Main description:

The project to create a 'New Man' and 'New Woman' initiated in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted one of the most extensive efforts to remake human psychophysiology in modern history. Playing on the different meanings of the word 'technology' - as practice, knowledge and artefact - this edited volume brings together scholarship from across a range of fields to shed light on the ways in which socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe sought to transform and revolutionise human capacities. From external, state-driven techniques of social control and bodily management, through institutional practices of transformation, to strategies of self-fashioning, Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc probes how individuals and collectives engaged with - or resisted - the transformative imperatives of the Soviet experiment.

The volume's broad scope covers topics including the theory and practice of revolutionary embodiment; the practice of expert knowledge and disciplinary power in psychotherapy and criminology; the representation and transformation of ideal bodies through mass media and culture; and the place of disabled bodies in the context of socialist transformational experiments. The book brings the history of human 're-making' and the history of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism into conversation in a way that will have broad and lasting resonance.

Contents:

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I - Senses of Technology
1. The 'Map-Eye': Cartographic Visuality and the Soviet Cyborg, Nick Baron (University of Nottingham, UK)
2. From The Blind to New Vision: Sergei Tretiakov and Soviet Ethnographic Optics, Oksana Sarkisova (Central European University, Hungary)
3. Women's Cinema as Haptic Cinema: Esfir Shub's Today, Lily Brik's Glass Eye, and the 'Lost' Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde, Lilya Kaganovsky (University of Illinois, USA)
4. Dreams of a Synaesthetic Future: Technologies of Deafness in Late Soviet Socialism, Claire Shaw (University of Warwick, UK)
Part II - Expert Knowledge and Disciplinary Power
5. On the Clinical Periphery: Existentialist Attention in Bulgarian Psychiatry, Julian Chehirian (Princeton University, USA)
6. Technology of the Unconscious: The Battle over Hypnosis in Early Soviet Russia, Anna Toropova (University of Nottingham, UK)
7. New contribution covering an Eastern Bloc country (TBC)
Part III - Socialist Therapeutics
8. Reproducing the Mountain Climate: Sun Therapy and the Introduction of Therapeutic Lamps in Early Soviet and Stalinist Medicine, Johanna Conterio (Flinders University, Australia)
9. Soviet Pioneers of Smoking Cessation: From Group Therapy in the 1920s to Cystine in the 1970s, Tricia Starks (University of Arkansas, USA)
10. 'Human Capabilities are Limitless': Post-War Soviet Psychotherapy and the Quest for the Transformation of Human Beings, Aleksandra Brokman (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)
Part IV - Technologies of Psycho-Physiological Remaking
11. Health and Heroism: Shifting Patterns in Late Central Europe, Jan Arend (University of Tubingen, Germany)
12. How to (Un)Make a Soviet Body: The Resistance of Fizkultura, Ben Krupp (University of Illinois, USA)
13. How to Be a War Invalid: Technologies of Rehabilitation during and After World War II Frances, Lee Bernstein (Drew University, USA)
14. From Psychosis to Psychopathy: Forensic Psychiatry and Criminality in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1948-1970, Jakub Strelec (Charles University, Czech Republic)
Index