alternatehistory.com

Introduction

Could one see an ATL where the USSR would be a leading center of psychoanalysis--where for example Freud might address world psychoanalytical conferences in Moscow or Leningrad?

It's more plausible than one might guess from the six decades of official Soviet hostility (from the late 1920's) to Freud and his "bourgeois" "idealistic" doctrine.

I have recently been reading the fascinating *Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union* (Yale University Press 1998) by Martin A. Miller (incidentally, all quotes in this post are from that book unless otherwise indicated). He shows how during the early-to-mid-1920's the USSR did indeed seem to be well on the way to becoming one of the great world centers of psychoanalysis (p. xi: "Psychiatrists who had traveled to study with Freud, Carl Jung, and Karl Abraham in Western Europe organized a training institute in Moscow years before any existed in London, Paris, New York or Buenos Aires--all cities that later became flourishing centers of psychoanalysis...")--with not just the tolerance but the active support of important elements of the party and state. I will, in four succeeding sections, trace the rise and fall of Soviet psychoanalysis:

Part One will deal with the rise of psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia (where it had a modest but promising beginning--Freud's works, starting with *The Interpretation of Dreams* were translated from German to Russian before they appeared in any other foreign language) and its revival in Soviet Russia. 1921-24 can be called the "Golden Age of Soviet Psychoanalysis"; outstanding psychologists like Lev Vygotsky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky and Alexander Luria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria showed great interest in Freud, a psychoanalytical society and (as mentioned above) a training institute were formed, a home for disturbed children was run on Freudian principles with state support, and a large library of psychoanalytic classics from Freud and others was translated and published by the State Publishing House. Articles in publications like *Under the Banner of Marxism* (the Bolshevik party's leading journal of Marxist philosophy)
maintained the compatibility of Marx and Freud. Of course this must be seen in the context of this being the NEP era, when many "advanced" cultural trends from the West were at least open to discussion in the Soviet Union in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade later.

Part Two will raise the question of the fate of Soviet psychoanalysis if Trotsky rather than Stalin had come to power (and yes, as I have conceded in the past, this was unlikely, but as I indicated at http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/07ef90600ea59060 I don't think it was impossible). I will show Trotsky's lifelong (though not uncritical) fascination with psychoanalysis--dating back from his days as an exile in Vienna, and his belief that (along with Pavlov's "reflexology") psychoanalysis had an important contribution to make to a Marxist science of psychology. I will also discuss how (in Miller's words, pp. 87-88) "Although Trotsky's interest in maintaining psychoanalysis as part of the continuing debate over the establishment of a Marxist psychology was politically helpful to the Soviet Freudians during the mid-1920s, his association with them (however indirect it was in reality) soon became a fatal liability once Trotsky himself fell into political disfavor."

Part Three will raise the question of how psychoanalysis would have fared in the USSR if Lenin had lived. From the late 1920's on, it was maintained that Lenin was hostile to psychoanalysis. Yet, as I will show, the evidence for this is thin, and rests entirely on a purported conversation of Lenin with the German Communist Klara Zetkin, which--even granting its authenticity, which is by no means certain--does not really say what Soviet anti-Freud propagandists claimed it said.

Finally, Part Four will raise the following question: Even if Trotsky was sympathetic to psychoanalysis and even Lenin not necessarily hostile, might Freud himself wreck the prospects of psychoanalysis in even a non-Stalinist Soviet Union with the increasingly harsh criticisms he made of Bolshevism in OTL from the late 1920's onward?

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Part One (The Golden Age of Soviet Psychoanalysis)

"In front of our eyes, a new and original trend in psychoanalysis is beginning to form in Russia."--L. Vygotsky and A. Luria, preface to the Russian translation of Freud's' *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* (1925).

Psychoanalysis got off to a promising start in Imperial Russia, with Nikolai Osipov, a psychiatrist at the Moscow Psychiatric Clinic, being one of the earliest advocates. (It is a fact not generally known that Russian was the *first* language into which Freud's collected works were translated from the original German--a project initiated mostly by Osipov in 1909. Miller, *Freud and the Bolsheviks*, pp. 34-35.) By 1911 a professional group modeled on Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytical Society had been formed in Moscow, and the journal *Psychotherapy* provided a sympathetic forum for the small but expanding Russian psychoanalytical community. By 1914 "the Russians had developed the necessary components for the training and expansion of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice to the extent that it was no longer necessary for patients to be sent abroad...At the historical moment when the next stage would logically have taken place--the spread of psychoanalytic concepts to the culture at large, including new areas of clinical, intellectual, and literary applications--war broke out." (Miller, p. 50)

Despite the disruptions caused by the First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and the subsequent Civil War, and such setbacks as the emigration of Osipov to Prague in 1920 and the unexplained suicide in 1921 of pioneer psychoanalyst Tatiana Rosenthal (who unlike Osipov was a political radical and had welcomed the new regime) the psychoanalytic community succeeded in re-establishing itself in the early 1920's. In March 1921, a psychoanalytic group was formed in Moscow specializing in the study of problems of artistic creativity. Three of its founders--Ivan Ermakov, Nikolai Bernshtein, and Moshe Wulff--were familiar to European psychoanalysts because their works had been published in Freud's journal. A year later, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was formed, divided into three sections. The first was a continuation of the group concerned with psychological problems of artistic creativity, headed by Ermakov. The second, headed by Wulff, was devoted to clinical analysis. The third was concerned with maters of pedagogy, which was of particular concern to the ruling Communist Party. This section which was run by the prominent mathematician Otto Schmidt, attracted the attention of some researchers who were working on problems of educational psychology, including Lev Vygotsky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky Meanwhile a second psychoanalytic society formed in Kazan, headed by the young psychologist Alexander Luria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria In 1923 the Kazan society merged into the Moscow one.

"By the fall of 1922 Wulff and Ermakov announced in Moscow they were forming the country's first Institute for Psychoanalysis. The shift from society to institute was an important upgrading to the highest professional status, signifying that the Moscow group was now able to offer psychoanalytic training programs. At this point, there were only tow such training institutes in Europe--one in Vienna and the other in Berlin. Moscow, under communist authority, became the third center." (Miller, p. 59.)

Besides training Russian psychoanalysts, the new institute undertook other tasks:

(1) Taking over the project, begun in 1921 by Ermakov and Wulff, of establishing a clinical institute for disturbed children in which psychoanalytic principles would be utilized exclusively in treatment. This school, run by Vera Schmidt (Otto Schmidt's wife) was financially supported by Lunacharsky's Commissariat of Enlightenment. It was somewhat controversial--there were rumors of sexual excesses that were allegedly encouraged by the staff--and was finally closed down in 1923 when Vera Schmidt refused to accept Lunacharsky's demand for strengthened political control.

(2) Undertaking a large publication project--the "Psychological and Psychoanalytical Library"--that would publish all the important papers of Freud as well as Jung, Ferenczi and others. The editor-in-chief of the project was Ermakov with most of the translation to be done by Wulff.

Even granted that this was the period of the NEP, when the Soviet Union was more tolerant of western "avant-garde" cultural trends and more open to private initiative than it would be in the future, the psychoanalytic movement could not have made the headway it did without not merely state toleration but active party/state support. After all, the psychoanalysts were publishing Freud's works in the press of the State Publishing House and operating a children's school in Moscow at a time when most educational activities were already under party control. Moreover, the Communist Party's philosophical journal, *Under the Banner of Marxism* published in 1923 an article by Bernard Bykhovskii entitled "On the Methodological Foundations of Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory" arguing at length that Freudian theory was materialist and entirely compatible with Marxism. Another high-level Bolshevik journal, *The Press and Revolution*, published an article in early 1924 by M. A. Reisner, a leading Soviet legal philosopher, entitled "Freud and His School on Religion" attempting to show the points of convergence shared by Marx and Freud in their interpretation of religion.

As Miller summarizes it (pp. 67-8), "Clearly the years 1921-1923 were the high tide of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia. Apart from the one major casualty--the closing of the school for disturbed children--psychoanalysis achieved spectacular successes at this time. An institute with a fully recognized training program was inaugurated, an outpatient clinic was established together with the children's home, all functioning on psychoanalytic principles. The extensive publication of psychoanalytic books and articles was proceeding at a level that was difficult to imagine a few years before. All of these activities were in some measure supported by the state. Indeed, it can safely be said (with all the implied ironies, given what was to come later) that no government was ever responsible for supporting psychoanalysis to such an extent, before or after."

(Of course this reliance on government support--though obviously necesary under the Soviet system--would also prove to be the Soviet psychoanalytic movement's Achilles heel. Ermakov's "Charter of the Psychoanalytic Society" in its last clause, "which would later prove to be of great significance, indicated that 'in the event of the necessity to liquidate the Society,' the government retained the right to control its activities. In this manner, the unique institution of state psychoanalysis was established." Miller, p. 64.)

Obviously all this required that psychoanalysis have, if not disciples, at least friends in high places. What major Soviet officials helped to protect Soviet psychoanalysis in 1921-24? As I will note in part two, all signs point to Leon Trotsky, who during his days in exile in Vienna had acquired a lifelong fascination with psychoanalysis...

***

Part Two (Trotsky and the Downfall of Soviet Psychoanalysis)


There has been much speculation here about how the Soviet Union's economic, foreign and Comintern policies would have differed if Trotsky rather than Stalin had emerged as supreme leader (which I will readily concede is unlikely). There has been less speculation about the *cultural* differences between a Trotsky-led and a Stalin-led USSR. Yet the USSR in 1934 was as different from the country it was in 1924 culturally as it was economically and politically. Where various schools of art and literature competed in 1924 (with the proviso that nothing actually attacking the regime be published), by 1934 "Socialist Realism" was the only approved style. The 1920's avant-garde theories of the disappearance of the family, the withering away of law, etc. were denounced as leftist heresies. The rehabilitation of the Russian past had begun, and all things Western except Marx and Engels themselves were viewed with suspicion.

Some of this might have happened under Trotsky as well; he himself was by no means friendly to some of the "avant-garde" trends of the 1920's, as his *Literature and Revolution* indicates. Yet there is at least one development that would almost certainly *not* have taken place under Trotsky's leadership. This was the reaction against psychoanalysis, a reaction which gained force in the late 1920's to the extent that by the 1930's Freud could hardly be mentioned except to denounce him. Pavlov was deified as the last word in psychology and used as a weapon against Freud. (There are two ironies here. First, as Leszek Kolakowski noted in *Main Currents of Marxism*, 2005 edition, p. 899, "It is safe to say that if Pavlov had been British or American his ideas would have been sternly condemned by Soviet philosophers on the ground that they explained mental functions by conditioned reflexes: he would have been accused of 'reducing' the human mind to the lowest forms of nervous activity, ignoring the 'qualitative difference' between men and animals, and so forth." But because Pavlov was a Russian, "the regime went to the opposite extreme and erected his theories into a dogma from which physiologists and psychologists were forbidden to deviate." The second is that Pavlov himself does not seem to have shared the regime's hostility to Freud: "Some evidence shows that Pavlov, as a scientist, was curious enough to have taken Freud's theories seriously, and may even have reacted favorably to certain aspects of psychoanalysis. For example, one Western psychiatrist who visited Moscow in the early 1930s not only found substantial areas of agreement between Pavlov and Freud, but also reported a conversation in which Pavlov admitted that he set up several of his experiments as a result of his 'reading some of Freud's work.' Pavlov further said that he was 'indebted to Freud for stimulating his thoughts and experiments' and added that he anticipated that 'a deeper understanding of behavior would come from a fusion of the concepts of the conditioned reflex and of psychoanalysis.' When told of this later, Freud commented, 'It would have been helpful if Pavlov had stated that publicly a few decades ago.'" Miller, p. 118.)

Trotsky had become interested in psychoanalysis back in his days as a political exile in Austria before the First World War. He was introduced to psychoanalytic circles there by his fellow-exile Adolf Ioffe (later a Soviet diplomat and supporter of Trotsky in the struggles of the 1920's; he killed himself in 1927). Ioffe had been analyzed by Alfred Adler and himself became an Adlerian analyst. While Trotsky had reservations about psychoanalysis, he always felt that it had an important contribution to make to a materialist psychology, and that Freud and Pavlov were really working toward the same goal. As Trotsky wrote in a letter to Pavlov:

"During the several years I spent in Vienna I came into quite close contact with the Freudians, I read their works and even attended some of their meetings..In essence psychoanalysis is based on the idea that psychological processes are the complex superstructure of physiological processes...Your theory of conditioned reflexes, it seems to me, embraces Freud's theory...The sublimation of sexual energy, a favourite sphere of Freudian teaching, is the construction of conditioned reflexes on the sexual base."

http://books.google.com/books?id=0O9KkuXgAbgC&pg=PA1907

Some other remarks illustrating Trotsky's attitude toward psychoanalysis:

(1) "Literature and Revolution" (1924)

"It is clear to anyone, even to the uninitiated, that the work of our physiologist, Pavlov, is entirely along materialist lines. But what is one to say about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud? Can it be reconciled with materialism, as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also), or is it hostile to it?" https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch07.htm

(2) "Culture and Socialism" (written in 1926, published in 1927)

"Let us take psychology as an example. Pavlov's reflexology completely follows the lines of dialectical materialism. It destroys for all time the wall between physiology and psychology. The simplest reflex is physiological, and a system of reflexes gives us 'consciousness.' The accumulation of physiological quantity yields a new 'psychological' quality. The method of Pavlov's school is experimental and painstaking. Generalizations are being won step by step: from a dog's saliva to poetry, i.e., to its psychological mechanics (but not its social content). Of course, the paths leading to poetry are yet to be seen.

"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud takes a different approach to the problem. It assumes in advance that the driving force behind the most complex and refined psychic processes is physiological need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if we leave aside the question of whether or not it places too much emphasis on the sexual element at the expense of others, for this is already a debate within the confines of materialism. But the psychoanalyst doesn't approach the problem of consciousness experimentally, from lower phenomena to higher, or from simple reflex to complex; he tries to take all these intermediate steps with a single bound, going from the top down, from religious myth, lyrical poem or dream--straight to the physiological foundation of the psyche.

"Idealists teach that the psyche is independent, and that the "soul" is a bottomless well. Both Pavlov and Freud consider that physiology is the bottom of the 'soul.' But Pavlov, like a diver, descends to the bottom and painstakingly investigates the well from the bottom up. Freud, on the other hand, stands above the well, and with a penetrating stare tries to capture or guess the outlines of the bottom through the depths of the ever-changing and murky water. Pavlov's method is the experiment. Freud's method is conjecture, and sometimes fantastic. The attempt to declare psychoanalysis 'incompatible' with Marxism and to simply turn one's back on Freudianism is too simple, or, to be more precise, simplistic. But in no case are we obliged to adopt Freudianism either. It is a working hypothesis which can give and undoubtedly does give conclusions and conjectures which go along the lines of materialist psychology. In time, the experimental path leads to verification. But we have neither the grounds nor the right to impose a ban on the other path, which, even if it is less reliable, still tries to anticipate the conclusions that will be reached by the experimental path, just much more slowly..."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/cult-o23.shtml (For a slightly different translation of part of this, see Isaac Deutscher, *The Prophet Outcast* http://books.google.com/books?id=mgubj5z1XUcC&pg=PA149 As Deutscher notes, Trotsky thought that Freud and Pavlov differed not in philosophy but in method of inquiry.)

(3) "My Life" 1930

"My chief contributor to the Pravda was A.A. Joffe, who later became a well-known Soviet diplomatist. The Vienna days were the beginning of our friendship. Joffe was a man of great intellectual ardour, very genial in all personal relations, and unswervingly loyal to the cause. He gave to the Pravda both money and all his strength. Joffe suffered from a nervous complaint and was then being psychoanalysed by the well-known Viennese specialist, Alfred Adler, who began as a pupil of Freud but later opposed his master and founded his own school of individual psychology. Through Joffe, I became acquainted with the problems of psycho-analysis, which fascinated me, although much in this field is still vague and unstable and opens the way for fanciful and arbitrary ideas."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch17.htm

(4) "Anthropology, biology, physiology and psychology have accumulated mountains of material to raise up before mankind in their full scope the tasks of perfecting and developing body and spirit. Psycho-analysis, with the inspired hand of Sigmund Freud, has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically called the 'soul.' And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources, must shed light on the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will."
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol08/no07/trotsky2.htm (Trotsky’s concluding remarks of Speech on Russian Revolution delivered at Copenhagen, November 1932)

(5) From an interview in 1934: "I see in Freud a genial detective [I think by "genial detective" he means "a detective of genius"--DT], a man who has opened one of the greatest domains in psychology. At the same time he is a disastrous philosopher."
http://www.google.com/search?q=freud++"disastrous+philosopher"&tbm=bks

By the time of that last remark, Freud, as I will later explain, had made some critical remarks about Bolshevism and about the error of thinking that abolition of private property will do away with man's aggressive instincts. Trotsky wanted to disassociate himself from such remarks while still maintaining (qualified) support for psychoanalysis.

It seems reasonably clear from this that if Trotsky had led the USSR, psychoanalysis would not have been suppressed. As it was, however, "Although Trotsky's interest in maintaining psychoanalysis as part of the continuing debate over the establishment of a Marxist psychology was politically helpful to the Soviet Freudians during the mid-1920s, his association with them (however indirect it was in reality) soon became a fatal liability once Trotsky himself fell into political disfavor." (Miller, pp. 87-88.) In any event, Soviet psychoanalysis received blow after blow, coinciding with Trotsky's own political eclipse. Already in the fall of 1924, *Under the Banner of Marxism* published an article by V. Iurinets entitled "Freudism and Marxism" refuting the arguments of people like Bykhovskii and Reisner that Freud and Marx were compatible. Iurinets argued that Freud was no materialist but an idealist who merely used biological analogies. Iurinets linked Freudian theory to the tradition of decadence and irrationalism in the West represented before the First World War by Nietzsche, Bergson, and Sorel (all of whom would of course be denounced by the Soviets and others as spiritual forerunners of Fascism). Further attacks followed. True, in the mid-1920s psychoanalysis still did have some defenders, such as the outstanding psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky. But the tide was obviously turning. In 1926 the Psychoanalytical Institute was defunded by the state and thus killed. In 1927 Moshe Wulff, one of the leading Soviet psychoanalysts, defected to the West. In the same year, Luria resigned as secretary of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (which would be defunct by 1930); this was in part a political decision in response to the growing antipsychoanalytic chorus at the Institute of Psychology where he worked. (Miller, p. 88)

By the time Freud was roundly denounced at the 1930 Congress on Human Behavior (one of the denouncers was Aron Zalkind, who had once been a defender of Freud [1]) he had no defenders. As the 1930's went on, denunciations of psychoanalysis increasingly associated it with Trotskyism. Luria survived the decade by turning against Freud, although he was a little less strident and more nuanced than the other critics. (Luria's 1940 article "Psychoanalysis" for the *Great Soviet Encyclopedia* while obediently critical in general, does manage to include some positive comments, stating that the method of "investigating the repressed unconscious drives of man and their role in psychic life" was "the scientific importance of psychoanalysis" but that Freud, generalizing from this data, developed an "erroneous theory" emphasizing man as a product of instincts, independent of society. Miller, p. 198.)

One of the themes of the critique of Freud was that Lenin had been opposed to psychoanalysis. So having raised the question of "How would psychoanalysis have fared in the USSR if Trotsky had come to power" I will (in part three) ask how it would have fared if Lenin had lived ...

[1] One of Zalkind's precepts in his mid-1920's writings was that interclass sex was a form of "sexual perversion": "To be sexually attracted to a being who belongs to a class which is hostile and morally alien to one's own is just as much a perversion as it would be to feel sexual attraction for a crocodile or an ourangutang." Miller, p. 196.

***
Part Three (What Would Lenin Do?)

In Part Two, I argued that psychoanalysis would not have fallen into disgrace in the USSR if Trotsky had come to power. Here I would like to ask what the fate of psychoanalysis would have been if (a healthy) Lenin had lived and had retained power. (That last proviso is important: Krupskaya allegedly told some Left Oppositionists in 1926, "If Ilych were alive, he would probably already be in prison.")

From the late 1920's on, Soviet anti-Freud polemicists argued that Lenin was opposed to psychoanalysis. Their evidence, however, was very thin. It is true that Krupskaya published an article in 1923 in which she wrote: "Freud does not just take into account the role of sexual attraction in our actions. He inordinately exaggerates that role, while explaining all subconscious actions by sexual attraction. Many of his explanations are artificial, stretched out and, besides, are permeated by a bourgeois-philistine attitude towards women." (Miller, *Freud and the Bolsheviks*, p. 85) But she may have been speaking only for herself.

Lenin himself never wrote anything about psychoanalysis. *Pravda* published a posthumous statement of Lenin's in 1925 in which he said he"may sometime deliver a lecture or write on [Freud]; but not right now." Since he never in fact managed to write such an essay, Soviet opponents of Freudianism had really only one source to rely on: The German Communist Klara Zetkin's recollections (published in 1925) of a conversation she allegedly had with Lenin in the autumn of 1920:

"Freudian theory is the modern fashion. I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles, dissertations, pamphlets, etc., in short, of that particular kind of literature which flourishes luxuriantly in the dirty soil of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always contemplating the several [sexual?--DT] questions, like the Indian saint his navel. It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary hypotheses, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat." http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm

However, there are two problems with the use of this passage as an anti-Freudian weapon. First of all, it has to be considered in context with the words immediately preceding it:

"Your list of sins, Clara, is still longer. I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard it. The first country of proletarian dictatorship surrounded by the counter-revolutionaries of the whole world, the situation in Germany itself requires the greatest possible concentration of all proletarian, revolutionary forces to defeat the ever-growing and ever-increasing counter-revolution. But working women comrades discuss sexual problems and the question of forms of marriage in the past, present and future. They think it their most important duty to enlighten proletarian women on these subjects. The most widely read brochure is, I believe, the pamphlet of a young Viennese woman comrade on the sexual problem. What a waste! What truth there is in it the workers have already read in Bebel, long ago. Only not so boringly, not so heavily written as in the pamphlet, but written strongly, bitterly, aggressively, against bourgeois society. The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems 'educated', even scientific, but it is ignorant, bungling." [Then comes the passage cited above: "Freudian theory is the modern fashion" etc.]

As Miller writes (pp. 85-6) "Examining the passage in context, we find that Lenin was actually talking about 'the pamphlet of a young Viennese woman' (unnamed) which Lenin uses as representative of articles written by communist women who 'discuss sexual problems and the question of forms of marriage in the past, present and future,' in order 'to enlighten proletarian women on those subjects.' He mentions Freud in passing because a section of the pamphlet dealt with 'the extension of the Freudian hypotheses' to these areas in a manner which Lenin found objectionable. However, he was speaking neither about Freud nor of Russia, but about the way people misuse this literature." And of course the interview may signify nothing more than a belief that there were more urgent matters than problems of sex and marriage for Communists to concern themselves with in 1920, with the Bolshevik regime still engaged in wars, civil (against Wrangel) and foreign (against Poland).

Moreover, this assumes the authenticity of Zetkin's account in 1925 of what Lenin had said to her four or five years earlier. This is questionable, and not just because of the fallibility of memory over such a long period. In the wake of Lenin's death a large hagiographic literature developed of "recollections" of the Great Man. In them, Lenin was always made to say whatever was the party line at the time of publication (or in cases where the party line was not yet set, the quotes always seemed to match the personal prejudices of the "recollector"). By 1925, as I have noted, the Bolsheviks were beginning to turn away from Freudianism, and Zetkin may have been aware of this. (One of Freud's few remaining defenders was Trotsky; from what I have read, Zetkin's political sympathies in the 1920's were somewhat "rightist" or Bukharinist, so she would not be predisposed to take a "Trotskyist" line on Freud.) In any event, a number of historians have cast doubt on the reliability of Zetkin's "recollections", e.g., Eric Naiman's reference to "Lenin (or Zetkin's Lenin)" http://books.google.com/books?id=dcITpLnONz8C&pg=PA115 or Alix Holt, in *Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai* arguing that "the thoughts attributed to Lenin relate suspiciously to the discussions of 1924, in which he took no part, rather than those of 1920."

Miller (p. 86) gives a number of reasons to question Lenin's alleged hostility to psychoanalysis:

"Additional questions about Lenin's alleged hostility to Freudian ideas in Russia have been raised. It has, for instance, been assumed that Lenin knew little of Freud's work and that his opposition to psychoanalysis was coupled with a lack of real interest. Yet, in Lenin's private library, he owned three volumes of Freud translations from the Ermakov series on psychoanalysis. One of these volumes, *Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis*, had marginal notations in Krupskaia's hand. There were also some possible personal connections between Lenin and Freud, though they remain indirect and inconclusive. Trotsky, one of Lenin's closest collaborators, was acquainted with psychoanalysis (as we shall shortly see), and the subject may have come up between them at some point...[M]any party officials who were sympathetic to psychoanalysis...had direct contacts with Lenin. Chief among these may have been the prominent mathematician Otto Schmidt, who was director of the State Publishing House during the early 1920s at the time when Ermakov's Psychoanalytic Library series was published. Schmidt, who was simultaneously an officer in Moscow Psychoanalytic Society, obviously arranged and personally approved of the series. No multivolume series under the imprint of the Bolshevik-controlled state press could have been published without approval at the highest level of the party. Lenin must have been aware of Schmidt's involvement with the psychoanalytic project and may have even received from Schmidt Freud's books, which were in the Bolshevik leader's library. In addition, Schmidt's wife, Vera, was the de facto director of the psychoanalytic children's school, which was the subject of intense discussions in the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Lenin regularly received summaries of these discussions. Moreover, if Lenin were as opposed to psychoanalysis as the Zetkin conversation indicates, he would hardly have permitted these activities in an era of communist ideological control and limited capital expenditures for necessities..."

All in all, I find the evidence inconclusive. It is true that the state support of psychoanalysis in 1921-3 would have been unlikely to occur if Lenin had been violently opposed to it, but he may have been merely indifferent (thinking something like "if Lunacharsky thinks this school is worth supporting, well, I don't know if it is but I'll go along with him")--so that if the leading party and state officials later turned against psychoanalysis, Lenin would go along with that too. The fact that he owned some of Freud's works is no proof that he ever read them, at least with any real attention. Perhaps what would matter most if Lenin had lived would be if he protected Trotsky (at least from a total loss of power)--as long as Trotsky had some influence, psychoanalysis would have an important sympathizer.

***

Part Four (Would Freud Spoil It All?)

"Things are going poorly for the [psycho]analysts in Soviet Russia, by the way. From somewhere the Bolsheviks have gotten it into their heads that psychoanalysis is hostile to their system. You know the truth that our science cannot be placed at the service of any party, but that it needs a certain liberal-indedness Freiheitlichkeit] in turn for its own development."--Freud to Russian emigre psychoanalyst Nikolai Osipov in Prague, February 23, 1927; quoted in Miller, *Freud and the Bolsheviks*, p. 97. http://books.google.com/books?id=neqglCuMW1MC&pg=PA97

My final question about the prospects of psychoanalysis in a non-Stalinist USSR is this: Granted that Trotsky was basically sympathetic to psychoanalysis and even Lenin not necessarily as hostile as later Soviet accounts made him out to be, nevertheless, might Freud himself ruin the prospects of Soviet psychoanalysis by his increasingly critical statements about the Bolshevik regime? Already in *Civilization and Its Discontents* he argued that, whatever its economic merits might or might not be,
Communism was based (psychologically speaking) on an illusion:

"Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment...

"The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature. The possession of private property gives power to the individual and thence the temptation arises to ill-treat his neighbour; the man who is excluded from the possession of property is obliged to rebel in hostility against the oppressor. If private property were abolished, all valuables held in common and all allowed to share in the enjoyment of them, ill-will and enmity would disappear from among men. Since all needs would be satisfied, none would have any reason to regard another as an enemy; all would willingly undertake the work which is necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communistic system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings--possibly with the single exception of that of a mother to her male child. Suppose that personal rights to material goods are done away with, there still remain prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancour and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect, and that is that the ineffaceable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led.

"Men clearly do not find it easy to do without satisfaction of this tendency to aggression that is in them; when deprived of satisfaction of it they are ill at ease. There is an advantage, not to be undervalued, in the existence of smaller communities, through which the aggressive instinct can find an outlet in enmity towards those outside the group. It is always possible to unite considerable numbers of men in love towards one another, so long as there are still some remaining as objects for aggressive manifestations. I once interested myself in the peculiar fact that peoples whose territories are adjacent, and are otherwise closely related, are always at feud with and ridiculing each other, as, for instance, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and South Germans, the English and the Scotch, and so on. I gave it the name of 'narcissism in respect of minor differences', which does not do much to explain it. One can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless form of satisfaction for aggressive tendencies, through which cohesion amongst the members of a group is made easier. The Jewish people, scattered in all directions as they are, have in this way rendered services which deserve recognition to the development of culture in the countries where they settled; but unfortunately not all the massacres of Jews in the Middle Ages sufficed to procure peace and security for their Christian contemporaries. Once the apostle Paul had laid down universal love between all men as the foundation of his Christian community, the inevitable consequence in Christianity was the utmost intolerance towards all who remained outside of it; the Romans, who had not rounded their state on love, were not given to lack of religious toleration, although religion was a concern of the state, and the state was permeated through and through with it. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a German world-dominion evoked a complementary movement towards anti-semitism; and it is quite intelligible that the attempt to establish a new communistic type of culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. *One only wonders, with some concern, however, how the Soviets will manage when they have exterminated their bourgeois entirely* [my emphasis--DT]..." Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) http://personal.ashland.edu/~jmoser1/freud2.htm

Later in his 1932 lecture on "The Question of a Weltanschauung" he went further:

"Theoretical Marxism, as put into effect in Russian Bolshevism, has acquired the energy, the comprehensiveness and the exclusiveness of a Weltanschauung, but at the same time it has acquired an almost uncanny resemblance to what it is opposing. Originally it was itself a part of science, and, in its realisation, was built up on science and technology, but it has nevertheless established a ban upon thought which is as inexorable as was formerly that of religion. All critical examination of the Marxist theory is forbidden, doubts of its validity are as vindictively punished as heresy once was by the Catholic Church. The works of Marx, as the source of revelation, have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran, although they are no freer from contradictions and obscurities than those earlier holy books.

"And although practical Marxism has remorselessly swept away all idealistic systems and illusions, it has nevertheless developed illusions itself, which are no less dubious and unverifiable than their predecessors. It hopes, in the course of a few generations, so to alter men that they will be able to live together in the new order of society almost without friction, and that they will do their work voluntarily. In the meantime it moves elsewhere the instinctual barriers which are essential in any society, it directs outwards the aggressive tendencies which threaten every human community, and finds its support in the hostility of the poor against the rich, and of the hitherto powerless against the former holders of power. But such an alteration in human nature is very improbable. The enthusiasm with which the mob follow the Bolshevist lead at present, so long as the new order is incomplete and threatened from outside, gives no guarantee for the future, when it will be fully established and no longer in danger. In exactly the same way as religion, Bolshevism is obliged to compensate its believers for the sufferings and deprivations of the present life by promising them a better life hereafter, in which there will be no unsatisfied needs. It is true that this paradise is to be in this world; it will be established on
earth, and will be inaugurated within a measurable time. But let us remember that the Jews, whose religion knows nothing of a life beyond the grave, also expected the coming of the Messiah here on earth, and that the Christian Middle Ages constantly believed that the Kingdom of God was at hand...

"...Perhaps [the future] will show that the [Bolshevik] attempt has been made prematurely and that a fundamental alteration of the social order will have little hope of success until new discoveries are made that will increase our control over the forces of Nature, and so make easier the satisfaction of our needs. It may be that only then will it be possible for a new order of society to emerge which will not only banish the material want of the masses, but at the same time meet the cultural requirements of individual men. But even so we shall still have to struggle for an indefinite length of time with the difficulties which the intractable nature of man puts in the way of every kind of social community." "The Question of a Weltanschauung" (1932) https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm

Of course in theory the Soviets might react to Freud's criticisms by saying "Psychoanalysis in itself is valid, but the broader sociological conclusions that Freud has drawn from it are wrong." (Trotsky may have had such a distinction in mind when he said that although Freud was a great "detective" he was a "disaster" as a philosopher.) It is not clear, though, that in practice this distinction could be maintained. Some Soviet sources in the late 1920's did distinguish between psychoanalysis as therapy and "Freudism" (i.e., the broader social, artistic, etc. conclusions Freud and his disciples drew from psychoanalysis). But in fact the discrediting of the latter led to the extinction of the former.

There is one other thing to note, though: Freud's critical remarks about Bolshevism were made *after* he had learned (as the letter to Osipov quoted at the beginning of this post indicates) that psychoanalysis was being destroyed in the Soviet Union. Perhaps if it had still been flourishing there, he might have been more restrained in his criticisms?

***

In conclusion, I should emphasize that I am not necessarily saying that Soviet psychologists and psychiatrists were wrong to reject Freud after the late 1920's. Although some of their reasons for doing so make little sense outside "Marxist-Leninist" ideology, others--e.g., the argument that there had not been sufficient scientific verification of Freud's theories--could be agreed to by many Western psychologists and psychiatrists. Indeed, as Miller acknowledges at the beginning of his book (pp. ix-x): "A century after the publication of *Studies in Hysteria*, which launched Freud's career in the new field he was to name 'psychoanalysis' his work has come under attack from many quarters. These arguments revolve around the very serious doubts that have been raised concerning the inability to verify the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis by the general standards of modern scientific testing....Even Freud's most passionate defenders are compelled to admit that a crisis is at hand." But whatever the current reputation of psychoanalysis (and it still does have its defenders) there can be no doubt that in the 1920's it was an important part of modernist Western culture, and the Soviet rejection of it has importance for that reason. (Miller might not agree with me that this rejection was not inevitable; he thinks that despite all the arguments made to the contrary by the Soviet "Freudian Marxists" in the 1920's and by the western left-wing sympathizers of Freud (e.g., the Frankfurt School) in the following decades [1], there really is a basic conflict between Freudian and Marxist ideology.)

[1] As Miller notes, it is striking that those who have written about what Martin Jay in *The Dialectical Imagination* http://books.google.com/books?id=nwkzVdaaB2sC&pg=PA86 called the Frankfurt School's "unnatural marriage" of Marx and Freud have generally failed to realize how it had a precursor in the Soviet "Freudian Marxists" of the 1920's. (Jay does recognize Trotsky's sympathies for Freud but writes that after 1923 "a taboo descended on Freud and his followers and Pavlovian behaviorism became the new orthodoxy." This is a bit of an oversimplification of a process that actually took several years.)
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