PSYCHOTERAPIA (PSIXOTERAPIJAOBROZRENIE VOPROSOV LECENIJA I PRIKLADONOJ PSIXOLOGII)

In Moscow in 1909 the military physician Nikolai A. Vyroubov founded the review Psychoterapia, A Review of Questions of Therapy and Applied Psychology with a view to introducing Russian practitioners to western schools of psychotherapy.

The thirty issues of the review (which appeared from January 1910 to the end of 1917) focused increasingly on psychoanalytic theories but they also presented the work of Freud's great rivals, like Paul Dubois and Johannes Marcinowski. Readers were also informed of the split brought about by Alfred Adler (1911). The review enjoyed the support of the very influential Moscow Psychiatric Circle and the eminent psychiatrist Vladimir P. Serbski (1858-1917), who had decided to dissociate himself from the nosological and purely organicist orientation of Kraeplin's school.

Completing the work of the "Library of Psychology and Psychoanalysis," also organized by Vyroubov and which published Freud's major works, Psychoterapia translated no fewer than twelve of Freud's short technical texts. It also introduced its readers to the works of Adler, Ferenczi, Jung, Rank, Reik, Sachs, and Stekel. The orthodox tendency of the review, directed by doctors Nikolai Ossipov and Mosche Wulff, gave an account of the first Russian attempts to apply the method of free association to clinical neurosis. But it also published works of psychoanalysis applied to subjects as diverse as political jousting, stage fright in actors, and folklore. Supporters of the breakaway Adlerian school, being more politicized, criticized the "monoetiology" (sexual) of the neuroses.

Just before it disappeared, the review had begun to manifest great openness to the medical and scientific culture or the West, and also to its literary and artistic culture. There was no other Russian review of psychoanalysis until 1991—not even during the short and amazing period of Bolshevik psychoanalysis (1920-1930). As a mouthpiece for democratic and liberal ideals, Psychoterapia was of capital importance for the peaceful acceptance of psychoanalysis in Czarist Russia.

Alexandre Mikhalevitch

See also: Russia/USSR.

Bibliography

Maximov, Valeri. (1988). Histoire de la psychanalyse: La psychanalyse russe. L'Âne, 10, 3-5.

Mikhalevitch, Alexandre. (1991). L'âge d'argent de la psychanalyse russe. Les premières traductions des œuvres de Freud en Russie prérévolutionnaire, 1904-1914. Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 399-406.