Normalizing the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
| By: | Bjelic, Dušan I, Professor |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Print ISBN: | 9781409433156 |
| eText ISBN: | 9781409494720 |
| Edition: | 0 |
| Format: | Reflowable |
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Normalizing the Balkans argues that, following the historical patterns of colonial psychoanalysis and psychiatry in British India and French Africa as well as Nazi psychoanalysis and psychiatry, the psychoanalysis and psychiatry of the Balkans during the 1990s deployed the language of psychic normality to represent the space of the Other as insane geography and to justify its military, or its symbolic, takeover.
Freud's self-analysis, influenced by his journeys through the Balkans, was a harbinger of orientalism as articulated by Said. However, whereas Said intended Orientalism to be a critique of the historical construction of the Orient by, and in relation to, the West, for Freud it constituted a medical and psychic truth. Freud