Guilt as Capital: Psychoanalysis and the New Russians

This article draws on interviews conducted by the author in July 1998 with Russian psychoanalysts and scholars, including members of the recently established East European Institute for Psychoanalysis in St. Petersburg: Dr. Mikhail Reshetnikov (the Institute's director), Dr. Alexander Etkind, and Dr. Viktor Mazin. The conference described in the article was hosted by the East European Institute and co-organized by the University of Florida's Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts.

This essay is in part an attempt to imagine a connection between two disparate events: a Russian presidential decree of 1996 and a lavish party I attended on a houseboat on the outskirts of St. Petersburg on the 4th of July, 1998, as a participant in the 15th International Conference on Psychoanalysis, Art and Literature. Like other foreign speakers at the conference, I had arrived in St. Petersburg primed by Western press coverage of the endemic official corruption and gangster-capitalism that have bankrupted Russia's economy and polity following the collapse of communism in 1991—since when Russia's GNP has dropped by forty per cent; the national debt has risen to U.S. $140 billion; previously state-owned industries and services, including up to eighty-five per cent of banks, are now reportedly in the hands of organized crime; corporate and personal income taxes are largely uncollected; health and welfare systems are collapsing; wages and pension payments are in chronic arrears; and homelessness, beggary, suicide, and assassination rates are soaring. I was therefore surprised and intrigued to learn that in July 1996 Boris Yeltsin had found time to issue a presidential decree (No. 1044) entitled “On the Revival and Development of Philosophical, Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis” in Russia. I knew that psychoanalysis had been officially suppressed by the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s, but surely, I thought, there must have been more urgent matters on Yeltsin's political agenda in