Natalia Pamuła (University of Warsaw), Neurotic state: mental illness, psychiatry, and society in socialist Poland.

Viernes 28 de agosto de 2026, 16:00 hrs. Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad de Chile, sala B-22 (formato híbrido).

Socialist countries were invested in the health of its populations, including, mental health. In this presentation, I discuss how mental illness, in particular neurosis, was understood and conceptualized in socialist Poland between 1956 and 1989. Neurosis was one of the most often discussed psychiatric conditions by the experts, journalists, and writers under state socialism in Poland. But what makes neurosis a topic particularly worthy of exploration is the experts’ inability to provide its clear definition, in other words, its indeterminacy. Both the vagueness and lack of “seriousness” of neurosis enabled a public discussion that spanned topics such as mental hygiene, nutrition, sexuality, family relations, employment, and socialist infrastructure. Neurosis cut across social classes and age groups: in other words, everyone could have been neurotic. The discursive popularity of neurosis perhaps lay, at least partially, in the fact that treatment, as outlined by the experts, did not always require hospitalisation, long-term institutionalisation, and pharmacology. It could be prevented or combatted with the right changes in sleep, rest, and the introduction of new habits. Thus, framed as manageable through lifestyle, neurosis illuminates shifting values relating to work, politics, gender, family, and intimacy in socialist Poland.

Polish psychiatrists did not work in isolation: their ideas, on the one hand, constituted a continuation of pre-War World II Polish psychiatry, on the other, were influenced both by Eastern European and Western psychiatry. As a result, this project investigates, as well, the circulation of ideas about mental health and what brings me to Chile is its communitary psychiatry and socialist Chilean approaches to the human mind. As much as this project focuses on Poland, I want to go beyond strictly local conditions and processes and embed Polish discussions on neurosis in socialist contexts and traditions that are not restricted to Europe.