ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 turns to the histories of Dmitry Uznadze and Filipp Bassin, two leading voices in Soviet studies on the unconscious. Reading Bassin and Uznadze’s main monographs, the chapter suggests that the notion of the ‘Soviet unconscious’ based on Uznadze’s theory of set and established by Bassin as an alternative to Freud was not that much different from Freud’s. The critique of Freud that appeared in their work is due to political reasons, and should be read not as a critique, but as a disguise technique that Bassin used to keep the discussion about psychoanalysis alive after 1956. The chapter also presents a review of materials from The International Symposium on the Unconscious, an event held in Tbilisi in 1979 and four volumes of the symposium papers.
