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Freud believed that psychoanalysis was “an impartial instrument like … the infinitesimal calculus.”25 He asserted that if psychoanalysis could be said to embody a philosophy of life or world view —that is, if it had a Weltanschauung—this philosophy of life or world view would be the impartial Weltanschauung of science.22 Reasoning from these views, many psychoanalysts have concluded that it would be unrealistic to expect psychoanalysis to suggest ultimate values—that, in the words of Heinz Hartmann, psychoanalysis “cannot, by itself, provide … the ultimate ends … of personal, social, or political behavior.”39
Despite this seeming psychoanalytic neutrality, however, totalitarian governments have in the main tended to reject psychoanalysis. Typical perhaps is the hostile attitude exhibited by the Soviet government, an attitude that finds expression in condemnations of psychoanalysis as being “in the service of reaction,” as encouraging “speculative constructions masked as science,” as indeed “justifying and developing the basest and most repellent instinctual tendencies.”8,42,60
These Soviet objections to psychoanalysis may, of course, be taken at face value and discussed as such. Yet their very intemperance suggests the possibility that they may mask a more fundamental Soviet objection to psychoanalysis. That is, the leaders of the Soviet Union may have discerned that, “impartial instrument” or not, psychoanalysis supports values and goals very different from those emphasized in the Soviet Union.