ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how some aspects of Russian history and culture created or maintained a mix of contradictory attitudes and representations, which despite all conscious efforts at integration result in representational splitting at societal and individual levels. It examines clinical vignettes from four women patients including dream material. In some sense—also with a perverse flavour—women might be seen as somehow privileged. The history of Russia is contained in overcoming its geography wrote the prominent Russian historian, Ivan Solonevitch. Paradoxical as this may seem, but logically indeed in a perverse "Orwellian" sense, one of the most democratic European constitutions was the 1936 Russian one, when Stalin's terror was already blossoming. The particularity of the Russian constellation might be more in the enormous inconsistency of social, economic, legal, and religious or/and moral pressures shaping gender identities on a societal level.
