A01=Dusan I. Bjelic
Archaic Mother
Author_Dusan I. Bjelic
Balkan Nations
Balkan studies
Ball Room
Category=JBSL
Category=JMAF
Civil Society
cultural psychiatry theory
discourse of Balkan madness
DPG
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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Freud's Group Psychology
Freud's Jewish Identity
Freud's Sexual Theory
freuds
Insane Geography
inter-ethnic violence analysis
Mad House
maternal
Maternal Space
NATO Bomb
neuroses
Non-violent Resistance
normality
Oedipal Revolt
orientalism critique
Ottoman Legacy
postcolonial psychiatry
psychic
Psychic Normality
psychoanalytic
psychoanalytic geography
Russian Tactics
sexual
Slovene Civil Society
space
theory
Turbinal Bones
Turbinate Bone
Universal Subjectivity
Vice Versa
war
War Neuroses
Yasnaya Polyana
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409433156
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 24 Nov 2011
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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’s self-orientalization became the structural foundation of psychoanalytic language, which had tragic consequences in the Balkans when a demonic conjunction developed between the ingrained self-orientalizing structure of psychoanalysis and the Balkans' own propensity for self-orientalization. In the 1990s, in the ex-Yugoslav cultural space, psychoanalytic language was used by the Serb psychiatrist-politicians Drs. RaÅ¡kovic and Karadzic as conceptual justification for inter-ethnic violence. Kristeva's discourse on abject geography and Zizek's conceptualization of the Balkans as the Real have done violence to the region in an intellectual register on behalf of universal subjectivity. Following Gramsci’s and Said’s 'discourse-geography' Bjelic transmutes the psychoanalytic topos of the imaginary geography of the Balkans into the geopolitics inherent in psychoanalytic language itself, and takes to task the practices of normalization that underpin the Balkans’ politics of madness.
Dušan I. Bjelic is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine, USA
