Sarah Marks

This article traces exchanges of personnel, knowledge, and practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) between China and the Soviet Union during a brief window of Sino-Soviet friendship in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that TCM theory was reshaped by incorporating Pavlovian theories to modernize and validate acupuncture through a theory of mechanisms of higher nervous activity, with the framework of holism, specific research methods, and concepts such as “biologically active points” becoming sedimented within the TCM system. In turn, Soviet medicine embraced acupuncture, with its use enduring long after the Sino-Soviet split of 1959, in keeping with the internationalist spirit of the Soviet Scientific Technological Revolution. The article challenges theories of Soviet scientific exchange as “imperial scavenging,” demonstrating that China was as much an active agent in these interactions, with both sides making use of each other’s expertise for their own ends, often with mutual respect and enthusiasm.

Recovery and rehabilitation are highly charged terms in contemporary mental health, with their meanings and implications contested by professionals and survivors alike. A loose ‘recovery movement’ with radical reformist aims, which emerged across Britain and the United States in the later decades of the 20 th century, has, some argue, been co-opted by ‘neoliberal’ political and clinical interests. Most of these narratives begin with the emergence of the recovery movement as a result of service-user/peer activism in the 1970s: few consider the longer history of ideas and practices of recovery and rehabilitation. In turn, recovery and rehabilitation have been strangely marginal in the works of historians of psychiatry, madness, and mental health. This article traces some of the key literatures and concepts in relation to recovery and rehabilitation, and introduces this special issue of History of the Human Sciences, with contributions on Britain and the United States from the late 19 th century to the turn of the 21 st century.

This article offers an overview, historicising how both ‘race’ and racism have been seen as an aetiological root for mental ill health in people racialised as black, and contextualising the rise of transcultural psychiatry. Heeding the calls of the few historians to study race, mental health, and transcultural psychiatry in the metropole and across the globe, this article includes a wider variety of voices in order to create a dialogue between these histories. Drawing extensively on the global historiography and embracing contemporary work that demonstrates the persistence of racism in psychiatry and research, we use medical publications and a prosopographical lens to explore the push from radical psychiatrists to uproot racism and anti-b/Blackness in psychiatry and to recognise the impact of racism on mental health. This article considers the practice and activism of three late 20th-century UK-trained clinicians: Jamaican Frederick Hickling (1944–2020), British Jamaican Aggrey Burke (b. 1943) and British Sri Lankan Suman Fernando (b. 1932). By shifting the gaze of the historiography, we argue that beyond the towering figures of Frantz Fanon and Thomas Adeoye Lambo, psychiatrists were engaged in anti-racism and decolonisation using history—and doing so long before decolonisation became a watchword for historians globally.

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism.

This article will briefly explore some of the ways in which the past has been used as a means to talk about psychotherapy as a practice and as a profession, its impact on individuals and society, and the ethical debates at stake. It will show how, despite the multiple and competing claims about psychotherapy’s history and its meanings, historians themselves have, to a large degree, not attended to the intellectual and cultural development of many therapeutic approaches. This absence has the potential consequence of implying that therapies have emerged as value-free techniques, outside of a social, economic and political context. The relative neglect of psychotherapy, by contrast with the attention historians have paid to other professions, particularly psychiatry, has also underplayed its societal impact. This article will foreground some of the instances where psychotherapy has become an object of emerging historical interest, including the new research that forms the substance of this special issue of History of the Human Sciences.