Psychology Behind the Former Iron Curtain: A Special Issue

This supplement, Volume 46 from 2004, was put together by guest editors Alexander Thomas and Günther Bäumler. It gathers work from psychologists across Central and Eastern Europe, tracing how the discipline changed once the political order that had shaped it for decades fell apart. The through-line is less a single argument than a shared question: what happens to a science of mind and behavior when the regime that constrained it disappears?

Damián Kovác opens with an account of psychology's strange turns behind the Iron Curtain, focused on Czechoslovakia and later Slovakia. Jirí Hoskovec follows the thread into the Czech Republic, cataloguing the shifts that arrived after 1993. Vid Pecjak does something similar for Slovenia, picking up the story from 1990 onward.

Croatia gets its own treatment from Dinka Corkalo, who describes a movement from the laboratory bench toward fieldwork, and from the study of the senses toward questions of social change. Lothar Sprung and Helga Sprung sketch the history of psychology in the German Democratic Republic and then in the New Federal States after Germany reunified in 1990, two chapters of the same national story told under very different conditions.

Several contributions zoom in on Slovenia as a case study. Marco Polic and Grega Repov map the country as a cognitive object, looking at how people spatially represent it and attach identity to those representations. Janek Musek examines Slovenia through what he calls a psychomicroscope, reporting recent findings on personality and on the dimensions of human value.

Children and their development occupy a cluster of papers. Lubomír Pálenik describes the role of the Research Institute of Child Psychology and Pathopsychology, both in research and in direct care. Luba Medvedová and Tomá Kovác report on stress-coping research carried out at the same Bratislava institute. Elfriede M. Ederer looks at mental health difficulties in young children, comparing what the children say about themselves with what the adults around them report. Vladimír Dockal and Tomá Kovác turn to gifted children who also have disabilities, pairing research with practical work in Slovakia. Vlasta Zabukovec and Darja Kobal-Grum study the link between how students think and the social skills they develop.

The volume also carries broader theoretical pieces. Damián Kovác argues that quality of life is becoming a kind of master concept for the era taking shape. Imrich Ruisel surveys intelligence research coming out of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, while Tomá Kovác writes on creativity and the inner limits that hold it in check. On the applied side, Károly Bretz, Kornél Sipos, Katalin Borvendég and Éva Bretz consider the psychological dimensions of computerized gait training.

An addendum closes the collection: Ekkehard F. Kleiter proposes something he calls Psycho-System, or PsySys, an attempt to fold general, social and personality psychology into a single highly complex and integrative framework. The issue was published by Pabst Science Publishers.