1st Edition
Normalizing the Balkans Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry
By Dušan I. Bjelic
Copyright 2011
200 Pages
by
Routledge
200 Pages
by
Routledge
200 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
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... Read more
Introduction; Chapter 1 Freud and the Balkans; Chapter 2 Freud and the Language of Power; Chapter 3 The Universal Subject and Colonial Geography; Chapter 4 Kristeva’s Exile from Balkan Madness; Chapter 5 Slavoj Žižek: Lacania and the Balkans’ Real; Chapter 6 Immigrants as the New Balkans; Chapter 7 Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Insane Geographies; Chapter 8 From “Family Myth” to “Family Resemblances”;
Biography
Dušan I. Bjelic is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine, USA
'An extraordinary success at framing what the Balkans have meant for Balkan thinkers from Julia Kristeva to Slavoj Zizek. Given the role that psychoanalysis plays in such thinkers’ imaginary it is striking how this original book accesses the inner life of these images to help all of us grasp how identity is shaped, even our own, through images.' Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, USA 'In this ground-breaking work, DuÅ¡an Bjelic finds in "the Balkans" the roots/routes of an ongoing trauma. Through their discovery, a new reading of the legend of psychoanalytic politics becomes possible. From Freud's own difficult relationship with his father's history to a certain French-Freudian disavowal of "being on location," Normalizing the Balkans applies a unique brand of analytic sociology to "the Nazi symptom".' Laurence A. Rickels, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany / University of California, Santa Barbara, USA 'What should we make of the fact that ideological architects of the Bosnian Genocide were psychiatrists well acquainted with psychoanalytic theory? This discomfiting question reverberates throughout DuÅ¡an Bjeli’s fierce and learned book.' Journal of Modern Greek Studies 'There is a sorrow and an anger to DuÅ¡an I. Bjeli’s most recent book, neither of which is misplaced. Nor are they made explicit. Normalizing the Balkans is neither emotional nor emotive. It is, in the most classical sense of the term, scholarly. It is well researched and well documented. It covers vast yet always necessary ground - from Carl Jung’s dalliances with a Russian analysand and Sigmund Freud’s traumatic travels through the Balkans, to Julia Kristeva’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s very different voyages of return to Bulgaria.' Slavic Review
