Named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine

This fascinating book is the first comprehensive history of psychoanalysis in Russia from the last years of the tsars to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Using rare Russian sources and newly opened Soviet archives, Martin A. Miller explores Sigmund Freud`s influence in Russia during the twentieth century, discusses the lives of the Russian Freudians, and explicates for the first time original Russian psychoanalytic case studies.

The book begins with an investigation of the cultural currents in Russian society during the last decades of the tsarist regime. Discontented with treatment modes in Russia, a small group of Russian psychiatrists sought training with Freud, Carl Jung, and Karl Abraham and by 1917 had established the first psychoanalytic institute outside Vienna and Berlin and the first Russian psychoanalytic journal. Contrary to common belief, the psychoanalytic community did not disappear when the Bolsheviks seized power. Miller details how Soviet Freudianism was established, how psychoanalysts were trained, what their research focused on, and the impact of their work. Although psychoanalysis underwent a withering ideological assault under Stalin and clinical activities were curtailed, discussions of Freud and his work continued. Later, as the end of the Soviet period approached, Freud`s writings were republished for the first time in decades, and psychoanalytic institutes and societies reemerged. Miller finds that the oscillations in Russian attitudes toward Freud during Soviet rule reflected shifting tensions within Russian culture at large.

Martin A. Miller is professor of history at Duke University.

A selection of the History Book Club