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That there is such a thing as a history of psychoanalysis in Russia might seem surprising given that there was no psychoanalysis to speak of there for 60 odd years. Etkind's book, first published in Russian in 1993, is a fascinating, if rather idiosyncratic account of a relatively brief period of psychoanalytic endeavour and it is a tribute to the author's imagination and scholarship that he has written such an extensive book on such little material.
The flourishing of psychoanalysis in Russia was brief, lasting from about 1910 until the early 1930s, and yet it prompted Freud himself to speak in 1912 of ‘a local epidemic of psychoanalysis’ (p. 3). There was, it seems, more interest there than in France or even Germany at the same time.
Three key figures stand out - Lou Andreas-Salome, Max Eitingon who later headed the International Psychoanalytic Association, and Sabina Spielrein, Jung's first analytic patient (and lover), who returned to her native Russia in 1923 and would be murdered by the occupying Germans in Rostov. The impact of psychoanalysis on Russian culture was immense. The Symbolists, including the novelist Andrei Bely, were greatly influenced by it. The great polymathic thinker, Mikhail Bakhtin, was engaged in a dialogue with psychoanalysis throughout his life, and it was probably he who wrote, under another name, what remains to this day one of the most important critical engagements with Freud's thought, Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, usually attributed to Volosinov. The film-maker Sergei Einsenstein not only sought psychoanalytic treatment but was profoundly influenced by its ideas. So too was there an enormously fruitful engagement with psychoanalysis by the central figures of the influential Soviet psychology such as Lev Vygotsky and A.R. Luria.
Despite Lenin's dismissal of it as a fad, psychoanalysis flourished particularly in the astonishingly creative years after the 1917 revolution. Nearly all Freud's works were translated into Russian and achiev