Psychology in Cuba: symposium presented at the Cuba Research Forum Annual conference, Nottingham, UK, September 2010

[...]Mark Burton's commentary considers the similarities and differences between psychology in socialist Cuba and the capitalist world and what this tells us about the nature of Cuba and its revolution and about the nature of psychology in its social context - the extent to which a different psychology could be constructed, and also about how psychology in capitalist countries may be distorted by that system. In this sense, the purpose of the new social sciences was cultural, not simply technical, and this was a declared aim from the beginning: the creation of a culture that would promote the best of the humanist tradition and also be capable of being extended to all citizens without any form of exclusion.\n Interestingly, the interest of the revolutionary leadership in psychology came from Che's own education in Argentina (where psychoanalytic approaches have long been hyper-developed) and from the influence of Bernabé Ordaz, Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Havana (see http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/mayo/lun22/22bernabe.html), a key nucleus in the early post revolutionary development of Cuban psychology (de la Torre 2006).