ABSTRACT
The well known communist joke inquires: ‘What is the difference between an optimist and a pessimist in the Soviet Union?’ The reply is, ‘A pessimist thinks that everything is so bad that it can’t get worse, while an optimist thinks that it can.’ Today, many Russians and other East Europeans still hold such an ‘optimistic’ view, since they are confronted with the economic chaos of early capitalism, which makes their lives even more difficult than under the communist regime. Some people thus feel deep despair and are daydreaming about those lost times of less freedom but more social security.1 For such nostalgic people, the fall of the communist regime was the event that caused the disarray of their lives. Clinging to this perception, they act like the hysterics who always find a point in their symbolic economy, a particular event, that instigated their suffering. Such a hysteric usually concludes: ‘If only my mother hadn’t done this in my youth…if only that encounter had never occurred…if only I could turn the clock backwards and arrange things to develop differently.’ The belief in such an ‘if only’ is a necessary fantasy that enables the hysteric to sustain the position of a suffering innocent victim. Since the clock cannot be turned back, the hysterics can do nothing to change the situation.
