From couch to camp: Psychoanalysis, refugeedom and the making of international mental health in the career of Maria Pfister-Ammende

Abstract

This article establishes the intersection of psychiatry and refugeedom as an area of historiographical inquiry. It traces how psychoanalysis was refracted through the paradigm of interwar mental hygiene and rescaled to a community level in the post-Second World War refugee camp, thereby contributing to the genesis of postwar international mental health. I examine the career of the Swiss Maria Pfister-Ammende from psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, to director of a refugee psychotherapeutic service in refugee camps in Switzerland, to international mental health expert at the World Health Organization. I situate her attempt at codifying an ‘uprooting neurosis’ within the genealogy of the medicalization of mobility and migration from nostalgia in the late 17th century to trauma in the late 20th. Implications for the historiography of refugee psychiatry and global mental health are considered.