scholarly journals Decolonizing madness? Transcultural psychiatry, international order and birth of a ‘global psyche’ in the aftermath of the Second World War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ana Antić

Abstract This article offers a transnational account of the historical origins and development of the concept of ‘global psyche’ and transcultural psychiatry. It argues that the concept of universal, global psyche emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and during decolonization, when West European psychiatry strove to leave behind its colonial legacies and lay the foundation for a more inclusive conversation between Western and non-Western mental health communities. In the second half of the twentieth century, leading ‘psy’ professionals across the globe set about identifying and defining the universal psychological mechanisms supposedly shared among all cultures (and ‘civilizations’). The article explores this far-reaching psychiatric, social and cultural search for a new definition of ‘common humanity’, relating it to the social and political history of decolonization, and to the post-war reconstruction and search for stable peace. It provides a transnational account of a series of interlinked developments and trends around the world in order to arrive at a global history of the decolonization of mental health science.

Literary Fact ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 314-332
Author(s):  
Michela Venditti

The article is a introduction to the publication of the minutes of the meetings of the Russian lodge "Northern Star" in Paris, concerning the discussion on the admission of women to freemasonry. The proposed archival materials, deposited in the National Library of France in Paris, date back to 1945 and 1948. The women's issue became more relevant after the Second World War due to the fact that Masonic lodges had to recover and recruit new adherents. The article offers a brief overview of the women's issue in the history of Freemasonry in general, and in the Russian emigrant environment in particular. One of the founders of the North Star lodge, M. Osorgin, spoke out in the 1930s against the admission of women. In the discussions of the 1940s, the Masonic brothers repeat his opinion almost literally. Women's participation in Freemasonry is rejected using either gender or social arguments. Russian Freemasons mostly cite gender reasons: women have no place in Freemasonry because they are not men. Freemasonry, according to Osorgin, is a cult of the male creative principle, which is not peculiar to women. Discussions about the women's issue among Russian emigrant Freemasons are also an important source for studying their literary work; in particular, the post-war literary works of Gaito Gazdanov are closely connected with the Masonic ideology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 341-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Łużyniecka ◽  
Monika Dąbkowska

This article is about conservational and study works on the enclosure of an old cystercian abbey in Krzeszów, that were made after the Second World War. Post-war history of conservation of this monument exhibits two periods. The first one covers 50 post-war years, where only routine maintenance was done. The latter period began at the beginning of the XXI century. Since then fragments of the building were renovated piece by piece. Current cultural and touristic needs were taken into consideration.Revalorization of Krzeszów Abbey in years 2007-2008 and since 2014 revealed the basements and relicts of the groundfloor of the south and west wings of the complex. At the same time the architectural studies were made, resulting in new conclusions of transformations of this building.


Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.


1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick L. Mckitrick

On 10 July 1950, at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Wiesbaden Chamber of Artisans (Handwerkskammer), its president Karl Schöppler announced: ‘Today industry is in no way the enemy of Handwerk. Handwerk is not the enemy of industry.…’ These words, which accurately reflected the predominant point of view of the post-war chamber membership, and certainly of its politically influential leadership, marked a new era in the social, economic and political history of German artisans and, it is not too much to say, in the history of class relations in (West) Germany in general. Schöppler's immediate frame of reference was the long-standing and extremely consequential antipathy on the part of artisans towards industrial capitalism, an antipathy of which his listeners were well aware.


1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brooke

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 141-164
Author(s):  
Maria Juda

POLISH POST-WAR RESEARCH INTO THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING IN POLAND: ACHIEVEMENTS AND RESEARCH PROPOSALSThe history of publishing in Poland encompasses many issues associated with the emergence and dissemination of printed books. Of fundamental significance to the study of these issues are the records of the publishing output: while we have nearly complete — though requiring further exploration — records of this output for 15th–18th centuries, documented in bibliographies and catalogues, the situation is worse when it comes to the 19th and 20th centuries, until the outbreak of the Second World War. In this respect what we need is not only a continuation, but a radical intensification of bibliographic work. This concerns works published in the Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Greek scripts as well as musical notation. Polish book scholars devoted a lot of attention to the beginnings of printing in Poland; the historiography concerning various typographic workshops located in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is rich, though it still requires further extensive studies. The scholars were also interested in phenomena influencing the content structure of printed publications, like publishing privileges in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, censorship as well as restrictions imposed by the partitioning powers and later by Poland’s communist authorities, as a result of which Polish publications had to be printed abroad and an independent publishing movement emerged. The scholars’ research interests also focused on books as products of the work of printers and publishers, on the publication of written works. They focused both on the various components of the book title page, printer’s signet, stemmata etc. and on its editorial composition as a whole.The scholars’ undoubted achievements in their studies of the history of publishing in Poland are significant, yet in many areas they need to be continued and expanded an important task is an edition of sources for the study of the history of Polish publishing, and concentrated on the phenomena that stem from developmental tendencies in modern book studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Ana Antić

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIL RUBIN

AbstractThe German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) had famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. During the Second World War, however, Arendt also spoke out repeatedly against the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Rejecting both alternatives, Arendt advocated for the inclusion of Palestine in a multi-ethnic federation that would not consist only of Jews and Arabs. Only in 1948, in an effort to forestall partition, did Arendt revise her earlier critique and endorse a binational solution for Palestine. This article offers a new reading of the evolution of Arendt's thought on Zionism and argues that her support for federalism must be understood as part of a broader wartime debate over federalism as a solution to a variety of post-war nationality problems in Europe, the Middle East and the British Empire. By highlighting the link between debates on wartime federalism and the future of Palestine, this article also underscores the importance of examining the legacy of federalism in twentieth century Europe for a more complete understanding of the history of Zionism.


Author(s):  
Peter N. Davies

This journal reprints the history of the Elder Dempster company by Peter N. Davies, from 1852-1972, originally published in 1973. It includes an additional chapter, also by Peter Davies, on the history of the company from 1973-1989, covering its decline and final years. The purpose is to describe and analyse the economic history of the Elder Dempster shipping company and its predecessors, and provide an account of West African and British economic backgrounds. The journal is divided into five parts, each concerning a different era in the company’s history. Part 1 covers the formation of the African Steam Ship Company, which would eventually merge and become Elder Dempster; Part 2 covers the expansion of Elder Dempster and the partnership with Alfred Lewis Jones; Part 3 explores major historical events and their impact on Elder Dempster, including the Great War, the transition from war to peace, and the end of the Royal Mail group; Part 4 concerns the establishment of Elder Dempster Lines Limited, the emergence of successful rival companies, the Second World War and post-war reconstruction, and prediction for the company for the 1970s and beyond, as this part concluded the first edition of the history; Part 5 is a retrospective look at the 1970s and 1980s, and tracks the decline of Elder Dempster and the evolution of the Ocean Group.


2020 ◽  
pp. 095269512092426
Author(s):  
Katie Joice

This article examines the use of cinematic microanalysis to capture, decompose, and interpret mother–infant interaction in the decades following the Second World War. Focusing on the films and writings of Margaret Mead, Ray Birdwhistell, René Spitz, and Sylvia Brody, it examines the intellectual culture, and visual methodologies, that transformed ‘pathogenic’ mothering into an observable process. In turn, it argues that the significance assigned to the ‘small behaviours’ of mothers provided an epistemological foundation for the nascent discipline of infant psychiatry. This research draws attention to two new areas of enquiry within the history of emotions and the history of psychiatry in the post-war period: preoccupation with emotional absence and affectlessness, and their personal and cultural meanings; and the empirical search for the origin point, and early chronology, of mental illness.


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