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I first met Sergey Agrachiov in the beginning of 1996, when we both started to work in a group of experts of the State Committee of Science and Technology. The task of this group was to find ways of carrying out the Presidential Decree “on the revival and development of philosophical, clinical and applied psychoanalysis.” We both faced the dilemma: to support or not to support it? We spent a lot of time discussing it after official meetings. I wanted Sergey to read my psychoanalytical essay about Dostoevski because Sergey's feeling for Russian language was extremely subtle and refined. This article is but a distant echo of those discussions about the future of psychoanalysis in Russia and we have not finished our talk.
Whenever I am asked about my attitude toward psychoanalysis I remember the words of the great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev about himself: “I am not a philosopher, I just love wisdom.” Colleagues of mine and I give different courses of lectures and seminars in psychoanalysis to undergraduate and post-graduate students of the Faculty of Psychology at St. Petersburg State University, but we do not prepare our students to be psychoanalysts per se. They obtain diplomas in psychology with a psychoanalytical background, and our main field might be called psychoanalytical psychology. We carry out research in this area and every member of staff of our Chair works as a counselor or psychotherapist in private or state practice. We strongly believe—and it is easy to prove to the students (easier at least than to other colleagues—psychologists)—that it was psychoanalysis that provided the foundation of many of the latest approaches in psychotherapy and counseling. Also, psychoanalysis provided the main ideas that led to a new kind of help for suffering people. That is why the use of only one particular method or technique, such as the so-called