Psychoanalysis was introduced to Greece in 1915 by the progressive educator Manolis Triantafyllidis and was further elaborated by Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s friend and member of the Greek royal family, and her psychoanalytic group in the aftermath of the Second World War. However, the accumulated traumas of the Nazi occupation, the Greek Civil War, the post-Civil-War tension between the Left and the Right, the military junta and the social and political conditions of post-war Greece led this project and all attempts to (...) establish psychoanalysis in Greece, to failure and dissolution. The restoration of democracy in 1974 and the rapid social changes it brought was a turning point in the history of Greek psychoanalysis: numerous psychoanalysts, who had trained abroad and returned after the fall of the dictatorship, were hired in the newly established Greek National Health Service, and contributed to the reform of Greek psychiatry by offering the option of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the non-privileged. This article draws on a range of unexplored primary sources and oral history interview material, in order to provide the first systematic historical account in the English language of the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and Greek society, and the contribution of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to the creation of the Greek welfare state. In so doing, it not only attempts to fill a lacuna in the history of contemporary Greece, but also contributes to the broader historiography of psychotherapy and of Europe. (shrink)

Although the compound adjective ‘psychosocial’ was first used by academic psychologists in the 1890s, it was only in the interwar period that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began to develop detailed models of the psychosocial domain. These models marked a significant departure from earlier ideas of the relationship between society and human nature. Whereas Freudians and Darwinians had described an antagonistic relationship between biological instincts and social forces, interwar authors insisted that individual personality was made possible through collective organization. This (...) argument was advanced by dissenting psychoanalysts such as Ian Suttie and Karen Horney; biologists including Julian Huxley and Hans Selye; philosophers (e.g. Olaf Stapledon), anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) and physicians (e.g John Ryle and James Halliday). This introduction and the essays that follow sketch out the emergence of the psycho-social by examining the methods, tools and concepts through which it was articulated. New statistical technologies and physiological theories allowed individual pathology to be read as an index of broader social problems and placed medical expertise at the centre of new political programmes. In these arguments the intangible structure of social relationships was made visible and provided a template for the development of healthy and effective forms of social organization. By examining the range of techniques deployed in the construction of the psychosocial (from surveys of civilian neurosis, techniques of family observation through to animal models of psychotic breakdown) a critical genealogy of the biopolitical basis of modern society is developed. (shrink)

Shortly following the Second World War, and under the medical direction of ex-army psychiatrist T. F. Main, the Cassel Hospital for Functional Nervous Disorders emerged as a pioneering democratic ‘therapeutic community’ in the treatment of mental illness. This definitive movement away from conventional ‘custodial’ assumptions about the function of the psychiatric hospital initially grew out of a commitment to sharing therapeutic responsibility between patients and staff and to preserving patients’ pre-admission responsibilities and social identities. However, by the mid-1950s, hospital practices (...) had come to focus pre-eminently on patients’ relationships with family members, and staff had developed a social model of mental health that focused on the family as the irreducible unit of mental treatment. By the late 1950s, this culminated in the in-patient admission of entire families for mental treatment, even when only one family member was exhibiting symptoms. At the heart of this growing post-war social-psychiatric preoccupation with the family was a new emphasis on the close relationship between mental health and individuals’ successful development toward mature responsible adulthood. The family came to be conceived as the quintessential space where both were forged. This article examines the process through which the Cassel’s social-psychiatric commitment to ‘therapeutic community’ became focused on the family as a key therapeutic site. While the family had become a central point of focus in social, political and psychological discussions of the foundation for stable democratic culture and political peace in post-war Britain, the Cassel Hospital actively experimented with these connections in therapeutic practice. This article thus illuminates the important, but frequently overlooked, role of psychiatric practices in the development of a post-war psychopolitics that established important links between the nuclear family, mental health and democratic social life. (shrink)