The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

in the MID-1990S the Western psychoanalysts who had sporadically been traveling to post-Soviet countries launched a formal training program for their colleagues from countries where the psychoanalytic tradition had been interrupted. Arutyunyan attended a series of training sessions held in Poland. She had been working as an analyst for about a decade, give or take a flailing year or two. For years now she had enjoyed free access to psychoanalytic literature. She had also been studying psychodrama at a school started in Russia by Swedish therapists. She was a well-educated, well-rounded psychoanalyst, no longer a beginner, so she had a phrase to call what she experienced when she started at the new program: it was a narcissistic blow. She observed masters at work, and she realized that she could not work half that well—not because the instructors were innately so much more talented or intelligent but because they stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of their predecessors, who stood on the shoulders of giants. Arutyunyan, on the other hand, stood on emptiness, and she herself felt empty. Her ideas were archaic at best, naive at worst. What she felt was that burning, destructive jealousy: this mastery, this fluidity, this depth should have been hers.

The post-Soviet psychoanalysts lacked the central qualification of their profession: they had not themselves gone through analysis. A number of psychoanalysts in Germany, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands began taking on the role of analyst and supervisor for the Russians, who would travel to their supervisors' cities for a few

weeks at a time to undergo analysis, while their own patients were on hold, to return and pick up their work and receive supervision over e­mail. Some of their colleagues pointed out that this was not how it was done, but the participants recalled that the early Freudians had shuttled much the same way. Arutyunyan began traveling to Germany for three-week stints of daily analysis. The language of her sessions was English, the mother tongue for neither analyst nor patient. Sometimes the work of expressing feelings in a language to which these feelings were foreign seemed impossible. Other times, Arutyunyan was grateful for the task of simplification and explication English forced upon her: it made obfuscation more difficult. As she went deeper into analysis, she observed the unconscious playing tricks with language—like when her dreams contained German phrases that she thought she could not understand—but she could remember them and, translated, they unmistakably revealed their meaning.

Shuttle analysis worked on a rigid schedule with long gaps, hardly suited to work so delicate and unpredictable. Arutyunyan often left her clients in Moscow at the least opportune moment in their own analytic processes and then compounded the problem by returning in a changed and vulnerable state. Weekly e-mail sessions with a supervisor called her to order. "Where did that come from?" he would write, challenging her interpretation of a particularly difficult moment. "Could it be that you are frustrated at being torn away from your own analysis and you are taking revenge on the person who caused the separation?" That would be her patient, who was utterly defenseless in this situation. Arutyunyan felt defenseless. All of Russia felt defenseless, it seemed. Pressing on with her own analysis, and her patients', was a way to hang on, by the skin of her teeth, to who she was.