For all of us involved in the psychoanalysis revival movement in Russia, 1998 began with a tragedy. Sergei Agrachev, the chairman of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society, died on January 3. He was 46 years old and is survived by his widow Marina and two young daughters.
Agrachev was a very special person and a unique therapeutic talent. In the past few years, he became known to many in the world of international psychoanalysis as a brilliant psychotherapist and one of the most hopeful leaders of the emerging Russian psychoanalytic school. His untimely death leads me to tell some of his story, which, had he lived longer, would have become known to a wider circle of analysts.
I heard him present a case in 1995 in Los Angeles at a Division 39 meeting. The discussant, a prominent American analyst, praised Agrachevs work and said that had he simply heard the presentation, he would never have guessed that the treatment had been performed by someone without psychoanalytic education. The only degree Agrachev held at that time was one in electronic engineering. He completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology a year later, in 1996.
In 1977, at the age of 25, Agrachev had joined a group of psychology students in Moscow to study psychoanalysis and to get personal therapy from an older psychiatrist, a self-motivated psychoanalytic scholar who had himself had no formal psychoanalytic training. Since the Russian psychoanalytic tradition had been interrupted in the mid-1930s, when psychoanalysis joined genetics and cybernetics as “bourgeois pseudo-sciences,” this was the only way to get any psychoanalytic training. Even studying this topic was a risky undertaking, but most of the time the authorities left these informal study groups alone.
What followed this “training,” though, was something absolutely heroic. In 1981 Agrachev and a few of his young friends started private psychodynamic psychotherapy practices. I know that he would object to me calling it heroic, but I lived there then, and I am prepared to argue my case. I would never have had the guts do that myself. No one I knew and worked with then would ever have tried to do that. Not only was private practice of any sort illegal (though many attempted it), but to invite people to trust you, when both of you were subject to persecution by the totalitarian state that was becoming more and more insane by the hour, was extraordinary.
When Agrachev died, I suddenly realized that I did not understand where they had found the courage to do it. I called a colleague, who with his wife had been in the study group and is now living and training in the United States. They had begun practicing at the same time Agrachev did. The colleague shrugged me off with, “Oh, you should not overestimate the danger.”
I was stunned. Overestimate the danger? In 1981 when Agrachev and his colleagues had begun their practices, somebody I knew was sentenced to six years in the camps for sharing a few books, Nabokov's Lolita among them, with friends. The colleague continued, “Although you might be right. I don't know.” We were not able to finish this conversation. I was left to wonder what made those therapists feel invincible. Was it youth? Could the therapeutic relationship be “protective” even in extremely noxious social circumstances?
When I left Russia, I referred one of my patients to continue therapy with Agrachev. Three years later I wrote an article about this case, focusing on the impact of the events of the 1991 coup d'etat on the course of therapy. It then occurred to me that Agrachev and I had treated this patient through all of the turmoil of recent Russian history.
I thought we had unique material for the study of the impact of the social context on the therapeutic relationship. I e-mailed him suggesting that we collaborate on such a project. His response was not very enthusiastic. Yes, he saw my points, but for him the most important context for his relationship with the patient was her previous therapeutic relationship with me. He did not deny the importance of social influences but, I felt, did not find them interesting enough to study. He placed the personal above the social.
For someone who had been raised and trained in the West and practiced there, this would be the usual position. But those of us who spent their formative years in totalitarian states, placing the social over the personal was the key survival skill employed in relationships with others. For someone who was raised, studied, and continued to treat patients amidst the chaos and uncertainty of Russian society in transition, Agrachev's position revealed an exceptional personality and therapeutic gift. It seems to me that he was genetically predisposed to become an analyst.
His friendly and mild manner and his clever sense of humor charmed everyone who met him. When you came to know him, you were unable to resist the influence of his remarkable optimism and determination. He was a man of incredible depth, generosity, and strength. He was also a man of insatiable curiosity, greedy for novelty. Life always seemed a little brighter around him.
I hope that American analysts will not forget that psychoanalysis continues to transform lives of young people like Agrachev around the globe. New psychoanalytic schools cannot develop without international aid, without your help.
It was very disappointing for Sergei and his colleagues in Moscow to see how involvement of the members of The American with the Russian-American Psychoanalytic Exchange Committee declined, leaving the committee struggling to staff its educational programs. This committee, during Americas love affair with Gorbachev, enjoyed a lot of support, but it has weakened dramatically over the last several years. I hope that it can be turned around. It is too late for Agrachev, but it is not for those who are following him in pursuit of analytic training.
Lev Gertsik, M.D., is a former Fellow of The American. He is a psychiatric resident at UCLA and is about to graduate from the Advanced Psychotherapy Program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute.