ABSTRACT
In 2022, the European Journal of Psychoanalysis asked Alberto Angelini for his opinion on the current state of psychoanalysis in Russia. He replied:
I am not aware of the developments of psychoanalysis in Russia in recent years; let’s say in the third millennium. As a historian I worked essentially on the sources of the first half of the last century. Then some sketches on the situation until the eighties or a little more. From the few direct contacts I have had, I have come to the feeling that our Russian colleagues have, almost completely, neglected their glorious psychoanalytic past. It concerns both the last phase of the tsarist era, and the Soviet cultural world, until the mid-twenties of the twentieth century. It seems, but I hope to be proven wrong, that Russian psychoanalysts are currently flattening out on the contemporary features of the debate, especially as it unfolds in the US. This, probably, to try to conform to the “Western discourse” and to stay in tune with what is going on in the IPA. The greatest contribution of a Russian to the history of psychoanalysis in that country does not come from a psychoanalyst, but from a historian of literary training, Aleksandr Etkind, with the magnificent volume Eros of the Impossible (1993).
Indeed, being a discipline without its history, psychoanalysis in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union had to start as if afresh and form a field consisting of translated knowledge and imported concepts. A valuable heritage got lost amid enthusiasm for incorporating the Western model. Was it a neglect of a deliberate kind, when anything Soviet could not be treated as valuable given years of atrocities and forced isolation? Was it a hunger for new knowledge? Was it a result of the IPA standardisation policies that would not accept any local knowledge as valid? Although my book did not intend originally to engage with answering these questions, some of my findings could shed light on the historical rupture that is so apparent to Angelini.