The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Whatever its limitations as a diagnostic tool in the USSR, the MMPI proved invaluable for inspiring trust in psychologists: the strange trick of being able to draw convincing conclusions about someone's personality—being able to point to such traits as excitability, cynicism, or a proclivity for developing unexplained symptoms of physical illness—on the basis of a series of apparently unrelated questions struck the perfect balance between magic and science. It showed that, despite lacking a medical doctor's white coat, psychologists knew something the subjects did not. Even better, they knew things about the subjects that the subjects themselves did not know—at just the time when so many Soviet people were starting to sense that they knew less about themselves and their world than they had thought.

The psychologists, meanwhile, started to learn to be clinicians. Moscow State University's psychology department abandoned most caution and launched a series of workshops for and by practicing psychologists. Self-styled shrinks emerged from their apartments, where they had been seeing clients without a permit or permission, or from the library, where they had been reading Freud in the spetskhran, and began helping one another systematize their knowledge. There were workshops on family therapy, Gestalt therapy, and psychoanalysis.

As the Iron Curtain began to open a crack—a byzantine visa system was still in place, and the activities of visiting foreigners were highly restricted, but some people were now welcome to come in for some reasons—Western psychotherapists began to visit and teach. Carl Rogers came in 1987. It was both bizarre and earth-shattering that Rogers, a founder of humanistic client-centered therapy and the pioneer of nondirective counseling, would be the first major Western psychologist to lecture in the Soviet Union: his approaches rested first on placing the person at the center of things, and, second, on not

telling the person what to do. An organizer of his visit recalled that Rogers himself pointed this out, saying, "What you have asked us to do here is dangerous . . . because if people learn to empower themselves, they may not do what you want them to do. It may not fit in this culture."¹⁶

Rogers proceeded to lead some of the strangest groups he had ever encountered. Following a large lecture at Moscow University, he planned to spend four days working with a group of no more than thirty people. The roughly fifty people who crowded into the room and another dozen who congregated outside the door spent the first day screaming and fighting one another for a spot in the group. Rogers was, he wrote later, "horrified"—he italicized the word. "Rarely, if ever, have I heard such vicious hostility directed personally toward present members of the group."¹⁷ On day two, he noted, "It became evident that many of their personal problems relate to the great frequency of divorce. In this educated and sophisticated group, it is similar to the United States. One woman spoke of the way in which she and her husband had gradually worked toward a better and seemingly more permanent relationship. She was definitely the exception. Nearly everyone else spoke of 'When I left my first husband'; 'I have a problem with my child by my second marriage'; 'If I leave my second wife.' There was talk of the insecurity and estrangement of children of previous partnerships; the difficulty of maintaining relationships with one's children when they are at a distance; the interference of ex-wives and ex-mothers-in-law—the whole gamut."¹⁸ Even after the room had settled down, Rogers continued to be taken aback by his students' inability to listen to one another. Yet the formal debriefing several days later convinced Rogers that as therapists his students had been deeply affected by the suggestion that they should hold back judgment and even guidance. Indeed, they attempted to conduct what should have been a formal and formulaic meeting of an "academic council" in Rogerian fashion, a feat Rogers himself called "extravagant." As people, though, the Russian participants seemed to sadden the great therapist: he and his

co-facilitator noted "a certain 'lostness' . . . a pervading sense that there should be more to life, a deep despair about ever finding it."¹⁹