The Soviet Emperor's New Clothes: Psychiatry, Dissent and the Art of Diagnosis

PLEASE NOTE, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO THE 19TH NOVEMBER, AND WILL NOT TAKE PLACE ON 29TH OCTOBER

Rebecca Reich will discuss her book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), which examines the literary lines of conflict and communication between Soviet psychiatrists and dissenters after Stalin’s death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of insanity to pathologise dissenting politics and art. Yet in their own psychiatrically themed texts, dissenters argued that the state had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. By denying psychiatry’s right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters challenged the post-Stalinist state’s renewed claims to rationality and modernity. What madness meant had long been a politically fraught question in Russian culture. But in the post-Stalin period it took its place at the very centre of a wider struggle over authority and power.