great Society social welfare programs provided a platform for pursuing bold experiments in structural interventions to improve the lives and mental health of minoritized Americans and came to serve as hubs for the Black psychology movement of the early 1970s. This alternative model for the profession received careful consideration at the Vail Conference. However, a different relationship between politics and the profession crystalized by 1980. The politics of professionalism in psychology took the form lobby on behalf of practitioners working independent practices to receive reimbursement from third-party health insurance providers. This shift in the political economy of mental health has obscured this earlier, communitarian moment in American psychology. The racial economy of psychology's professionalization was structural, but not inevitable. It resulted from a series of historical choices. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Launch of a Political Satellite: Constructing the Ming Tombs Reservoir and "Mass Engineering" in Communist China.

Archives and oral histories show that the Ming Tombs Reservoir was a showcase project in Communist China directed by and involving the country's top leaders. This was one of the first projects to rely on the mobilization of physical labor rather than specialized machinery, driven by a belief in self-reliance and the use of local resources. It argues that the focus on the "masses," rather than engineers or scientists, challenged established engineering procedures and technical traditions. Historical evidence suggests that adopting a "build while being designed" mindset and mobilizing the "masses," projects could be completed, but often in ways that ultimately proved less than optimal. The case study suggests that innovations fail when local enthusiasm and technical knowledge are not balanced. By focusing on the role of the "masses" in shaping a novel technological landscape, this article highlights "mass engineering" to better understand this model of native innovations and economic autarky.

Fixing the Huai River: Technology of Labor Formation in Maoist China, 1950-53.

This article contributes to the large-scale engineering scholarship by revealing the labor practices involved and the state's role in shaping them. It provides a history of labor formation through earthwork technology in China's 1950s Huai River Control Project. The Communist Party's approach to engineering and labor differed from its Nationalist predecessor's. The party mobilized millions of peasants to dig and move an astronomical amount of soil in a few years. This herculean feat was made possible by promoting "work methods" to encourage peasants' self-Taylorization. The campaign aimed to cultivate a habit to work efficiently in mass-scale collaboration under external instructions. Through promoting work methods, state-appointed cadres assumed a tutelage role that allowed them to replace labor foremen. A hierarchical cadre-laborer relationship emerged from the same labor process that changed the nation's landscape.

Between conformity and individuality: Psychologists in Czechoslovakia during normalization (1968-1989).

The study examines the development of psychology in former Czechoslovakia during the period of "normalization" (1968-1989) and the challenges it faced under the communist regime. The restricted connection to Western psychology and the regime's control over all aspects of human activity negatively influenced the continuity of development in psychology. The regime demanded conformity, leaving individuals, including psychologists, in recurring states of internal conflict and intellectual discomfort when deciding how much to compromise in their personal and professional lives. The study identifies three groups of psychologists based on their adaptability to regime demands. The first group consists of those who aligned themselves with the regime, allowing them to hold positions of leadership and shape the conceptualization of the field. The second group comprises individuals who actively opposed the regime, facing significant limitations in their educational and career opportunities, and mostly being forced to leave the profession. The third group of psychologists belongs to the apolitical gray zone. A significant portion of individuals in this largest group passively complied with established norms and constraints, accepting the restrictions imposed on the development of Czechoslovak psychology. Fortunately, thanks to the persistent efforts of the proactive members of the gray zone and their willingness to endure significant discomfort, an even deeper decline of psychology during the normalization period was prevented. The study provides insights into the topics of education, research, Western influences, and adaptation to the communist regime within Czechoslovak psychology, illuminating the intricacies of living in that historical period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Maszyny Matematyczne, women, and computing: The birth of computers in the Polish communist era.

The history of computing usually focuses on achievements in Western universities and research centers and is mostly about what happened in the United States and Great Britain. However, in Eastern Europe, particularly in war-torn Poland, where there was very little state funding, many highly original hardware and software projects were initiated. The small number of publications available to us, especially those in English, led to the belief that technological progress was the result of research carried out in Western countries alone. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap by focusing on the numerous research projects initiated in Polish universities and computer industries that unfortunately turned into dead ends as the result of socialist policies. These are references that cannot be ignored, not only for a historical reconstruction of the evolution of technology but also with regard to the social effects recorded in Poland immediately after the Second World War. The communist ideology, which pursued gender equality policies after the end of the war, encouraged women to pursue education, enabling the many female students enrolled in mathematics degree courses to specialize in "Maszyny Matematyczne" (mathematical machines) and become, like men, experts in computer programming and design. As well as highlighting the role that Poland played in the nascent "computer science" and providing detailed information on what women contributed, this article will explain why the success of the Polish computer industry was limited due to the nonexistent coordination between the communist states (Comecon).

The pushback against state interference in science: how Lysenkoism tried to suppress Genetics and how it was eventually defeated.

Genetics in the Soviet Union (USSR) achieved state-of-the-art results and had reached a peak of development by the mid-1930s due to the efforts of the scientific schools of several major figures, including Sergei Navashin, Nikolai Koltsov, Grigorii Levitsky, Yuri Filipchenko, Nikolai Vavilov, and Solomon Levit. Unfortunately, the Soviet government distrusted intellectually independent science and this led to state support for a fraudulent pseudoscientific concept widely known as Lysenkoism, which hugely damaged biology as a whole. Decades of dominance of the Lysenkoism had ruinous effects and the revival of biology in the USSR in the late 1950s-early 1960s was very difficult. In fact, this was realized to be a problem for Soviet science as a whole, and many mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and other scientists made efforts to rehabilitate genetics and to transfer biology to the "jurisdiction" of science from that of politics. The key events in the history of these attempts to pushback against state interference in science, and to promote the development of genetics and molecular biology, are described in this paper. These efforts included supportive letters to the authorities (e.g., the famous "Letter of three hundred"), (re)publishing articles and giving lectures on "forbidden" science, and organizing laboratories and departments for research in genetics and molecular biology under the cover of nuclear physics or of other projects respected by the government and Communist party leaders. The result was that major figures in the hard sciences played a major part in the revival of genetics and biology in the USSR.

Why I joined the Freedom Rides.

Peter Sterling expands upon his recent Q & A article by discussing his participation in the Freedom Rides and the reasons for his involvement in the civil rights movement.

Soviet genetics and the communist party: was it all bad and wrong, or none at all?

The history of genetics and the evolutionary theory in the USSR is multidimensional. Only in the 1920s after the October Revolution, and due in large part to that Revolution, the science of genetics arose in Soviet Russia. Genetics was limited, but not obliterated in the second half of the 1950s, and was restored in the late 1960s, after the resignation of Nikita S. Khrushchev. In the subsequent period, Soviet genetics experienced a resurgence, though one not as successful as geneticists would have liked. The Communist party bodies interfered constantly, but with different consequences for the development of genetics than when the earlier periods. The main troubles for Soviet genetics occurred during the unique, well-known, most contradictory, and tragic Stalinist period. The start date for the defeat of genetics is also known-August, 1948. In the social history of science and especially in the history of evolutionary biology (including genetics) it is natural, necessary, and even expected to adopt an evolutionary approach. In particular, historians of science need to consider and explain the evolution and dependence of Soviet science in regards to the evolution of Soviet society, the Soviet state, and the Communist party. This evolutionary perspective reflects the standards of evolutionary biology, evolutionary macrosociology, and also the history of science.

Stereotypes as Historical Accidents: Images of Social Class in Postcommunist Versus Capitalist Societies.

Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism's rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries (N = 2,241), compared with 38 capitalist countries (N = 4,344), support the historical, sociocultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in postcommunist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; postcommunist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism's ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups' stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Postcommunist societies show weaker status-competence relations and stronger (negative) competition-warmth relations; respectively, the lower meritocratic beliefs and higher priority of embeddedness as ideological legacies may shape these relationships.

Neurasthenia, psy sciences and the 'great leap forward' in Maoist China.

The present study looks into the much-neglected history of neurasthenia in Maoist China in relation to the development of psy sciences. It begins with an examination of the various factors that transformed neurasthenia into a major health issue from the late 1950s to mid-1960s. It then investigates a distinctive culture of therapeutic experiment of neurasthenia during this period, with emphasis on the ways in which psy scientists and medical practitioners manoeuvred in a highly politicized environment. The study concludes with a discussion of the legacy of these neurasthenia studies - in particular, the experiment with the famous 'speedy and synthetic therapy' - and of the implications the present study may have for future historical study of psychiatry and science.

'Co-operation and Communism cannot work side by side': Organized Consumers and the Early Cold War in Britain.

This article contributes to a better understanding of labour anti-communism in Britain through an exploration of the evolution of ideas and attitudes within the co-operative movement during the early Cold War. It demonstrates that the period witnessed an increasingly rigid separation of co-operation from communism and argues that this separation made it harder for activists within the co-operative movement to imagine a total or utopian alternative to capitalism. Drawing particularly on a close reading of the co-operative press as well as other sources, the study is divided into three main parts. The first section discusses sympathy among co-operators for the achievements of the Soviet Union, which increased during the war against fascism. The article then moves on to consider the continuing dialogue between British co-operators and their counterparts in European communist states and how international tensions shaped co-operators' views. The final major section explores the hardening of attitude towards communism after Marshall Aid was declared in June 1947, and underlines the role played by figures such as A. V. Alexander and Jack Bailey who worked with the Information Research Department at the Foreign Office to spread anti-communism within the movement. The conclusion reflects, more speculatively, on what implications this shift may have had for the medium and long-term decline of co-operation and the hegemony of capitalist consumerism post-war.

Cold Interests, Hot Conflicts: How a Professional Association Responded to a Change in Political Regimes.

In South America, the 1970s began with ardent sociopolitical crises leading to a wave of repressive military regimes. In Chile, most professional bodies suffered profound structural and functional modifications resulting from internal political polarization as well as state intervention. Nurses saw the same fate befall them, which created both a historical blackout and abrupt changes in power dynamics. Given the prominence of this process in the reconfiguration of modern nursing's identity, this article traces the association's political process during the short-lived 1970s Marxist-inspired government and the response of nurses collectively to the rapid shift into a repressive regime leading to a profound internal crisis and an identity break-up within nursing. By using archival sources and oral testimonies1 of 1970s and 1980s nurses, we reconstruct a historical account of a key period in the history of the country that for the nurses meant a progression of discord and division along with a self-imposed silence on the past. In so doing, the article adds to a growing literature on the participation of women in political life.

[The career of the psychiatrist Dietfried Müller-Hegemann (1910-1989) : Example of a politically motivated rise and fall in the German Democratic Republic]. / Die Karriere des Psychiaters Dietfried Müller-Hegemann (1910­1989) : Beispiel eines politisch gewollten Auf- und Abstiegs in der DDR.

Dietfried Müller-Hegemann was one of the prominent figures in East German psychiatry and psychotherapy of the 1950s and 1960s. Having been a communist prior to 1933, a resistance fighter during the National Socialist regime and having gone through political training during his exile in Soviet Russia, he proved to be a committed member of the new ruling SED socialist party in Eastern Germany. As such both governmental and party organs regarded him as a promising and reliable party member to be supported and implemented as executive staff within the new, socialist scientific system. Also, due to the fact that he supported the Pavlovian school of thought for modern psychiatry, Müller-Hegemann was installed as the new head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at Leipzig University by the state secretary for higher education, notably against the clear opposition of the university medical faculty. Soon thereafter however Müller-Hegemann fell from favor due to the fact that he supported views that did not follow the strict ideological guidelines, e. g. with regard to the emergence of fascism. Moreover, he strongly opposed the separation of neurology from psychiatry as ruled by the ministry. An attempt in 1963 by junior party members and ministerial staff to remove him from office failed, but still managed to make Müller-Hegemann resign from his Leipzig post and take over that of director of the Griesinger hospital for the mentally ill in East Berlin. In May 1971, after new conflicts with party officials, he did not return from a business trip to Essen in West Germany. This study does not review the scientific and medical merits of Müller-Hegemann, but concentrates on how his career as a leading psychiatrist was manipulated, both supported and sabotaged, and ideologically controlled by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) system. His development is documented proof that party officials did not tolerate opposition, neither in ideological nor in professional questions, even if the opponent was a committed Marxist. The example of his career shows that political and ideological dissent soon melted into personal animosity and drives, as a result of which Müller-Hegemann's promising career as professor in Leipzig was terminated.

A relação intrínseca entre a psicologia histórico-cultural e a epistemologia marxiana / La relación intrínseca entre la psicología histórico-cultural y la epistemología marxiana / The intrinsic relation between historical-cultural psychology and the marxian epistemology

RESUMO. Considerando as investidas ideológicas que tencionam mascarar as bases epistemológicas marxistas da psicologia histórico-cultural, o artigo em tela visa contribuir para evidenciar o modo como o materialismo histórico e dialético edificou os pressupostos essenciais desta teoria psicológica. Para tanto, estabeleceu-se a proposição de que os três pilares metodológicos que fundamentam a crítica marxiana à sociedade burguesa - quais sejam, a unidade mínima de análise, a historicização categorial e a essência contraditória do fenômeno estudado - amparam, analogamente, a análise histórica do psiquismo humano como sistema interfuncional. Deste modo, objetivou-se demonstrar que a arquitetônica epistemológica marxiana serviu de sustentáculo para a edificação de uma psicologia legitimamente marxista a qual superou os limites atomísticos da lógica formal burguesa. Concluiu-se que a especificidade metodológica da psicologia histórico-cultural apreendeu o desenvolvimento dos processos psicológicos no movimento de suas tendências antagônicas essenciais - representadas pelo núcleo contraditório que contrapõe e articula os processos funcionais elementares e superiores - alcançando a compreensão da concretude histórica que conforma a subjetividade humana.

RESUMEN. En cuanto a las investiduras ideológicas que pretenden enmascarar las bases epistemológicas marxistas de la psicología histórico-cultural, en el artículo en pantalla se pretende contribuir a evidenciar el modo en que el materialismo histórico y dialéctico ha edificado los supuestos esenciales de esta teoría psicológica. Para ello, se estableció la proposición de que los tres pilares metodológicos que fundamentan la crítica marxiana a la sociedad burguesa - que sean, la unidad mínima de análisis, la historicidad categorial y la esencia contradictoria del fenómeno estudiado - amparan, análogamente, el análisis histórico del psiquismo humano como sistema inter-funcional. De este modo, se pretendió demostrar que la arquitectónica epistemológica marxiana sirvió de sostenimiento para la edificación de una psicología legítimamente marxista la cual superó los límites atomísticos de la lógica formal burguesa. Se concluyó que la especificidad metodológica de la psicología histórico-cultural aprehendió el desarrollo de los procesos psicológicos en el movimiento de sus tendencias antagónicas esenciales - representadas por el núcleo contradictorio que contrapone y articula los procesos funcionales elementales y superiores - alcanzando la comprensión de la concreción histórica que conforma la subjetividad humana.

ABSTRACT. Considering the ideological assumptions that intend to mask the marxist epistemological foundations of historical-cultural psychology, this article aims to contribute to evidence the way in which historical and dialectical materialism has built the essential presuppositions of this psychological theory. In order to do so, the proposition was established that the three methodological pillars that underpin marxian criticism of bourgeois society - namely, the minimum unit of analysis, the categorical historicization and the contradictory essence of the studied phenomenon - support, in the same way, the historical analysis of the human psyche as a cross-functional system. In this way, it was tried to demonstrate that the marxian epistemological architectonic served as support for the construction of a legitimately marxist psychology that surpassed the atomistic limits of the formal bourgeois logic. It was concluded that the methodological specificity of historical-cultural psychology seized the development of psychological processes in the movement of their essential antagonistic tendencies - represented by the contradictory nucleus that contrasts and articulates the elementary and higher functional processes - reaching an understanding of historical concreteness which conforms to human subjectivity.

Crafting socialist embryology: dialectics, aquaculture and the diverging discipline in Maoist China, 1950-1965.

In the 1950s, embryology in socialist China underwent a series of changes that adjusted the disciplinary apparatus to suit socialism and the national goal of self-reliance. As the Communist state called on scientists to learn from the Soviets, embryologists' comprehensive view on heredity, which did not contradict Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)'s doctrines, provided a space for them to advance their discipline. Leading scientists, often trained abroad in the tradition of experimental embryology, rode on the tides of Maoist ideology and repositioned their research. Some of their creative realignment of previous research questions, materials, and traditions to Marxist philosophy and agricultural objectives generated productive programs. In particular, Tong Dizhou (1902-1979) translated Engels's dialectics of nature into a research question about cytoplasmic inheritance. His continuing investigation on it led to the first goldfish "clone" through a nuclear transplantation experiment; Zhu Xi and his associates transferred a goldfish model in embryology into studies on improving carp aquaculture, leading to a rare success in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. These directions for embryology continued well into the 1960s. At a time when global embryology was diversifying and began to be molecularized, eventually forming "developmental biology," socialist embryology took shape in China with a different set of epistemic and practical commitments. The history of its development challenges and enriches our understanding of the concrete process of change in one discipline under Mao, showing ways in which scientists creatively adapted state-sanctioned ideologies and visions to do productive work outside the framework of molecular biology during the Cold War.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1924): an introduction to the historico-cultural psychology and the development of the higher psychological processes.

In the 1930's LS Vygotsky developed an original conception of the psychology and the development of the higher psychological processes, which stands up the current theories in Russia and the West. He layed the bases for the study of the higher mental processes and their relationship with the brain functioning, which will be later on developped by AR Luria. After a brief historical notice, this paper will specify the relationships between Vygoski and Marx's and Engels's philosophy, the Soviet power and the works of Freud and Piaget.