History of the unconscious in Soviet Russia: From its origins to the fall of the Soviet Union – 2008
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2
History of the unconscious in Soviet Russia: From its origins to the fall of the Soviet Union
Russia accepted the notion of the unconscious and psychoanalysis before many western countries. The first Russian Psychoanalytic Society was established in 1911. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, for a short happy period, the following psychoanalysts were active: Sabina Spielrein, Tatiana Rosenthal, Moshe Wulff, Nikolai Osipov, and Ivan Ermakov. Also scholars associated with Soviet ideas participated, among them: Aleksandr Luria, Michail Rejsner, Pavel Blonskij. Lev Vygotskij himself dealt with unconscious. A second psychoanalytic society was set up in Kazan. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1920s, repression dissolved the psychoanalytic movement. Even the word ‘psychoanalysis’ was banned for decades. Nonetheless, interest in the unconscious, as distinct from psychoanalytic conceptions, survived in the work of the Georgian leader D. Uznadze. His followers organized the 1979 International Symposium on the Unconscious, Tbilisi, Georgia, which marked the breaking of an ideological barrier. Since then, many medical, psychological, philosophical and sociological scholars have taken an interest in the unconscious, a subject both feared, for its ideological implications, and desired. Since the 1980s, psychoanalytic ideas have been published in the scientific press and have spread in society. The fall of the USSR in 1991 liberalized the scientific and institutional development of psychoanalysis.
Origin and repression
Russia was one of the first countries to welcome psychoanalytic ideas, before psychoanalysis was accepted or even known in many Western nations. Furthermore, the notion of the unconscious was already present in the tradition of the 19th century Russian philosophers and in the ‘objective psychology’ school, whose most predominant member was Ivan P. Pavlov. The latter, despite his distance from psychoanalysis, was nevertheless cited by Freud (1905), as regarding the psychological anticipation. Meanwhile another member of the objective psychology school, Vladimir M. Bechterev, through his interpretation of perversions and inversions based on reflexology, attracted the attention of Otto Fenichel (1924). On his part, the 19th century founder of objective psychology, Ivan M. Sechen, had on several occasions expressed significant reflections on the theme of the unconscious.
From the beginning of the 20th century, psychoanalytic ideas began to spread in Russia. Only relatively recently have studies on the history of the subject been written (Angelini, 1988, 2002; Etkind, 1993: Miller 1998). The crucial year is 1908, with three significant events. Firstly, an important psychiatric journal, Psikhoterapiia (Psychotherapy), was launched in Russia, with Vyrubov as its editor. The latter was a psychiatrist who had shown an interest in the suggestive-persuasive method used in Berne by Paul Dubois (1904) and in the Freudian thoeries which were then starting to appear on the scientific horizon. Psikhotherapiia regularly published, in the succeeding years, information on the progress of the psychoanalytic movement, as well as full psychoanalytical articles, including various translations of Freud’s writings. Also in 1908, a military doctor from Odessa, A.A. Pevnitskii, held in S.Petersburg the first conference with a psychoanalytic subject. Finally, in that same year, the Korsakoff’s Journal for Neuropathology and Psychology published two articles by Nicolaj J. Osipov (1887-1934). Osipov was to become known in the official history of psychiatry as one of the most important pupils of Bechterev. These articles dealt with Jungian studies on the concept of complex, the associative experiments, and ‘the most recent works of the Freudian school’.
Osipov had studied in Switzerland and had worked for some time at Hospital Burgholzli in Zurich canton, Jung’s workplace. He had met Freud in Western Europe, and in Russia had been a student of Bechterev. He had worked as an assistant in the University Clinic of Moscow under Professor Vladimir P. Serbsky, an open-minded psychiatrist who had not opposed his psychoanalytic interests. Osipov was soon surrounded by young colleagues interested in the therapeutic applications of Freud’s ideas. In this same period Osipov organised, with the support of Professor Serbsky, a series of bi-weekly meetings, the ‘Little Friday Psychiatric Group’, in which psychoanalytic topics were discussed. These meetings were attended by physicians and other professionals from related disciplines, such as psychiatry, sociology, and psychology. Osipov, a real pioneer of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia, together with O.B.Feltsmann (who was temporarily interested in the Freudian theory) founded in that same period the ‘Psychotherapeutic library’, a project publishing several Russian editions of Freud’s and Jung’s works, starting from 1909. Despite their enthusiasm, neither Osipov or Feltsmann had been personally trained. Freud himself, in The History of The Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) mentions the Russian M. Wulff with these words: “Only Odessa owns, in the person of M. Wulff, a trained psychoanalyst”. In fact Wulff was the first Russian psychoanalyst to be fully trained, having completed his personal analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin. Back in Odessa, his native town, he carried out, from 1909, several years of intense analytic work.
On the 2nd May 1911, Freud informed Ferenczi that he had received, that same day, Doctor Leonid Drosnés, who had told him that in Russia a psychoanalytic society, based in Moscow, had been formed. Its founders were Osipov, Vyrubov and Drosnés himself (E.Jones, 1953). Drosnés was in fact the doctor who had consulted in 1909 in Odessa the young patient with neurotic episodes later described by Freud in his The Clinical Case of the Wolf Man (1914) Drosnés had accompanied the young man on his long journey from Odessa to Vienna.
Another member of the emerging psychoanalytic society of Moscow, was P.A. Ermakov, the new director of the Moscow University clinic, who had replaced Serbsky. The latter had resigned from the organisation, together with Osipov, because of political tensions. Between 1912 and 1915 Wulff, Ermakov and Osipov translated into Russian almost the entire works of Freud. Meanwhile, the German journals Zentralblatt, Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse and Imago pubblished about a dozen Russian contributions. In those same years, other young Russian students had come across psychoanalytical ideas in the course of travels related to their intellectual and political development. Amongst them was Tatiana Rosenthal who, when very young, had emigrated to Zurich and was part of the Bolshevik movement. She had graduated as a doctor in 1911, and after having been an active member of the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna, she went back to Russia after the Revolution. Another woman who had a relevant role in the history of Russian psychoanalysis was Sabina Spielrein. Born in 1885 in Rostov on Don, Spielrein was hospitalised at the Bugholzli in Zurich, Jung’s hospital, between 1904 and 1905, suffering from ‘hysteria’. Later, she studied medicine at Zurich University, from where she graduated, in 1911, devoting herself, thereafter, to psychoanalysis. It was Spielrein who in the meeting of 26 November 1911 of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, presented a paper in which she proposed the concept of the death instinct. On that occasion Freud rejected the idea, as he considered misleading an explanation of such a concept using biological rather than psychological motives. After a few brief visits to Russia, Spielrein finally returned to her native country after 1923.
For many years, the violence of war and, later, of the revolution, interrupted all intellectual and scientific connections between Europe and Russia. After a period of confusion and isolation, the psychoanalytic society reconstituted itself in 1921, in Moscow. It only consisted, to begin with, of eight members. Its programme was orientated around the three filds of aesthetics, medicine and pedagogy. We find here names such as Wulff and Ermakov, who, together with A. Bernstein, comprised the first medical group. In 1922 the number of the members had already risen to fifteen. It included members with a philosophical background and other of various affiliations. The pedagogical current of the Russian psychoanalytic movement found its greatest expression in the person of Vera Schimdt. In 1921 she founded the legendary experiment of the Psychoanalytic School of Moscow. Spielrein too was temporarily part of this project. Amongst the school children was Schimdt’s child and, according to some witnesses (Faenza, 2003), even Stalin’s child. To begin with, this project was in line with the post-revolutionary climate and with the aspiration to create a new kind of human being in a new kind of society. It was hoped that the educators involved in the project would try to understand and interpret the unconscious derivatives of the infantile unconscious and separate them from conscious manifestations. Transference phenomena between children and educators were taken into account and there was an attempt to create a relationship founded on affection and trust rather than on authority. Furthermore, the educators were also expected to maintain an analytic attitude within themselves.
Punishments were avoided, as well as excessive manifestations of love. On the main, there was an effort to adapt the physical environment to the needs and the age of the children. Children enjoyed maximum freedom of movement and their toilet training was not constrained by any rigid or artificial control. The same level of open-mindness was shown towards their sexual manifestations and curiosity (Schmidt, 1924). It was probably this latter aspect of Vera Schmidt’s pedagogical project that provoked a reaction on the authorities’ part. It is an established fact spiteful accusations of pornography and sexual abuse caused, in 1924, after various upheavals, the closing down of the so called ‘White Nursery’, the Moscow Psychoanalytic School. The Moscow psychoanalytic society had met twice (November 1923 and February 1924) in order to discuss the problems of the school, while Schmidt undertook, in 1923 a journey to Berlin and Vienna to inform the psychoanalytic movement of its existence. Her courageous initiative had been allowed to develop beyond, perhaps, what was imaginable, partly because she enjoyed, in the Soviet world, a solid position. Her husband, Otto Schmidt, a mathematician, was part of the Soviet of Moscow and of the State Soviet of scientists. He too was a member of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society and as director of the State Publications had made materially possible the publication and diffusion of many psychoanalytic writings.
The most prominent personality of the Psychoanalytic Society of Moscow, in those years, was Ermakov, particularly through his commitment to the aesthetics section. His numerous works on aesthetics were to prompt reactions some years later from Lev Vygotsky (1925) and Valentin Voloshinov (1927), whose name is thought by many to be the pseudonym for Michail Bachtin. Both were very interested in psychoanalytic theory. The second section of the Society, was the clinical one, and it was directed by Professor Wulff, secretary of the |Society and a training analyst. For a while, in 1923, he shared this task with Spielrein, who, after brief and intermittent visits to her country, had finally left Switzerland and returned to Russia. Spielrein had founded, in Lausanne in 1919, a psychoanalytic study group called ‘Circle Interne’[inner circle]. For over a year, she lived in the Student Residence, in the centre of Moscow, with her husband Pavel Scheftel, a physician, and their daughter Renata. In 1925, after the birth of her second daughter Eva, Spielrein moved to her home town, Rostov, where she devoted herself mainly to the psychoanalysis of children. The last of her works to appear in Western Europe was published by Imago in 1931. She died in 1914, with her two daughters, during the German invasion of Rostov in 1914. Another significant female character within Russian psychoanalysis was Tatiana Rosenthal, a follower of the Bolscheviks, who had participated in the revolutionary movement. She was able, in 1919, to found a psychoanalytic clinic in the new Institute of Brain Pathology based in St. Petersburg, formerly the Neurology Department, of the Military Academy, directed by the eminent scientist Vladimir Bechterev.
In 1922, Ermakov and Wulff founded a State Psychoanalytic Institute. This, to begin with, incorporated the psychoanalytic school in which Vera Schmidt was involved. Later, it opened a psychoanalytic clinic directed by Wulff. The Russian Psychoanalytic Institute was, after those of Berlin and Vienna the main centre of psychoanalytic training and activity. In 1924, this Institute proposed a programme of ten seminars and organized supplementary courses at Moscow University and at the Psychiatric Clinic. Ermakov himself, launched, in Moscow, the publication of a series called ‘The Psychological and Psychoanalytical library’, which appeared until 1929 (Vasilyeva, 2000).
As well as finding a home within the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society and its programmes, Freudian ideas were met with interest by many scholars. Under the impetus of the revolutionary movement, they welcomed psychoanalytic theories as an innovative methodology with implications for many disciplines, such as sociology, law, criminology etc. Obviously the term ‘psychoanalysis’ had a meaning different from its use today. Rooted in various, fundamentally philosophical disciplines, psychoanalytical thought was totally divorced from clinical practice. Some of these scholars were also part of the Moscow Society. However, historically and methodologically, they are best characterised as attempting to put psychoanalytical ideas to use in reinforcing the Marxist and Soviet perspective within their particular discipline. Some of them worked at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology in Moscow, while others were prominent, historically-important personalities from other fields. This is the case, for instance, with Pavel P. Blonskij, who appears in the list of Moscow psychoanalysts published in 1922 in the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse. In the period in which psychoanalysis gained his attention, Blonskij, a Bolshevik, was professor in the Second State University of Moscow, at the Krupskaia Academy for Communist Education, and in various other pedagogical institutes. He was the founder of paedology, a discipline that is to pedagogy, he said, as botany is to gardening. His intention was to found a new pedagogy capable of educating a self-aware and active ‘new man’, an idea strongly resonant with the developing Soviet world. Psychoanalysis was considered reinforcement for his theory of psychic development.
Another member of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society was Michail A. Reisner, a jurist and professor of Law. Engaged in the People Commissariat of Justice, he tried to use psychoanalysis to establish links between the psychologies of individual and mass behaviour, and he was the precursor of some ideas that would later be explored by Otto Fenichel and the Frankfurt School (Etkind, 1993; Angelini, 1996).
The work of B. D. Fridman is situated in philosophically similar ground. Fridman, who was for some time active in the Psychoanalytic School of Moscow, tried to explain the underlying mechanisms in the formation of social ideologies, equating them, fundamentally, with the psychoanalytic concept of rationalisation. An even more philosophical line was taken by Bernard E. Bychovskij, who tried to link psychoanalysis to the energetist philosophy being expressed in those years by the German chemist-physicist Wilhelm Ostwald, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909. Historically, some connections have been made between psychoanalytic ideas and W. Ostwald’s ones (Dimitrov, 1971; Angelini, 1985), even though Freud never expressed openly any adhesion to Ostwaldian conceptions. Finally, Aron B. Zalkind, also listed as a member of the Moscow Society tried to produce a wide transformation of psychoanalysis, translating it – and distorting it considerably – into the terms of reflex theory elaborated by Ivan Pavlov.
Generally speaking, the concept of psychoanalysis proposed by these scholars, was not only divorced from the clinical field, practice being virtually impossible in the prevailing political context, but was often distorted and ideologically biaised. However, psychoanalytical ideas, with their innovative power, did become widespread, and were not restricted to Moscow. In those same years individuals or small groups interested in Freudian thought occurred in various other Russian localities. Information on these more peripheral activities are, however, limited. It is well known that in Kiev, apart from Zalkind who was a resident, there were active figures such as Vinogradov, Goldovskij and Hackebusch, the director of the University Clinic. As for Odessa, we know of two physicians, Chaletzky and Kogan who promoted psychoanalytic concepts. In Leningrad, all psychoanalytic activity ceased when in 1921 Tatiana Rosenthal, who had established herself there, committed suicide at the age of 36. Her colleague Leonid Drosnès, also active in Leningrad, moved then back to Odessa, his home town.
One of the most significant psychoanalytic centres, after Moscow, was that of Kazan in the Tartar Republic. It became a Psychoanalytic Society in 1922 on the initiative of a young psychologist, who was to become known in Western Europe as one of the fathers of contemporary neuropsychology: Aleksandr Romanovic Luria. He had previously described his project to Freud, who when answering his letter, greeted him with ‘Sehr geehrter Herr Prasident’ [Dear Mr. President]. Luria’s psychoanalytic activity, first in Kazan and then in Moscow, where he had settled in the autumn of 1923, is shown by his numerous contributions to the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, between 1922 and 1927. This work includes accounts of the general principles of Freudian thought, descriptions of the characteristics of anxiety, an analysis of a piece of theatre, and various other topics. From an historical perspective, Luria also belongs to that group of young Russian academics who arrived at psychoanalysis through the impetus of Marxist historical materialism. This is shown in particular in Luria’s 1925 essay Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology. Despite his laborious and problematic input of ideology, Luria’s great merit was that he understood and emphasised the epistemological power of psychoanalysis, giving it the ability to develop an overall approach to the human personality, thus overcoming the limits of 19th century experimental psychology. The latter was at the time the object of fierce debate, taking place also at the philosophical level. In the list of the psychoanalysts belonging to the Moscow Society and reported on the Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, there appears also the name of one of the most prominent personalities of 20th century psychology: Lev Semenovic Vygotsky, founder of the historical-cultural psychology school. According to the reports of the above journal, he had at least two roles in the Society: one related to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, and the other to the aesthetics strand in Freud’s work (1924; 1927). Furthermore, in 1925, he wrote, in collaboration with Luria, a brief introduction to the Russian translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this work he expresses various positive opinions towards Freudian ideas, though interspersed with many criticisms, especially towards the death instinct concept. In truth, Vygotsky, unlike other colleagues of his, never fully accepted psychoanalysis, not even briefly. He did however engage with the theory, though in a limited way. His critical attitude towards Freudian thought was revealed even when he dealt with the problem of psychic, unconscious, phenomena in The Psychic, Consciousness and the Unconscious (1930). In this work he acknowledged the methodological importance of psychoanalysis, particularly its denial of the dichotomy, characteristic of 20th century thought, between psychic and physical processes. However he expressed some worries about Freudian psychic determinism and voiced concerns that it might open the way to biologicisation. In fact, Vygotsky, the theorist of consciousness as an historical-social phenomenon, did not deal with the unconscious in a systematic way, but accepted it as a given, thus opposing those who identified, in a reductive way, consciousness with the psychic. At any rate, the huge reach of Vigotskyan conceptions has produced, in the second half of the twentyth century, many ideas which have also interested psychoanalytic theory. Without being overly detailed, it is worth remembering that the historiography of psychoanalysis possesses a growing literature that aims to understand possible points of contact between psychoanalytic thought and historical-cultural theory. These reflections have begun to have their impact on psychoanalytic theory.
James Wertsch, an author interested in psychoanalysis (1985; 1991; 1998), has developed Vygotskyan ideas, studying the idea of the regulation of human behaviour through language, signs and other cultural artefacts. Wertsch (1990) has also attempeted, using a psychological perspective, to make a cautious link between Vygotsky and psychoanalysis, emphasising in particular the interaction and the exchange of meanings between the child and the adult. This can be witnessed in the special issue of the Contemporary Psychoanalysis journal, entirely dedicated to the relationship between the great Russian scholar and psychoanalytic thought. In that issue, other authors, closer to psychoanalysis, offer a variety of reflections on the relationship,even suggesting, as Tanzer did (1990), that in the wider context of G.H.Mead’s writings, it is possible to make an analogy between Vygotsky’s thought, and H.S.Sullivan’s.
Subsequently, Wilson and Weinstein (1992), in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, wrote a detailed study, including a clinical perspective, on the Vygotskian view of the acquisition of language. In this article different aspects of the unconscious dimension are taken into account, such as phantasies, identifications and defensive mechanisms. These same authors in 1996, proposed a link between the concept of ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ (ZPD), elaborated by Vygotsky in the context of his child studies, and the notion of transference. We should realise that, within the academic field of pyschology, beginning in the 1980s, there has been a wide and systematic growth of Vygotskian themes. This new interest was caused by the publication in English, in 1978, of an anthology of various writings by Vygotsky, gathered in the volume Mind and Society. Since then, following this trend, numerous psychologists have highlighted the close relationship between environmental context, emotions and development (Cole, 1990; Bruner, 1990; Shweder, 1990; Valsiner, 1995).
These studies, which explore the relation between individuals and their socio-cultural environment, have urgent and important methodological problems which produce conflicting theorethical positions. Within psychology, an open attitude (Cole, Engestrom, Vasquez, 1997), inclined to methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 2003) has, up to now, predominated. This study however, which builds a historical context to psychoanalytic thought, actual psychological theory – and thus its methodological themes – cannot be described in any depth. As far as history is concerned, the fact is that at the start of the 20th century, a substantial amount of Russian psychological and philosophical thought was influenced by Freudian ideas. However, while on the one hand psychoanalytical theories moved into wide areas within Soviet culture, they were, from the 1920s, the target of hard criticisms. These criticisms, philosophical in nature, arose because of the relation of psychoanalytic theory to Marxism and are linked to a complex international situation.
Psychoanalytic conceptions were often used to support critical revisions of Marxism, especially in Austria and Germany. The Soviet orthodox Marxist philosophers vehemently attacked the ‘Austro-Marxist revisionists’, condemning at the same time almost all the theories that the latter had supported, including psychoanalysis. It can be said that these attacks came from the faction engaged in the fight against Trotskyism in the scientific field. This extremist faction criticised and banned from the Soviet cultural horizon most of the modern science’s developments, including Einstein’s relativity theory, Planck’s quantum theory, and modern biology. The attack on psychoanalytic conceptions and on numerous psychological theories carried on for years and culminated, after psychoanalysis had been eliminated, with the Central Committee of the Communist Party formalising, on 4 July 1936 a ‘severe criticism’ of any ‘anti-scientific and bourgeois principle’. As a result, psychoanalysis, as well as Blonskij’s ideas, and the historical-cultural concepts of Vygotsky disappeared from the landscape of Soviet Russian psychology. In a society which was restructuring itself on authoritarian lines, and which only allowed a single set of ideas, one could not expect the survival of initiatives based on psychoanalytical ideas, Vera Schmidt’s school for example. Psychoanalysts disappeared. Some of them emigrated; others, like Tatiana Rosenthal, came to a tragic end. From the second half of the 1930s the Soviet repression became so violent and all-encompassing that it struck not only the psychoanalytic movement, but even its adversaries. In other words, the concept of the unconscious could not be mentioned or even criticised.
From that point, the whole of Soviet psychology remained, until after the Second World War, substantially confined within the context of Pavlovian physiology. However, within this general context, there were some researchers who, although distant from Freudian thought, stepped outside the Pavlovian framework. They laid the basis for the re-emergence of those repressed contents, belonging to both the scientific and the affective spheres, which were going to find some formal space only in the second half of the 20th century.
The return of the repressed
Among the scholars who, though not psychoanalytically oriented, became interested in the notion of the unconscious, and thus distanced themselves from Pavlovian orthodoxy, was Serguei Leonidovitch Rubinstejn (1889-1960). He was a critic of Freud, but he acknowledged his importance in confronting psychology with new problems, and had, at least, the courage of talking about him. Rubinstejn saw theoretical relevance in the notion of the unconscious and he attempted a conceptual distinction between instinct and drive. He seemed to fear that the biological aspects might gain a philosophical autonomy. In his view, the subject and the world were linked in a dynamic interaction (Koltsova et al., 1996).
These ideas were collected in Foundations of General Psychology (1940) which had a wide circulation, especially when reprinted in 1946. Despite all this, the official theoreticians of Marxism, in particular E.T. Chernakov, accused him of supporting psychoanalysis, thus deviating from ‘historical Marxism’ (Wortis, 1950). These extreme Marxists aimed at the total historicisation of the human being, including its biological and instinctual aspects. At the same time, the contributions of those Marxists, such as Lukàs (1923), who had explored the importance of the ‘subjective factor’ in history, were ignored. This dismissal of the importance of subjectivity meant putting into question not only psychoanalysis, but the methodological autonomy of any psychological inquiry or perspective in the scientific field. An important scholar of the period was aware of this risk: V.N. Miasishev (1893-1973). He showed some familiarity with psychoanalytical theories and, after Stalin’s death, was nominated director of the prestigious Psychoneurological Institute of Leningrad, named after its founder, V.M. Bechterev. He was also a professor of psychology at Leningrad University and he claimed, contrary to the dominant physiologists, that the treatment of some patients, in particular those with obsessive and hysterical phenomena, would require a fundamentally psychological perspective.
According to Miller (1998), some of Miasishev’s published cases are influenced by psychoanalytical theories, even though there is no explicit reference to Freud in them. Because of his tacit sympathy for the ‘Western science’, he was never accepted to the Academy of Medical Sciences, rigidly dominated at that time by orthodox Pavlovians.
Meanwhile, in far away Georgia, Dimitri Uznadze (1886-1950), aided by his geographical isolation, had been systematically researching unconscious phenomena since the 1940s. He proposed his own theory as an alternative to the dichotomy between psychical determinism and physical causality. However, in his research, both on unconscious phenomena and on psychical events more generally, he claimed to adhere to the experimental validity of the objective cause. The key concept in Uznadze’s theory is what he calls ‘ustanovka’, translated as ‘set’. This term describes an unconscious psychical configuration that governs an individual’s relationship with his environment. Sets are formed in the course of development, when the person’s organism reacts to certain situations. They possess, therefore, the characteristic of historicity. They can change, come into conflict with each other and so on. Uznadze always had a critical attitude towards psychoanalysis and underlined the historical aspect of the sets because the theorists of Soviet Marxism accused Freud of overlooking the social determinants. When, in 1978, the First International Symposium on the Unconscious took place in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, and re-launched the theme of the unconscious in post-war Russia, Nancy Rollins’ (1978) rejection of these accusations was somewhat paradoxical. She claimed that psychoanalysis considers the Superego to be mainly an effect of the environment and of the education received by the parents in a family context. Seen in this context, psychoanalysis could be said to overvalue the role played by social factors. Distinguishing himself from reattology, reflexology and other branches of behaviourism, Uznadze rejects the atomistic approach to the human psyche and deliberately proposes a holistic theory.
When in the middle of the 1920s, the debate about the theory of conscience had become lively, two opposite positions could be defined. The first suggested the abandonment of the concept of consciousness, as a mentalistic superstition, in favour of an objective study of behaviour. The second position attempted, in some ways, to save such a concept. Uznadze considered that the notion of consciousness was necessary as one of psychology’s instruments; but he proposed also that the non-conscious set be considered a self-sufficient psychical entity. Due to contingent reasons, not least the geographical isolation in which research on sets theory was being carried out, and the fact that Uznadze’s publications were all in the Georgian language, more than thirty years went by between the conceiving of the set theory and the publication in Russian, in 1961, of Uznadze’s main works. On the other hand, Georgian psychology accepted the set theory almost uncritically and viewed it as a national source of pride. For these reasons, and perhaps because Stalin was Georgian, the set theory remained unscathed through the ideological wars of the 1930s and 1940s and was also relatively untouched by the vigorous revival of Pavlov-oriented studies that occurred in the 1950s. Towards the end of the 1950s, however, the orthodox Pavlovians compared the notion of set, with its unconscious dimension, to ideas expressed by the philosopher E. Mach (1838-1916). In the Soviet context, this methodological consideration implied a heavy accusation, because Mach, in his time, had been attacked by Lenin himself. Desipte this, in 1957, Z.I. Chodzava wrote a long article in defence of Uznadze’s ideas and of the concept of the set. The latter remained an important presence in Russian psychology.
On a more general level, in those years, any psychological perspective not in line with Pavlovian physiology was criticised. This period, referred to as the ‘Pavlovian revival’, had developed from the ‘Scientific session on the problems of physiological doctrine by the academic I.P. Pavlov’, organised by the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and held in Moscow from the 28th June to the 4th of July 1950. This ‘session’ remained a point of ideological and methodological reference for more than a decade. The philosophical reference consisted in the psychophysical parallelism.
In 1957, D.D. Fedotov, Head of the Psychiatry Institute of the Soviet Minister of Health, was invited to write an article for the American journal The Monthly Review, in which, along with the predictable criticisms of Freud, he confirmed, in Leninist fashion, that the ‘psyche is a reflex, in the brain, of a reality which exists objectively’. In October 1958, under the auspices of the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Medical Science a conference was held in Moscow on the ‘Problems of Ideological Struggle with Modern Freudianism’ (Bondarenko P.P., Rabinovich M.Kh., 1959). On this occasion the usual range of neurological, psychological and philosophical criticisms towards the psychoanalytical theory was re-affirmed. However, the influence of Freudian thought had started to be felt, in both the scientific and cultural contexts. The scholars V.N. Miasishev and P.K. Anochin claimed that in order to be able to criticise psychoanalysis it was necessary to study it in depth. After the death of Stalin, as the general political situation changed, many authors supported the re-establishment of a methodological autonomy in psychology, and criticised the orthodox Pavlovianism as mechanistic and reductionist. However, in 1959, during a Congress in Czechoslovakia, which reunited Western and Eastern scholars, psychoanalysis was again criticised in favour of Pavlovianism. It was only in May 1962, on occasion of the ‘All-union Session on the Philosophical Problems Linked to the Physiology of Superior Nervous Activity and to Psychology’, held in Moscow, that the mechanistic positions assumed in the course of the two Academies of 1950 were finally attacked. Psychology was officially rehabilitated and promoted to the status of an independent science. The problem of the unconscious resumed its importance and attention was drawn again on Uznadze’s model. His works had been translated from Georgian into Russian a few months previously. Also the contacts with the Western world, interrupted during the Cold war, were resumed. In 1964, in East Berlin, a symposium was held dedicated to a more specific theme: Corticovisceral Physiology, Pathology and Therapy’. ‘Corticovisceral’ was the official replacement term for ‘psychosomatic’, the latter being ideologically contested by the Soviets. The congress was attended by several Western psychoanalysts, for instance Wittkowen, who were interested in psychosomatic phenomena.
On that occasion, according to Chertok (1982), the Sovietic anti-psychoanalytic front lost its coherence. Despite the traditional attacks on psychoanalysis, made by I.T. Kurtsin, director of the Institute of cortico-visceral research, the anti-psychoanalysis polemics were weakened by authoritative personalities such as Birjnkov director of the Institute of experimental Medicine of the Academy of Medical Sciences in Leningrad and Cernigovskij, director of the Pavlov Institute, whose contributions centered on the psychological question of human emotions. Kurtsin himself reconsidered, in 1965, his anti-Freudian position with the volume A Critique of Freudianism in Medicine and Physiology, in which he acknowledged that psychosomatic medicine found its origin in the spread of psychoanalysis into the fields of physiology and neurology. The same year, A.M. Kaletskij published a philosophical article on the prestigious Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Psychiatry. In this article he analysed the relationship between psychoanalysis and existentialism and he criticised both, on ideological grounds. In 1967, I.S. Kon, an eminent sociologist of Leningrad University, published the volume The Sociology of Personality which contained a whole chapter dedicated to the psychoanalytic theory of personality, which was criticised from a Soviet sociology perspective.
Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, some precise research questions in relation to the brain and the psyche were defined. On one side there was an ‘anti-psychological’ group, with a psychiatric background, relating to the Moscow Academy of Medical Sciences. This group was essentially interested in psychosis and stressed its organic cause. This was at a time when in the West the psychosocial perspective was gaining ground. On the other side, there was a psychologically oriented group, which proposed further developments in Uznadze’s set theory. Meanwhile, the interest towards non-pharmacological psychiatry and the various psychotherapeutic methods, including psychoanalysis, as used in the West, was increasing.
In the same period, Aleksandr R.Luria’s School of Neuropsychology was also flourishing. Luria had, since the 1930s, abandoned his interest on psychoanalysis, due to ideological repression, and had dedicated himself to the study of the brain, in particular of the cortical functions. Leòntiev was also fundamental in the development of this perspective. In the 1970s Leòntiev’s ‘Activity theory’ became virtually the official Soviet doctrine. From that time, within an essentially psychological perspective, some researchers developed a conception of human personality which was attentive to the contributions of the now flourishing Georgian school and which incorporated Vygotsky’s conceptions (Asmolov A., 1998). In the 1970s, the debate on the theme of the unconscious was kept alive mainly by the Georgian school and all the followers of Uznadze’s set theory.
The work of Filipp Veniaminovic Bassin represents, both theoretically and historiographically, a milestone in the debate of the unconscious at that time. His book The problem of the Unconscious (1968) is the first Russian work, since the 1920s, which contains the word ‘unconscious’ in the title. This was symptomatic of a widespread need for scientific theorisation. However, Bassin never accepted the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. He rather considered the unconscious as a amnifestation of the ‘higher nervous activity’, which needed empirical physiological and neurological study. For this reason, he considered Uznadze’s set theory to be ‘the only conception of the unconscious which has been demonstrated at an experimental level’ (1968). On the whole, he was concerned that psychoanalysis placed the unconscious in a position too far removed from the notion of consciousness; he linked the notion of lapsus to latent motivations of the set and he saw a risk of anthropomorphism in the symbolic significance of dreams. He was thus adopting the perspective of the Russian I.E. Volpert (1966), who, in the 1960s, had organised research and experiments on dreams.
Convincing arguments rejecting these criticisms can be found in the work of Cesare Musatti. Since 1959, he had responded to Bassin’s accusations of psychoanalysis in several, widely circulated articles, adopting an open and scientific dialogue. Musatti defended Freud’s choice of the psychological interpretative criterion, highlighting its essential methodological value. It should not therefore be counter-opposed, as an alternative, to the physiological perspective. Furthermore he underlined Bassin’s lack of congruence in his evaluation of Freudian conceptions, particularly in relation to catharsis and dream symbolisation.
Two years later, Emilio Servadio (1961) was also debating with the Russian issues concerning the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature. However, the Russian positions themselves were not homogeneous. In those same years, A.E. Sheroziia (1969; 1973), a prominent figure of the Georgian school, claimed, distancing himself from Bassin, that, on matters of basic principles, there were some common interests between Uznadze and Freud. He claimed that both opposed the 19th century tradition, which conceived the various conscious psychical functions, such as perception, will, cognition, and others as separate parts of a mosaic. They both considered that unconscious processes formed the basis of the content of psychic activity and they both shared philosophical conceptions of a monistic kind. Finally, they both had conceived a psychological system of a general nature.
This current which attempted to find a common ground between Freud and Uznadze, was later resumed by some Western researchers, in particular Nancy Rollins (1978). In the 1970s the political and cultural atmosphere in the U.S.S. R. was gradually changing. The theme of the unconscious was starting to find some space, even if it was from a perspective critical of Freud. An example of this was the second edition, in 1971, of A.M. Sviadoshch Neuroses and their Treatment, originally published in 1959. Despite the inevitable criticisms of Freud, and in particular of his theory on infantile sexuality, some interest in Alfred Adler was emerging, perhaps because of his closeness, at the beginning of the 1900s, to the socialist movement, and for his clinical introduction of group psychotherapy. The latter was very popular, and was appreciated also from an ideological viewpoint. In 1977, A.E. Lichko, of the Bechterev Institute of Leningrad, wrote an article which emphasised the importance of the psychological relational aspects of childhood; and in 1978 A.H. Boiko, in Kiev, with his volume The problem of the Unconscious in Philosophy and the Concrete Sciences, though still critical of Freud from an ideological viewpoint, identified a real function of the unconscious which allows the adaptation of the human organism to the social environment . In that same period a new generation of sociologists started to show an interest in psychoanalysis and more particularly in Eric Fromm and Jacques Lacan. It is Fromm, appreciated for his Marxist roots, who was the point of reference for the work of V.M. Leibin, a philosopher at Moscow University. In 1972 Leibin wrote ‘Conformism and Respectability of Psychoanalysis’ in which he criticised psychoanalysis’s tendency to social conformism. At the same time, he introduced the Russian readers to the work of personalities such as Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erik Erikson and Herbert Marcuse. In 1972 and in 1974, a young sociologist from Moscow, V.N. Dobrenkov, in two works which described Fromm as a ‘liberal-bourgeois theorist’, offered nonetheless an exhaustive account of neo-Freudian conception in the European and American cultural context. In 1973, N.S. Avtonomova published ‘The Psychoanalytic Conceptions of Lacan’, a broad-ranging article which introduced the Russian readers to the complex thought of this author, without accusing him of being a ‘bourgeois antagonist of socialism’.
During the mid-1970s other works on Lacan, who was appreciated for his closeness to Marxism, continued to appear; but the msot authorative work for its broadness and depth, was by the aforementioned V.M. Leibin who, in 1977, published Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Neo-Freudianism. This remarkable volume examines the influence of European and American psychoanalysis on various fields, such as psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, and art, and emphasises the importance of psychoanalytic competence, in the clinical as well as in the social and cultural contexts. Furthermore, the volume contains an account of Wilhelm Reich’s theories and a philosophical speculation on the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to the work of some great Western thinkers: from Kierkegaard and Bergson, to Sartre and others. The theme of the unconscious had become an object of interest for a great part of the Russian scientific world. The need for general reflection on this topic in order to legitimate this kind of research in the political and cultural contexts, culminated with the organisation of a major congress held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1979. Historically, this symposium represented for Russia a turning point in the study of the unconscious. It was promoted by the major exponents of the ‘Georgian school’, in Uznadze’s homeland, and was possible because of a relatively less rigid political atmosphere. The main organisers of the conference were F.V. Bassin, the most prominent theorist of the unconscious of that period, A.S. Prangisvili, a research psychologist of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Georgian Republic and A.E. Sheroziia, a psychology lecturer at the Tbilisi State University. Another Soviet organiser was Sergei Tsuladze, a Georgian psychologist who had undergone psychoanalytic treatment in Paris. Amongst the foreign backers was Nancy Rollins, an American psychiatrist who had studied in Moscow and Leòn Chertok, a French psychiatrist widely trained in psychoanalysis and psychosomatics.
The First International Symposium on the Unconscious, held in Tbilisi, from the 1st to the 6th October 1979, was attended by over 1400 delegates. The participants were not only from medical and scientific backgrounds, but also from literature, art, sociology, philosophy and from ‘different schools of psychoanalysis’. As well as from U.S.S.R., they came from Europe and America. One of the covenants was the well-known linguist Roman Jakobson, who impressed the audience by giving his talk in the Georgian language.
Jacques Lacan and Cesare Musatti, also expected, were unable to attend. This event represented a victory for all those Russian psychologists who had tried to oppose the dominant Pavlovian doctrine and promoted the study of psychoanalytic theory. Returning from Tbilisi, George Pollack (1982), director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, commented positively on the curiosity and the enthusiasm shown by his Russian colleagues for this extraordinary event. The proceedings of the symposium consisted of four volumes with a total of 2710 pages, edited by Prangisvili, Sheroziia and Bassin. The date of publication, 1978, was one year earlier than the actual event (Miller, 1998). The fact that the Tbilisi Academy of Sciences had been working for several years on the organisation of the Symposium (Lobner e Levitin, 1978) and had a well-developed organisation overcoming several difficulties, is perhaps the technical explanation for this formal discrepancy. The fourth and last volume appeared after a considerable length of time, in 1985, and was dedicated to the memory of Sheroziia, who had meanwhile died.
The first volume is entitled The Development of the Idea and is divided into three sections. The first deals with the question of psychological reality of the unconscious and includes numerous contributions of the Georgian researchers of the Uznadze school. The second deals with the evolution of this concept before, during and after Freud; it also contains the contribution of Nancy Rollins. The third section illustrates the neurophysiological mechanisms relating to the unconscious and includes Cesare Musatti’s contribution.
The second volume is essentially oriented towards clinical applications and experimental studies and is entitled Sleep, Clinic, Creativity. It includes studies on the activities of the unconscious in conditions of hypnosis, a topic cherished by the Russians, as well as reflections on the relationship between the unconscious, clinical states and artistic creativity. Louis Althusser’s work appears in this context. This volume contains several contributions of American authors, as well as works by Russian scholars, such as Sviadoshch, Fedotov and Lichko whose criticisms towards psychoanalysis resulted, in the written form, more moderate.
The third volume is entitled Cognition, Communication and Personality and features a laborious attempt at an integration of Vygotsky’s and Uznadze’s theoretical conceptions. It also contains the contributions by Silvano Arieti and Roman Jakobson.
The fourth and last volume, Results of the Discussion appearing several years later, in 1985, consisted of a deeper analysis of the differences between what were thought by the Russian scholars to be the two basic approaches to the phenomenon of the unconscious: the Freudian/ post-Freudian psychoanalytic orientation and the research methods used by Uznadze’s followers. A version of Uznadze’s ‘set’ theory elaborated by Sheroziia, was proposed as the most advanced scientific method for studying the functions of unconscious mental activity. At the same time, Freud’s conceptions were considered necessary to the achievement of this enterprise.
Despite the various controversies among different schools, the criticisms of the ideological constraints which had limited reasearch and the complaints about the resulting slow growth of scientific knowledge, were unanimous. All this was happening in an intellectual environment in which the existence of unconscious psychic mechanisms was still largely denied. The Tbilisi Symposium represented a milestone in the history of the unconscious in Soviet Russia. For the first time since the 1920s, a genuine effort was made to compare the psychoanalytical theories developed in Europe and in the United States, to the parallel research on the unconscious carried out in the Soviet context ( Chertok, 1982). The Russians showed a particular interest in those psychoanalytical theoretical orientations which implied a criticism of metapsychology. In particular, the three curators of the symposyum expressed in the introduction a certain appreciation of George Klein’s ideas, which were then spreading. As is well known, Klein (1973, 1976) proposed, in essence, a separation of metapsychology from the clinical field. The latter was given priority, in order to enable the discovery of new instruments for grasping the subjective experience of the patient in the therapeutic relationship. This meant for the Russian a departure from the instinct theory and a support in the implicit task that they had set for themselves: the separation of psychoanalysis from neurology and from any biological orientation. At the same time, they needed to do so while avoiding offering any opportunity for the so-called orthodox materialists to accuse them of idealism. In trying to achieve this difficult balance, they also embraced some of the concepts expressed, in that period by Wallerstein (1976), who claimed that the specific field of psychoanalysis is one of meaning, significance and intention, all of which cannot be explained in a biologically determinist context. Lacan also, with his concept of the unconscious structured like a language, obtained some success, as such a principle appeared to offer potential openings to the social dimension. Of course, these new directions were followed unevenly, with strong differences among the different factions, all of which kept meanwhile a considerable conceptual distance from the psychoanalytical world. A common denominator easily perceived in the writings of the curators, was the concern that an acknowledgement of psychoanalysis’ scientific autonomy might drift towards a philosophical idealism, thus re-imposing the feared dichotomies between brain and mind, and mind and body. It was not so much a question of justifiable philosophical doubts as of archaic ideological rationalisations stimulated both by fear and curiosity of what Freud himself had called ‘the plague’. Psychoanalysis was an object feared and strongly desired at one and the same time. The Tbilisi Symposium marked an historical breaking of the banks, the demolitions of barriers to psychoanalytic knowledge that was, ultimately, profoundly needed. According to Tugaybayeva, after Tbilisi ‘diffidence and alarm towards the unconscious began to subside and the foundations for a serious study of Freud and of psychoanalytical theories were established’ (Tugaybayeva, in: Koltsova et al., 1996, pag. 264). Beside, it should be remembered that there were already contexts in which psychoanalytical ideas had surreptitiously filtered through. Throughout the 1970s at the Moscow Institute of Neurology, Bassin and other researchers, devoted to the study of the so called psychosomatics, had used concepts such as ‘psychological defence’ and ‘unconscious motivations’, even though these terms were avoided or modified in the texts. In this context, the lack of an autonomous Russian psychoanalytical tradition, was widely felt. Predictably, an antipsychoanalysis group, led by L. Kukuev (1980) soon emerged. However, starting from 1980, psychoanalytic topics were debated both in scientific journals and in more popular publications.
The Literaturnaya Gazeta of May 1980 publicised widely the themes of the Tbilisi Symposium. In an article by the three organisers, the sociological interpretations of psychoanalysis were criticised, while its specific and positive therapeutic virtues were fully recognised. Similarly, Russian cinema dealt, for the first time, with psychoanalysis. Andrei Zagdanisky, in 1988, produced a documentary with a psychoanalytically informed sociological theme, entitled Interpretation of Dreams (Tolkovanie Snovedeniia). This film closed with these words on the screen: “From 1929 to 1989, Freud was not published within the U.S.S.R.”
Furthermore, the Literaturnaya Gazeta, June 1988, published an excerpt from Jean Paul Sartre’s screenplay The Freud Scenario together with an exhaustive biographical portrait of Freud and an introductory article by Aaron Belkin, director of the Psychoendocrinology Institute of Moscow. In January 1989, also the widely circulated journal of popular medicine Meditsinkaya Gazeta, published a special issue entirely dedicated to Freud.
Also in 1989, the literary revue Neva, based in Leningrad, published an article by Leònid Gozman and Alexander Etkind presenting a social criticism of the U.S.S.R. which included psychoanalytic concepts. From then onward, there have been numerous articles on psychoanalysis, both in the scientific press and the popular one. Freud’s writings and those of his followers have been published. All this was made possible by the new political climat of ‘Glasnost’.
In August 1989, the International Association of Psychoanalysis held his 36th congress in Rome. For the first time, since the bygone 1920s, the congress saw the presence of Russian scholars, including Aaron Belkin, director of the National Psychoendocrinology Institute, in Moscow. Belkin reported the Russian renewed interest in psychoanalysis, also as a therapeutic instrument, especially in Moscow. In that occasion the author of this article personally interviewed Belkin, who emphasised the extent to which psychoanalysis had always been, in the U.S.S.R., an underground presence, also in the clinical field. He himself, as a young psychiatrist in Irkutsk, Siberia, in the 1950s, had noticed that the director of his clinic, I. S. Sumbayev, was interested in psychoanalytic theories and aspired, in certain instances, to put them to use clinically. Therefore, there had been an attention to psychoanalysis and, possibly, a ‘secret’ practice of it even in distant times. Unfortunately there are no reliable historical sources which can document this exceptional phenomenon.
In the second half of the 1980s , Belkin, together with some young colleagues attracted by psychoanalysis, had started to apply a psychoanalytic perspective in the Institute that he directed. In that same period, at the end of the 1988, the participants of a seminar led by Boris Kravstov formed the Association of Psychologists which was to become, in 1995, the current Psychoanalytic Society of Moscow. There currently exist several Russian members of the IPA, coming from various fields, including the above mentioned ones. Furthermore, young Russian scholars are applying for psychoanalytical training. This suggests, in a historical perspective, that the currently lively development of psychoanalysis in Russia has its roots in the past. Beside, evidence for this is provided by all the research offered by this paper. The demise, in 1991, of Soviet regime has left a space, as we said, for a vigorous development of psychoanalysis, also at the institutional level. The fortunes of psychoanalysis are subject now to the vicissitudes of day to day events. Their study involves a methodology different from that of the historical perspective. Our hope is that their analysis, using the right methodological framework, will be possible in the near future.
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