105,626 research outputs found
H. Oosterhuis, Autour de la table. 1973
No full textGuelluy Robert. H. Oosterhuis, Autour de la table. 1973. In: Revue théologique de Louvain, 5ᵉ année, fasc. 2, 1974. p. 248
The 'Jews' of the Antifascist Left: Homosexuality and Socialist Resistance to Nazism
Full text linkIn the early 1930s, German Social Democrats and Communists seized upon the homosexual orientation of some Nazi leaders, especially Ernst Rohm, with the aim of discrediting the entire National Socialist movement. In Western Europe as well as the Soviet Union, there was a general tendency among socialists in the 1930s to identify homosexuality with Nazism, Antifascist leftists created the impression that homosexuality was widespread in Nazi organizations. Such socialist theorists as Wilhelm Reich tended to view homosexuality sociologically and psychologically as a typical rightist, nationalist, and above all fascist aberration, Leftist aversion to homosexuality was not only an expression of political opportunism. Prejudices against homosexuality were part and parcel of socialist thinking and became even more deep-rooted among leftists as a consequence of the ideological and moral confrontation with National Socialism. Against the presumed immorality and perversion of the Nazis, the antifascists stressed their own rationality and purity
The Politics of Health and Citizenship:Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
No full textHealth has been defined as a basic human right and also, in most of the welfare states in the Western as well as in the former communist world, as a civil right. The Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organisation drafted in 1945, states that '[t]he enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.' And article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, reads: 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including […] medical care.' No matter whether such rights are explicitly laid down in constitutions, in other (social security) laws, or in the administrative regulations of the welfare state, in many countries health and disease have become an affair of the state as well as an important constituent in the exercise of democratic citizenship. The welfare state provides medical care for individuals - at least for its residents - according to their needs, not because of who they are or what they possess, but because they are citizens with equal rights. Access to health care is an aspect of democratic citizenship: it is considered, not just as a favour or a commodity, but as a right. In fact such rights and provisions reflect long-term historical developments: next to poverty, (ill) health was one of the first social issue targeted by the emerging intervention state in the nineteenth century. As part of the discourse of human rights in liberal-democratic political thought, the notion of health as a right can be traced back to natural law in Enlightenment philosophy and the principles of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, proclaimed by the revolutionary French National Assembly in 1789. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medicine and politics became mutually entwined to an increasing extent. Health care has become a substantive and increasingly visible issue in democratic as well as authoritarian and totalitarian politics. Most national health care systems in the West, although organised in different ways, epitomise the principle that all inhabitants have an equal right to health care according to need and that its costs are shared equitably. Apart from inevitable biological distinctions between individuals, everybody should have equal opportunities for health. The relation between health and citizenship, however, is far from self-evident and uncontested; it is fraught with complications and ambiguities. The idea that medical care is a human and civil right is easily formulated in the abstract, but it runs into difficulties as soon as practical implementation is at stake. Health cannot be construed as an absolute, legally enforceable right, like freedom of speech or religion, universal suffrage or fair trial. A human or civil right to health cannot be guaranteed for the simple reason that, in spite of the considerable advances of modern medical science and technology, individual health and disease are still, to a large extent, a matter of nature and fate. Governments can at best provide the conditions that put individuals on a more or less equal footing with regard to chances for health. However, as long as the necessary means, such as money, medical knowledge, and an adequate health care infrastructure are lacking, this right will be an illusory promise. The realisation of health as a human right has to be fought for and requires resources, solidarity, social responsibility, a long-term perspective, and the effort to resolve difficult questions and conflicts of interests.<br/
Outpatient Psychiatry and Mental Health Care:International Perspectives
Full text linkThis article is about the main similarities and differences between the twentieth-century history of extramural psychiatry and mental health care in the countries that are central in this volume: France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. My comparative analysis not only switches back and forth between relevant general trends and specific national developments. It also has a double focus: the development of outpatient services and other facilities in society, also known as 'community care' in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and 'de-institutionalisation', the demise of the public system of mental institutions, or at least a considerable reduction of its size. First I outline the relevant developments in extramural mental health care during the first half of the twentieth century. Then I will explore the changing constellation of psychiatry and mental health care in the second half of the last century, which some scholars refer to as the third psychiatric revolution: the different ways and degrees in which de-institutionalisation was implemented in the various countries and the accompanying shift towards outpatient or community care. Moreover, special notice will be taken of the tensions between ideals and realities. At the very end I shall again briefly consider the main differences and similarities between the six countries. Histories of psychiatry largely centre on mental institutions; studies on the history of outpatient psychiatry and mental health care are still thin on the ground and therefore the data at my disposal are incomplete and fragmentary. My comparative analysis relies on some available studies in English, Dutch and German, the preceding articles in this volume, and some papers presented at the Anglo-Dutch-German Workshop on Social psychiatry and Ambulant Care in the Twentieth Century, which took place in London in 2002.<br/
Insanity and Other Discomforts:A Century of Outpatient Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in the Netherlands 1900-2000
Full text linkThroughout the nineteenth century, psychiatry in the Netherlands, as in other countries, primarily developed in relation to the care of the insane in asylums. Around 1900, however, it also gained ground in clinics tied to universities, in sanatoria and other facilities for mental and neurotic patients as well as alcohol addicts, and in private practice. After the First World War, psychiatrists began to treat more and more individuals who were not institutionalised. The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of the mental health movement and the establishment of Pre- and Aftercare Services for the mentally ill and the mentally retarded as well as counselling centres for problem children. In the Second World War the first public facility for psychotherapy was established, followed by Centres for Family and Marriage problems. In the nineteenth century psychiatry centred on the notion that the mentally ill could be cured by temporarily removing them from society, but in the twentieth century, the opposite view gradually won ground. It was now thought better to treat those with either serious disorders or minor psychic and behavioural problems in ways that enhanced their social functioning and allowed them to remain in their everyday environments as much as possible. In the last decades of the twentieth century, this approach gained prominence in Dutch mental health care. In this general overview, I will map all the various extramural organisations, facilities, and practices in the Netherlands in which psychiatrists and other professional groups have played a role during the twentieth century. My discussion is chronologically divided into four periods: (1) before the Second World War, when the first outpatient facilities and the first mental health organisations were established, with specific contradictions coming to the fore from the beginning; (2) the years of the German occupation and post-war reconstruction (1940-1965), when the fairly small-scale mental health care system rapidly expanded and professional expertise was increasingly emphasised; (3) the years between the mid-1960s and early 1980s, marked by a substantial increase in scale of the mental health system as a whole, a growing involvement and funding by the government, and a striving for greater uniformity in the fragmented outpatient care sector; and finally, (4) the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which the limitations of the sector’s unbridled growth became visible and the emphasis shifted from building an independent outpatient sector towards closer collaboration with institutional psychiatry. Moreover, my discussion is organised around four themes: (1) the formal and institutional development of outpatient mental health care, including its funding; (2) the professional groups that shaped it and its various groups of patients and clients; (3) the kinds of approaches and treatments adopted by the mental health facilities; and finally, (4) the larger socio-cultural context.<br/
Leftist Sexual Politics and Homosexuality: A Historical Overview
No full textFor almost a full century now, the revolutionary prospect of socialism has fuelled opening forays first of the homosexual emancipation and later of the gay liberation movements, both in Europe and in North America. It inspired Edward Carpenter and Magnus Hirschfeld at the turn of the century; Andr? Gide and Richard Linsert in the post-World War I years; Harry Hay and Jim Kepner in the post-World War II era; and the British and American Gay Liberation Front, the Italian Fuori!, the French FHAR, the German "Rotzschwule," and the Dutch Red Faggots following the Stonewall rebellion. While the official socialist parties of Northwestern Europe may have made only limited contributions to homosexual emancipation, they certainly have a better record than conservative and Christian parties and even the liberals, who have consistently, if contradictorily, underlined the freedom of private life. Even so, parties across the entire political spectrum have gradually come to endorse at least some of the movement's goals. As it has advanced, the gay movement has changed as well, and it now finds itself pulled in divergent directions. Gay leftists who still subscribe to the ideals expressed in Marxist and utopian socialist writings now find themselves at demonstrations shoulder-to-shoulder with members of ACT UP and Queer Nation, to say nothing of gay conservatives and gay Christians. The successes achieved by the contemporary gay movement despite or precisely because of its diversity support Foucault's argument that "there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case...." At the close of the twentieth century, the welfare state has reached its apogee in Northwestern Europe. As blue-collar workers historically committed to class struggle have become relatively well-to-do and minoritarian, socialist parties have increasingly lost their traditional base of support and been forced into the defensive. Depending only on the socialists would mean relying on an ineffectual partner, for nowhere are they in a stable position of power. Long before the collapse of "really existing socialism" in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, gay and lesbian movements began developing their own autonomous politics independent of parties. They moved in this direction in part because the coalition with leftism so frequently led to disappointment, particularly when gays and lesbians working within socialist parties were called upon to subordinate or abandon their own goals in favor of party platforms. In other cases the gay-left coalition failed to yield results because a single-minded reliance on one party placed limits on lobbying other parties and entering compromises. We have reached a time when inherited ideologies are no longer capable of laying claim to the undivided loyalty of the gay movement, if indeed they ever were. As it has developed autonomous theories and practices, the gay movement's choice of coalition partners has increasingly come to be based on pragmatism and success in advancing the gay agenda. Indeed, the roles of the gay movement and political parties have undergone a notable switch in recent years, with parties currying the support of the gay movement rather than vice versa. This signals a shift from the desire for politics to a politics of desire, going far beyond traditional socialist ideologies
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