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The history of psychoanalysis shows that Ukraine has been central to its development from the early beginning (Nalyvaiko, 2023). The fact that Freud’s family originally comes from the small west-Ukrainian towns – Tysmenytsia and Brody – holds pride for many Ukrainians (Romanov & Pushkareva, 2000). In addition, one of Freud’s most famous and long-term patients, often mistakenly considered Russian – Sergei Pankejeff – lived in the Ukrainian city of Odesa (Freud, 1914/2010). As early as 1904 (13 years before the Soviet revolution in 1917), it was Ukraine-based psychoanalysts who carried out the first translations of Freud’s works from German and authored their own papers using psychoanalytic thinking (Butsykin, 2023). Psychoanalytic groups in Odesa, Kharkiv and Kyiv were active, and there were numerous psychoanalytic communities at that time (Nalyvaiko, 2023; Romanov & Pushkareva, 2000). In 1914, Freud himself claimed that the only well-trained early psychoanalyst lived and practiced in Odesa, Ukraine, which was under Russian imperial rule then – Mosche Wulff (Freud, 1914), who completed his training analysis in Berlin with Karl Abraham (Savchenko, 2021).
After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922, Ukraine, along with several other non-Russian nation-states, was falsely promised independence and “equality” in exchange for joining the Soviet alliance. Under Soviet rule, psychoanalysis initially received great support from the Moscow-based Russian government because several key leaders, such as Lev Trotsky, expressed interest in psychoanalysis (Miller, 1986). The early Bolshevik policy on psychoanalysis permitted the creation of psychoanalytic institutions across territories that the Bolsheviks controlled. However, these Soviet psychoanalysts were required to submit to a single state goal, guiding their scholarship or practice – to utilize the psychoanalytic knowledge toward a purposeful “fo