My dissertation is titled, Anatomy of the Drives: An Intellectual History of Freudian Thought in Russia from 1905 to 1930. It focuses on the influence of classical psychoanalysis in the Russian / Soviet context (a time of great cultural and political turmoil), set in the years before and after the break of the October Revolution of 1917, yet prior to the full arrival of Stalinism.
My book enters the current revisionist interest in Freudian thought and its impact on the culture of the twentieth century by bringing psychoanalysis into a larger conversation occurring within the history of philosophy and cultural studies. I argue that what allowed psychoanalysis to pass the break of revolution and to thrive in the Soviet 1920s was the general psychodynamic concept of the “drives” (vlechenie in Russian; Triebe, in German). This concept helps explain how Freudian thought became distributed between incompatible schools in the works of Soviet materialist thinkers, expatriate religious philosophers, and the remarkable work of several modernist artists of the period. It synthesizes several historical studies on philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis in connection to the concept of the drives. With the arrival of Stalinism, psychoanalysis became a prohibited practice, as it was further associated with the “Left Opposition” group allying itself with Trotsky, a vocal supporter of the Freudian movement within the state apparatus.
Furthermore, since literature has frequently played the role of psychological education in Russia, the thesis develops this history alongside discussion of under-examined literary case studies. These texts explicitly feature psychoanalysts as characters and psychodynamic concepts as central, thematic motifs—what I name “Russian psychoanalytic novels.” While sometimes critical of the rapid spread of psychoanalysis in the popular imagination, these authors were nevertheless inspired by psychodynamic lines of thought, in which case studies read like literary texts themselves. Freud himself described his practice as “a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers.”
Nikita Allgire 