Book Review

摘要

In 2002, I published an article in the journal entitled ‘Was There a Communist Psychiatry?’ Focusing on the history of mental health care in East Germany, I explored the extent to which it was plausible to account for developments in psychiatry in the Eastern bloc as the result of party political and Marxist-Leninist commitments. My conclusion at the time was that, while there were certain ways in which Communist ideology directly influenced psychiatric practice in the German Democratic Republic, many – perhaps most – features and trends were the result of institutional, economic, cultural and international factors that had little or nothing to do with post-war communism. Nevertheless, given the fact that at the time few academic historians had yet examined the history of Eastern European psychiatry in any depth, any general conclusions seemed provisional at best.