Psychoanalysis in the Early Days of Soviet Russia

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to give a brief account of the trajectory of psychoanalysis in the early years of Soviet Russia. Among the practices that have made psychoanalysis accessible to the working class, we will focus our presentation on the pioneering experience of Moscow’s “House of Children” (Detski Dom), the first nursery school based on psychoanalytic principles. Documented by her founder, Vera Schmidt, the school worked from 1921 to 1925, housing 30 children aged 1 to 5 years. Like the school, in the years following Lenin’s death and Trotsky’s exile others psychoanalytic institutions succumbed to ideological censorship. In 1936, Stalinist repression officially banned psychoanalysis from the Soviet Union, interrupting a process that modified the practice of psychoanalysis and broadened the cultural and social reach of Freud’s ideas. However, interest in the unconscious remained, and in the late 1980s psychoanalysis was resumed in Russia.