Psychoanalysis and Russian Revolution: Notes for a Debate

This article recovers some important moments of the encounters and mismatches between psychoanalysis and the Russian Revolution. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis played a crucial role in the Revolution's early years, making room for reflecting on the new Soviet man. So much so that Wilhelm Reich stated, when he visited the USSR in 1929, that many of the changes introduced by the revolution met his theories. Shortly afterwards, however, he criticized the setback in the field of sexuality, which occurred in the 1930s, to which he attributed an important role in the bureaucratization of the revolution. In this sense, Reich does not differ much from Freud, who, at various points in his intellectual career, referred to the Soviet experience and was skeptical of the world views’ univocity and the illusory character of the promises of extinction of unease. We consider it relevant to resume this debate because it raises the question for psychoanalysis of its possibility to listen to historically proletarianized voices, and for social revolutionaries, the problem of sustaining a discourse that is not seduced by the totalizing temptation.