ABSTRACT
The early twentieth century was a time when the craving of Russian intellectuals for world culture found a natural outlet in extended stays in the West, linking some of the most creative Russian personalities with leading intellectuals in Europe, including Freud and Jung. This fact has tended to be forgotten as communism and the Soviet State have been so dominant for such a significant portion of this century, a time which has seen the development of depth psychology. Freud, writing in 1912, said: “In Russia there seems to be a veritable epidemic of psychoanalysis” ( Etkind 1998:6). Many Russians came to Freud for psychoanalysis, and, prior to the Revolution in 1917, St Petersburg and Moscow were leading psychoanalytic centers. The early revolutionary leaders continued to value psychoanalysis, but with the emergence of Stalin as a leader in the mid-1920s psychoanalysis was systematically wiped out.
