History of the unconscious in Soviet Russia: From its origins to the fall of the Soviet Union

Abstract

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. Scholars associated with Soviet ideas participated too, including Aleksandr Luria, Michail Rejsner and Pavel Blonskij. Lev Vygotskij himself dealt with the unconscious. A second psychoanalytical 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 theory, survived in the work of the Georgian leader D. Uznadze. His followers organized the 1979 International Symposium on the Unconscious, in 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.