The Pedagogy of Workers’ Self-Management: Terror, Therapy, and Reform Communism in Yugoslavia after the Tito-Stalin Split

This article looks at the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry to read socialist Yugoslavia’s complex international and political position. It argues that the history of postwar mental health professions in this country opens up a larger social and political story of liberalization and authoritarianism in socialist Eastern Europe. After 1948, the conflict with the Cominform, and split with the USSR, Yugoslavia went on to receive Western material help, as well as political support, and developed its own more liberal and internationally open brand of socialism, predicated on the ideas of workers’ self-management and nonalignment. Yugoslav psychiatry and psychoanalysis became the most liberalized and Westernized professions in the region, but they also contributed to the operation of the violent “reeducation” program at Goli Otok, the most authoritarian and repressive political project in Yugoslav history aimed at “re-educating” pro-Stalinists in the Yugoslav Communist Party. In this article, those two sides of the Yugoslav psychiatric profession will be demonstrated through the prism of self-management. First, the article discusses the application of psychotherapeutic techniques and self-management in the violent context of re-education camps for political prisoners. A similar combination of psychoanalysis and principles of self-management in “civilian” and Westernized child psychiatry is analysed in the second part. The article shows how these very similar notions and ideological principles could be used within the same sociopolitical framework and by the same profession but for radically different purposes.