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Before the emergence of glasnost and perestroïka, we are reminded in the opening pages of this collection, the very notion of the unconscious had been “outlawed” in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the invitation that led to the essays in this volume is significant in that it represents the first official overture by Soviet psychiatry to western psychoanalysts in sixty years. Following the invitation of the National Mental Health Research Center in spring of 1990, four representatives of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Arnold Rothstein, Sander Abend, Homer Curtis, and Scott Dowling, presented a series of psychoanalytic seminars at the institute in Moscow. The papers in this volume, based largely on oral presentations delivered over the course of the visit, are intended as an introduction to the fundamentals of classical psychoanalysis; as such, they are engaging and compelling accounts of the core concepts, basic principles, clinical insights, and technical recommendations that have distinguished drive psychology since the turn of the century.
In the first chapter, by way of introduction, Abend summarizes Freud's early efforts to develop the psychoanalytic method, reviewing the theory of repression, Freud's self analysis, the abandonment