"Freudianism has no cultural, but only anti-cultural significance. [It is the result] of the negative side of the crisis of civilization, the side that destroys the old spiritual, social, ethical, and philosophical values, and replaces them with crude materialism."

Francis Parker Yockey

This brief article is a review of the book by Martin A. Miller (professor of history at Duke University): Freud y los Bolcheviques (2005, Ed. Nueva Visión: Buenos Aires).

That is to say, the title of this article is a metaphorical quotation mark, since "the Russians" who in 1917 made the revolution in that country by staging a coup d'état, were not Russians, but foreigners in their vast majority, for example, coming from the Baltic region, Ukraine, Poland, the Caucasus, etc. This is something that is not denied by any historian that I know of, Eric Hobsbawm or Orlando Figes. Those who made the Russian revolution, it turns out, were not strictly Russians. And this is something they probably didn't tell us in high school.

The Freuds came from Galicia, today a region shared by Poland and Ukraine.

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born in Moravia, now the Czech Republic, a region quite close to the above.

As we shall see, perhaps this best explains their affinity with the ethnic elements that bordered the Russian Empire, but who never felt themselves properly Russian as such. The proof of this is very simple: as soon as they came to power, the Bolsheviks exterminated millions of Russians. Those who do not love history books can at least read Alexander Soljenitsin, Nobel Prize winner.

For some reason unknown to me, this detail is not usually taught in the Universities in which I have participated, but Freud, rather than in the West itself, where it has the greatest impact is first in Russia and not in Western Europe or North America as it is usually believed. So much so, that the Soviet Encyclopedia of 1978 cites Freudism as a doctrine that elevates the conception of man in its philosophical and anthropological principles (p. 13).

The first Russian psychiatrist who as early as 1903 begins to introduce discussions of "the unconscious" was N. Bazhenov. (p. 50). Note what an early date. Not only that, but, by the end of the 19th century, figures like Orshanskii were already, very curiously, on similar paths to Freud, questioning associations of ideas and "psychic energy." Korsakov and Kandisnkii, by 1889, were already investigating "pseudo hallucinations" (sensory distortions), which led them to explore the realm of dreams, fantasies, and the sphere of unconscious ideas. (p.52). We ask ourselves: how original was Freud? In the beginning, who came first, the Russians or Freud?

Seeing these similarities, Russian psychiatrists soon saw psychoanalysis as a set of hypotheses applicable to many issues: analysis of culture, religion, sex. In the famous group of Wednesday meetings at Freud's house in Vienna, from the autumn of 1902, at first called the Wednesday Psychological Society and then, from 1909 onwards, the "Vienna Psychoanalytic Society", there were several Russian surnames: Leonid Drosnes, Tatiana Rosenthal, Sabina Spielrein and Moshe Wulff. Freud had been in contact with "the East" since pre-revolutionary times (pp. 50-60). Nietzsche never said better that Europe is only a peninsula of Asia, its backyard. History teaches us - and continues to teach us - that it is not a good idea to provoke the Asian dragon or the Russian bear.

Osipov and Pednitskii were major introducers of psychoanalysis in Russia in 1909 with respect to various theorizations on "anxiety neuroses," works to which Freud gave great credit.

In 1910, Osipov visited Freud in Vienna, and they had a "very pleasant" lunch. In his words by letter to Karl Abraham, Freud would describe Osipov as "our convinced follower in Russia." (p. 72) Osipov, among other things, would apply Freud's theses to interpret Tolstoy, and disseminated a sifted psychoanalytic view of Tolstoy that permeated the entire academic and literary orb.

Tatiana Rosenthal took it upon herself to disseminate psychoanalytic ideas in the (still illegal) Marxist Social Democratic Party of Russia, creating a sort of Freudo-Marxism even before the Frankfurt School of the West. (pp. 80-81)

Moshe Wulff and Spielrein took it upon themselves to impregnate every conceptualization of mental pathology with psychoanalysis, and it is even discussed whether Freud did not take Spielrein's idea of the "death drive" as his own. (pp. 86-87).

After the coup d'état of 1917, with the storming of the Winter Palace, in 1922 the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society was consolidated, directed by Wulff and Ermakov, and which had exchanges with Luria and Vygotsky, because an interest of the members (servile to the new totalitarian government) was how to design an educational system for the new Soviet child. (pp. 104-105) The curious thing is that, in the imagination of the student and the psychologist himself, these figures often appear disconnected, as belonging to parallel worlds that would have had nothing to do with each other. Freud and Luria used to have fluid exchanges by letter. Later another psychoanalytic society would emerge in Kazan, under Luria's leadership.

Freud was impressed with the Russians, and they received his praise. One of the striking things is that Freud, a temperamental, uncompromising, and authoritarian man, got along so badly with Europeans like Jung, but so well with the Russians.

The Bolshevik Communist Party gave its approval to the Freudian model, otherwise it could never have flourished and expanded, for as we know, in the USSR everything worked at gunpoint and vertical bureaucratic decrees. According to Trotsky (also a great Pavlov scholar), psychoanalysis was reconcilable with a materialistic conception of mind and man, and therefore with Marxism. (pp. 147-148) Miller himself tells us: "Nowhere else were psychoanalytic institutions sustained by a national government whose legitimacy was rooted in the fulfillment of ideological doctrine." (p. 121). The ideological doctrine, no mystery, is Soviet Marxism. The psychoanalytic society of the USSR became a state body at Ermakov's suggestion (pp. 111-113).

Freud not only successfully permeated the Russia that was about to explode with psychoanalysis, but he received referrals of patients from Russia, as well as being a pop star at the state level for the totalitarian Bolshevik authorities. The most prominent case we can cite is the well-known "Man of the Wolves", whose real name was Sergei Pankeev, a man belonging to the new Russian aristocracy. (pp. 90-91)

For fans of psychoanalysis, they will see a successful and interesting review of the official history of psychoanalysis in this brief review. For non-psychoanalysts, they see only a sad contamination that permeated everything in shadows and gloom and reinforced the sad psychological and anthropological vision of the Soviet "new man." Perhaps, the Freudian "subject" is that, and it persists despite the fall of the USSR. A theory that inverts the vision of human nature, and places everything elemental and animal in man as superior, and the superior in man as a presumed and even pathological reflection of the elemental. If we were to take it to the sociological plane, it sounds very much like Marx, where "ideology", the world of ideas, creations, ethics, and morals is a mere reflection of an economic structure; that is, once again everything superior as a pale reflection of the inferior.

Freud and the Russians