Observations on Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Russia

Psychoanalysis emerged early in Russia. By 1914 practically everything Freud had published was available in Russian translation. Russian psychiatrists were establishing contacts with analysts in the West, they were utilizing psychoanalytic methods of therapy, organizing seminars on psychoanalysis, publishing articles on psychoanalytic themes, and so on. The First World War, the Bolshevik coup, and

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the subsequent civil war understandably interrupted this process, but during the first decade of the Soviet Union psychoanalysis did continue to exist, and it was still possible to debate the validity of “Freudianism” in an ideological context dominated by Marxism. By the time Stalin gained dictatorial power around 1930, however, it was no longer safe to practice psychoanalysis as a therapy, openly to discuss it as a theory within the field of psychology, or to publish works applying psychoanalytic theory to literature, culture, history, politics, and other fields. In effect, psychoanalysis was snuffed out, and it did not resurface until the advent of glasnost during the late Soviet period.

By the time the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, psychoanalytic groups were already forming, psychoanalytic publications had started to appear, and contacts with Western psychoanalysts were beginning to flourish. In that early stage the most important organization was the Russian Psychoanalytic Association in Moscow, headed by the late Aron Belkin, a psychiatrist and endocrinologist who worked with patients who had undergone sex-change operations. A milestone in the history of the new Russian psychoanalysis was the appearance of the first issue of Belkin’s journal Rossiiskii psikhoanaliticheskii vestnik (Russian Psychoanalytic Bulletin) in 1991, which featured articles on – among other things – self-deception, exhibitionism, and the past repression of psychoanalysis under Stalin. Psychoanalysis eventually became fashionable during Russia’s roaring nineties – so fashionable that the Russian government under President Boris Yeltsin issued an official decree (ukaz) in 1996 supporting the development of psychoanalysis in Russia.

All of that oversimplifies the long and complicated history of psychoanalysis in twentieth century Russia, and readers may go to various sources for more detailed and nuanced accounts (the best of which is the two-volume compendium of over 1,700 pages edited by Viktor Ovcharenko and Valerii Leibin, Antologiia rossiiskogo psikhoanaliza! Anthology of Russian Psychoanalysis, Moscow: 1999). My concern here is to report on some developments of the last few years, and to offer some personal reflections on psychoanalysis in Russia. Although I am not a clinical psychoanalyst but a Slavist by training, I have nonetheless been studying Russia and the Russians from a psychoanalytic perspective for about thirty-five years. I have lectured (in Russian) at various psychoanalytic institutes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have published books and articles in English and in Russian translation on various psychoanalytic themes, and I have kept in touch with a number of fellow analysts in Russia.

The largest psychoanalytic organization in Russia today is the National Federation of Psychoanalysis, formed in 1988 as an umbrella organization for several others which have grown in number and in membership. Currently, there are over 300 individual trained members in this organization, “from Norilsk to Krasnodar, and from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok” – to quote an e-mail from Mikhail Reshetnikov of 7 November 2006 (in cases where I have quoted communications in English from Russian correspondents, I have fixed up the English grammar; all translations from the Russian original are my own).

Reshetnikov is President of the National Federation of Psychoanalysis, and he also serves as Director of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis in St. Petersburg. Many, if not most, of the psychoanalysts practicing in Russia today were trained in this institute. Since 1991 Reshetnikov has organized three international psychoanalytic conferences in St. Petersburg, and as of 2002 he was still bringing out two issues per year of a journal (Vestnik psikhoanaliza/ Bulletin of Psychoanalysis) which contained articles by both Russian and Western analysts on a great variety of topics, such as: classical studies of depression by Freud, Abraham, and Klein; the relationship of psychotherapy to psychopharmacology; the problem of personal identity; symbolism in dreams; analytic supervision by e-mail; Islam and terrorism; Sabina Spielrein’s relationship with Carl Jung; resistance in child analysis; the child as a mirror of the depressed mother; the current state of psychoanalysis in Italy; treatment of borderline patients; and many other fascinating topics (this is only a random sampling from a single one of the many psychoanalytic journals of highly variable academic quality

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which have been sporadically published in the post-Soviet period).

Further information about the psychoanalytic empire which Reshetnikov has built may be found at www.oedipus.ru. There are many ongoing discussion groups conducted in Russian, and another, very interesting site there which deals with “humanitarian strategies of anti-terrorism” and problems of negotiating with terrorists. Finally, for visitors to St. Petersburg, the Museum of Sigmund Freud’s Dreams, designed by Viktor Mazin, and located on the premises of the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis, is definitely worth a visit.

It should be noted that Russian psychoanalysts do not all follow the classical schools of psychoanalysis of the first half of the twentieth century in their clinical or theoretical work. There is much variety. Quite a few of the Russians are interested in the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut, for example. In October of 2004 I participated in one of the “Psychoanalytic Thursdays” in the clinic on the Old Arbat in Moscow, and heard an excellent presentation by Olga Murzina on Kohutian theory. Moscow analyst Valerii Leibin has just published a two-volume encyclopedia in Russian titled Post-Classical Psychoanalysis {Postklassicheskii psikhoanaliz: Entsiklopediia, Moscow: 2006). Psychobiography and psychohistory are also topics of interest in Russia, to judge from the availability of publications by such authors as Erik Erikson, Anna Geifman, and Lloyd deMause in Russian bookstores and from the Russian equivalents of amazon.com (note, however, that a Google search in the Cyrillic alphabet for “psychohistory” gets only 9,420 hits, by comparison with 1,330,000 hits for “psychoanalysis”). There are also quite a few Lacanian analysts in Russia. One of them, Dmitry Olshansky of St. Petersburg, kindly provided the following information: “in St. Petersburg we now have two groups (Freudian and Lacanian), which work with original texts, and two clinical cartels, which conduct research on themes of psychosis and jouissance (see http://www.freud.ru and http://freudien.narod.ru [in Russian and French] for information on sessions of Bureau Russe du Champ Freudienne).

One of the problems facing psychoanalytic development in Russia today is access to Western psychoanalysis due to the language issue. On the one hand, almost no analysts outside of Russia have any competence in the Russian language. On the other hand, most educated Russians are themselves monolingual. This means that a translator is required for most Russians who wish to study psychoanalysis and establish a psychoanalytic practice in Russia up to Western clinical standards. One can imagine how difficult it must be to tree-associate under such circumstances (we may recall that the famous “Wolf-Man,” the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankeev, at least knew German well enough to undergo analysis with Freud in German).

There are a few Russians today who have managed to undergo analysis in the West without the need of a translator, however. For example, Lola Komarova, current President of the Moscow Society of Psychoanalysts, speaks English fairly well (to judge from conversations I had with her in the 1990s). She received psychoanalytic training in London and became a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. On the web site for the Han Groen-Prakken Psychoanalytic Institute for Eastern Europe (a joint project between the International Psychoanalytic Association [IPA not to be confused with the psychohistorical association with the same abbreviations] and the European Psychoanalytic Federation), there is one American psychoanalyst – Gary Goldsmith of Brookline, Massachusetts – who tells me that he speaks Russian and that he has been involved in training Russian analysts. For the most part, however, analytic training involving Western analysts has required translators. As an example, Harold Stem (an analyst with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City) writes: “I am a visiting professor to the institute of Dr. Reshetnikov and visit there two or three times each year for about one week. I do training analysis, supervision and lecture all in English with a translator” (e-mail message of 13 November 2006).

Membership in the IPA is rare among Russian psychoanalysts. In October of 2002 I participated in a round table discussion on the topic of IPA membership at Ekaterina Belokoskova’s Institute for Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis in Moscow. During this discussion the term “inferiority complex” came up several times. The issue is quite contentious for Russian analysts. Dmitry Olshansky writes: “The IPA appears to use academic and medical discourse rather than psychoanalytic discourse: it looks to be a quite dogmatic organization. Therefore a ma-

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jority of Russian analysts who could enter the IPA reject that opportunity” (e-mail of 7 November 2006). When I asked Mikhail Reshetnikov about this, he replied: “There are some individual members of the IPA in Moscow (I think 10-15-20 people) and in St. Petersburg (4-6 people), but every one of them thinks that he or she is the best, and they cannot unite. When they finished their training in the West, every one of them created his or her own group. They do not keep in contact with us, as we are self-made analysts (equals bad, and without any discussion), while they are the ‘real analysts.’ I met them sometimes at various meetings and conferences: as we say, ‘very proud – very dreary’ (in Russia they are called ‘typical IPA.’ ‘First: you go to the couch, only with me, only 4 times per week, and after 5-7 years, maybe, I can speak with you about psychoanalysis’). I am sure that they have a different opinion, but you need to ask them” (e-mail of 7 November 2006).

Sensing a problem here, I decided to contact IPA headquarters in London directly, and was promptly informed that there are eighteen “Direct Members” of the IPA within Russia (e-mail of 21 November 2006). I also e-mailed Reshetnikov’s comments to some of these “Direct Members” in order to get their side of the story. However, only one of them chose to respond. This was Pavel Kachalov, who received his training at the Institute de psychanalyse de Paris, is author of a multilingual dictionary of psychoanalytic terminology, and is currently Director of the Research and Education Institute of Psychoanalysis in Moscow. He responded: “Sir: Your speculations about the soul of Russia have already made me think that your way of selling your article is very NEGATIVE for my country and for its people. Your actual letter is a mixture of threat and of blackmail. I do not have the honour to be acquainted with you, and I do not wish to be” (e-mail of 8 December 2006).

What Dr. Kachalov seems to be referring to, in addition to the provocative assertions made by Reshetnikov, is my own research on Russia and the Russians which has been published in Russian translation, and which has caused some consternation among reviewers in Russia. For example, in The Slave Soul of Russia (NYU Press, 1995), I documented the widespread moral masochism manifested in Russian literary characters, in ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church, in Russian folklore, in certain historical events, in traditional Russian collectivism, and so on. In The Joy of All Who Sorrow: Icons of the Mother of God in Russia (Moscow, bilingual edition, 2005) I focused attention on the nationalist uses made of objects originally intended for spiritual-devotional purposes. It probably did not help that I borrowed the notion of a Russian “slave soul” from a Jewish dissident writer, Vasilii Grossman. It is also curious that the current descendent of Aron Belkin’s Russian (Rossiiskaia) Psychoanalytic Association, still headquartered on the Old Arbat in Moscow, is now termed the Russian (Russkoe) Psychoanalytic Society (see http://www.rps-arbat.ru/fD.htm). This subtle linguistic change, from an adjective which broadly denotes citizens of Russia, to an adjective which narrowly denotes ethnic Russians – is in keeping with the drift toward ethnonationalism and authoritarianism which is now under way partly as a result of actions taken by the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Clinical psychoanalysis has improved the lives of many Russians – civic and ethnic alike – in the post-Soviet period. In fact many individuals in Russia have told me about the beneficial effects they have experienced as analysands. Many, but not all Russian analysts who have not had the opportunity to receive training in the West seem to be quite competent therapists. As for psychoanalytic research, however, the picture is less rosy. I am not aware of any major contributions to psychoanalytic theory which have come out of Russia (unless we include Freud’s theory of the death instinct, which some historians believe derives from the work of Russian analyst Sabina Spielrein). Many of today’s psychoanalytic publications in Russian (articles, books) would not be acceptable in Western academic venues. There are some exceptions, though, such as previously cited works by Valerii Leibin and a recent important study of Venedikt Erofeev’s novella Moscow to the End of the Line by St. Petersburg analyst Nikita Blagoveshchenskii (Sluchai Veni E. / The Case of Veni E., St. Petersburg, 2006).

There remains a potential for the development of psychoanalysis in Russia. But I fear that linguistic barriers, inadequate clinical preparation, substandard scholarly research, turf wars, incessant formation and disintegration of psychoanalytic groups, and most recently the chill on the political scene, have all worked to retard the development of psycho-

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analysis in Russia. More could be said on this subject, however, for here I have only skimmed the surface of a substantial archive of materials on Russian psychoanalysis which I have been gathering over the past fifteen years.

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