ABSTRACT
Western literature on the history of Soviet psychoanalysis tends to attribute disproportionate significance to the ideological debates that took place at the end of 1920s. The intersection of psychoanalysis and socialism has often been cited as a phenomenon of intellectual history that gave rise to exceptional thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. The political link between Trotsky and Russian psychoanalysts has been underestimated in Western literature on the history of psychoanalysis. One might suppose from these facts that Viktor Kopp's participation in the management of the Psychoanalytic Society was not so much scientific or organizational as it was operational. Psychoanalysis combined the elaboration of practical ways to translate the unconscious to the conscious with an extremely detailed study of the unconscious itself. The true art of psychoanalysis is the search for a delicate balance between what needs to be brought out into the conscious for arbitrary regulation and what can and should remain in the unconscious.
