This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It examines the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.
Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: European Perspectives during the Cold War
This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It examines the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. Moving beyond studies focused solely on World War II and its long-term psychological consequences, we aim to understand the Cold War as a period of continued upheaval, producing new institutional responses to psychic distress while shaped by the legacies of previous violence. The workshop focuses on institutional archives and documentary sources - psychiatric and therapeutic case files, forensic assessments, hospital records, bureaucratic documents, police files, and court proceedings. These materials reveal how societies perceived, managed, and classified mental suffering - or failed to do so - under specific historical conditions. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of 'trauma’.
Programme
Wednesday 3rd December
Arrival of Participants
19.00 Joint Dinner
Thursday, 4th December
9.00-11.15 Panel I: Psychiatry and Medical Records
Katja Geiger-Seirafi, Ina Markova: Traces of Trauma in Psychiatric Records: Understanding Postwar Psychic Suffering in Austria after 1945
Dagmar Wernitznig: The Third Woman as Second Sex and (Mental) Asylum: Alienness, Exile, and Trauma in Early Cold War Vienna
Gábor Csikós: Captivity, Trauma, and Psychiatric Practice under Hungarian Stalinism
Coffee Break (30 minutes)
11.45-13.15 Panel II: Police and Secret Services
Anna Grutza: Between Trauma, Repression and Political Abuse: Diagnoses of Insanity in Polish Secret Police Files
Haydée Mareike Haass: Addressing mental suffering and physical disability in the post-war integration of the Bavarian police force (1950-1965)
13.15 Lunch Break (75 minutes)
14.30-16.00 Panel III: Politics and Violence
Gelinda Grinchenko: Invisible in Life, Absent in Memory: Psychiatric Patients and Institutional Silencing of Nazi Atrocities in Ukraine
Irina Pelea: Manufacturing Madness: Institutional Trauma-Making and Psychiatric Violence in Cold War Romania
Coffee Break (30 minutes)
16.30-18.45 Panel IV/1: Professional Discourses
Nataša Mišković: Partisan Hysteria and the Making of the Ethnopsychoanalyst Paul Parin
Roman Mamin: Trauma à la soviétique: Redefining the Psyche in the Cold War
Georg Wurzer: The Traumatic Legacy of the Afghan War. How the concept of PTSD came to the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania 3
20.000 Joint Dinner
Friday, 5th December
09.00-11.15 Panel IV/2: Professional Discourses
Francesco Toncich: Displacement Trauma in Psychiatric Practice on the Western Side of the Iron Curtain: The Upper Adriatic Case Study
Ketil Slagstad: Making Prognosis, Untracing Trauma. A Praxiographic Analysis of Clinical Research on Schizophrenia in the 1960s and 1970s
Victoria Shmidt: Expertise on child deprivation in socialist psychology and the global resilience movement
Break with coffee and catering (45 minutes)
12.00-13.30 Panel V: Societal Debates
Vinko Korotaj Drača: Trauma, psychiatry and murder in socialist Slovenia: The case of Metod Trobec and its cultural reflections
Mykola Neborachko: Posthumous rehabilitation as a tool of social legitimization
13.30-14.30 Discussion