Russia

In his Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis ¹ James Rice has done a remarkable job of exploring Freud’s Russia. He begins with an account, new to me, of just how tied to Russia Freud was in terms of his ancestry and family background. Freud’s mother retained many close relatives there. At the same time Rice perceives how acutely Freud felt his own “lack of a fatherland,” in that a decent Viennese Jew had to be incapable of Austrian patriotism. Several of Freud’s most prominent disciples were Russians, such as Lou Andreas-Salomé, Max Eitingon, and Sabina Spielrein. Rice proposes, not terribly persuasively I think, that the concept of a human instinct to destruction can be considered “a distinctively Russian contribution to psychoanalytic theory.” But I believe that the notion of the death instinct can also be explored in terms of Freud’s biography as well as in connection with German intellectual life.