ABSTRACT

Russian culture thrived in the decade and a half between the beginning of the century and World War I, giving rise to a stunning topography of ideas that was repeated with variations across the humanities, politics, social thought, the visual arts, and literature. In Russia, concurrent academic and artistic cultures have always been infused with the same trends and political ideas. From the 1910s to the 1930s, psychoanalysis was an important component of Russian intellectual life. The Orthodox ideal of conciliarism—an undemocratic form of collectivism based on a priori concord and obedience—added another layer to the Russian conception of the transformation's means and ends. The history of psychoanalysis is surprisingly full of people from Russia, individuals who became prominent figures in the international psychoanalytical movement. The history of psychology and medicine, disciplines closely related to psychoanalysis, is directed toward the analysis of scientific ideas, methods, and categories.