For the first time in nearly 60 years, psychoanalysis is making an officially sanctioned return to the Soviet Union. Dr. Arnold Rothstein of New York is leading a four-member American delegation to Moscow in April. The delegation comprises Association president Dr. Homer C. Curtis; Dr. Sander M. Abend, secretary of the Association; and Dr. Scott Dowling, chairman of Seminars for Clinicians. There they will conduct a five-day seminar on “Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis” for some 200 Soviet psychiatrists. The meeting will consist of morning lectures and afternoon discussion groups.
“They know they're missing something, and they are very eager to learn,” reports Dr. Rothstein, who also serves as program chairman of the Association's annual and spring meetings. “It's a drop in the bucket, a first step for psychoanalysis in that part of the world.
“They're feeling their way, and the bolder ones feel freer now to offer opinions. We can certainly be as open in our effort to be understood, to get them to express their current concept of analysis. Then we can bring them up to date and correct misconceptions,” believes Dr. Curtis. He regards this trip—his first to the Soviet Union—as a “real personal adventure outside the professional, scientific, and cultural adventure.”
“It's a chance to build bridges,” Curtis continues, “one of a number of exchanges. We think psychoanalysis, with its humanistic basis, adds a dimension to psychiatry that is salutary for the field. We're going to concentrate on the basics—encouraging an interest in psychotherapy, informing them about the opportunity for psychological intervention with all patients.”
In fact according to Soviet expert Martin A. Miller, a Russian Psychoanalytic Society was born in 1911. It was reconstituted under the leadership of I.D. Ermakov, a practicing analyst after World War I. He served as the Society's first president in 1921 and edited a nine-volume series of Freud's work translated into Russian. Recently, Dr. Aron Belkin published a one-volume edition of Freud's selected writings. This volume sold out its entire print run of 130,000 books in only three days such is the intensity of interest in psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union.
Intense interest in Freud's theories among Russian clinicians and the intelligentsia appears to have existed for many years. N. I. Osipov trained at the Burgholzli and, before his return to Russia in 1908, was the first of a number of Russian analysts to visit Freud in Vienna In 1909, Moshe Wulff completed his psychoanalytic training under Karl Abraham in Berlin and returned to his native Odessa to practice. Dr. Wulff [see insert], along with Dr. Drosnes, treated 23-year-old Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff in Odessa. In 1910 the two psychiatrists brought Freud the patient who became known in the analytic literature as the Wolf Man.
Miller continues that Aleksandr Luria, the renowned Russian neuropsychologist originally was “intimately involved with the development of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union … establishing] a small psychoanalytic circle in Kazan which Freud, at Luria's written request, accepted into the International Psychoanalytic Association. The group consisted of seven physicians, two educational scientists, five psychologists and a writer.”
As a reward for his work, including published efforts to fuse psychoanalysis and Marxist ideology, in 1923 Luria was invited to join the prestigious Institute for Experimental Psychology in Moscow.
But this, according to Miller, was the “zenith” of the Soviet analytic movement “The psychoanalytic community in the Soviet Union, which existed in five cities (Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev, Odessa, and Rostov) and which in the middle 1920s formed an estimated one-eighth of the entire membership of the International Psychoanalytic Association worldwide, became the object first of scrutiny and suspicion and ultimately of attack. Within a few years, the leading psychoanalysts (Osipov and Woolf) emigrated and Luria abandoned his psychoanalytic research.”
Miller quotes an unpublished letter dated February 23, 1927 from Freud to Osipov saying, “The psychoanalysts in Soviet Russia are, by the way, having a bad time. From somewhere the Bolsheviks have caught the opinion that psychoanalysis is hostile to their system. You know the truth that our science is not able to put into the service of any party, but that it needs a certain liberal-mindedness (Freiheitlichkeit) in turn for its own development”
“Before glasnost, the unconscious was forbidden,” Dr. Marat Vartanian told a startled Dr. Rothstein during a 1989 breakfast near Central Park in New York. Rothstein says he “sensed a hunger” for an end of repression throughout Eastern Europe about three years ago. He “casually” mentioned this to his editor at International Universities Press, Martin Azarian, who also produces other Russian publications. Mr. Azarian related Dr. Rothstein's interest to Dr. Vartanian. Dr. Vartanian is a psychiatrist and geneticist at Moscow's National Mental Health Research Center. Two and a half years after Rothstein's suggestion, Vartanian reaped an historic reward for psychoanalysis.
“The need is obvious,” he says, “They're riding a wave, hoping to roll it in the direction of a free society. Psychoanalysis is part of the fabric of a free society.”
Rothstein compares Gorbachev's new policy on religion with the potential for the growth of psychoanalysis and says, “If you understand psychoanalysis, you have a richer understanding from a basic field of knowledge.”
Rothstein has carefully orchestrated his group's topics: Sander Abend will lead off with “The History of Development of Freud's Thinking”; Rothstein will follow with a “Contemporary Elaboration” on the same topic. Curtis offers “Principles of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy”; then Scott Dowling presents two
lectures: “Psychoanalysis and Infant Research” and “The Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents.” Abend concludes with “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Treatment of Sicker Patients.”
Asked about the potential language barrier, the historic difficulty in translating analytic concepts accurately, Curtis expects most of the Soviet psychiatrists to have a fairly good grasp of English, but “it will be a kind of barrier. So we'll stick to simple concepts, simple language, key words—repression, defense, Oedipus complex—everyday language they may have had a brush with already.”
The presenters all hope that this pilot program will expand to include visits by Soviet psychiatrists to the United States, beginning with the spring meeting, and ultimately join training programs here.
Dr. Curtis adds, “We're hoping to reach the younger people, younger psychiatrists coming up, who are curious and eager to learn.”