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A praise-worthy historiographic interest is gradually producing very interesting works and continues to supply useful information and stimuli for a better understanding of the theoretical and practical movement to which we belong.
Alberto Angelini's book, recently published, uncovers surprising information about the history of psychoanalysis in Russia, surprising because it has been neglected up to now and only recently brought to our knowledge.
In fact, only in the last few months have psychoanalytical ideas begun to find a partial space in the contemporary Soviet Union, where a translation into the Russian language of the complete works of Sigmund Freud has been announced, with a planned 300.000 copies.
Moreover, it was only during the years that followed the Second World War that Soviet psychology was able to develop in a systematic way. Nevertheless, Russia was, at the beginning of the 20th century, one of those countries that first welcomed psychoanalysis. Not only this, but the notion of the unconscious was already present in the tradition of 19th century Russian philosophers and in the school of “objective psychology”, of which the greatest exponent was Ivan P. Pavlov. The Soviets carried out various historically relevant attempts to introduce the psychoanalitical method inside institutional situations. Why, then, at a certain point, did psychoanalysis totally disappear from this country and the word unconscious became taboo? From documents and research which are unpublished in the West (like many essays on psychoanalytical themes published in Russia in the twenties by such as Fridman, Lurija, Vygotskj, Bychovskij, etc.), the author reconstructs the happy season of psychoanalysis in Russia starting from 1910, when many doctors began to practice it in Moscow,