Introduction

For psychoanalysts in the 20^th Century, the juxtaposition of psychoanalysis and Soviet Russia was not a realistic endeavor. Implicit in Soviet culture was an anti-Freudian ideology. Freud was considered to be “criminal number one” from the perspective of organized Soviet psychology and his theories were censored and condemned (L. A. Radzikhovskii as quoted in ). The exception to this forbidden status of any psychoanalytic thought was as a means of study of the decadent West. In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika (political restructuring) and glasnost (cultural openness) ushered in the beginning of many ideological changes in Russia. The acceptance and beginnings of a psychoanalytic movement was one of the outcomes of that historical shift.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, intellectuals and professionals in the newly formed Russian Federation have shown a remarkable interest in the theory, technique, and applied aspects of psychoanalysis. A flurry of movement west to east was established wherein American and Western European psychoanalysts and social scientists have traveled to Russia to provide training and supervision as well as cross cultural exchanges with their Russian counterparts. American psychoanalytic organizations (e.g., The Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association) have endorsed their members becoming involved with the Russian psychoanalytic movement and have offered financial support and academic interest.

Most of the psychoanalysts from North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere who traveled to Russia during the 1990s were quite moved by what they experienced. There were few books and journal articles available in a Russian language edition. There were no training and supervising analysts in Russia. There was a lack of health care, institutional structures, professional training standards, or credentialing for psychoanalytic practice.