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Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
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Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822371953 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
"TEARS OF BITTERNESS AND JOY"
The Haunting Subject in Soviet Biopolitics
If there were a single problem around which the history of Soviet psychology could be written it would be the role of subjective factors in behavior.
— Raymond Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology
In 1986 Carl Rogers came to Moscow. It was a few months after the Chernobyl disaster and a few months before Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. The famous American psychologist organized two four-day workshops on the suggested themes of humanistic education, individualized instruction, and the fostering of creativity (Rogers 1987). In a retrospective on these workshops, one participant, Ukrainian psychologist Alexander F. Bondarenko (1999), described his experience there. His account begins with skepticism and disappointment. He had hoped to learn "something 'scientific' ... some new theories, experiments, hypotheses and their proofs and disproofs [sic]," but, instead, Rogers had mused about his youth and spoke in generalities about empathetic listening, caring, and congruence (10). Then, on the second day, Bondarenko had a revelation: "I myself was the truth in the world, that was the essence, however bad this truth might be" (12). He continues,
It is difficult to render this in words, but this revelation came as a shock. From the time that I was a child, I had heard that I had to live for people. I was brought up with the idea that my life was necessary — to my parents, to the family, to the state, to the motherland. But it was needed as a part of a universal sacrifice or as a duty. And no one, myself included, needed my life as my own particular life, as the truth of my being in the world.
I looked at Carl Rogers and I felt and I understood that this wise old man was neither adapting himself to the world nor adapting the world to himself. He was being in the world. I knew I was lonely. I realized how lonely I had been. But I was feeling the truth of my being in the world and that feeling purified me and gave me strength to exist, and I sensed tears of joy as well as bitterness in my eyes. (13)
I would hear echoes of these words nearly two decades later, during fieldwork among psychotherapists working in Saint Petersburg. As I mentioned in the introduction, Ira the image maker contrasted the dry and theoretical Soviet approach to psychology with the revelatory sessions she attended in the 1990s. Vitya Markov had criticized the way the doctor-patient relationship was structured in Soviet psychiatry, and he took steps to humanize that relationship. In each case, a critique of the past was also important for situating current work. In this chapter I dive more deeply into this past referent. I discuss how psychiatrists trained in the Soviet period mounted bitter critiques against their former profession while praising the arrival of Western psychotherapies. Such descriptions raise questions both about the status of psychotherapy under Soviet power and its post-Soviet significance.
I understand practitioners' disdain for Soviet medical power, and Bondarenko's mixture of joy and bitterness, in terms of a story of haunting. Throughout the Soviet period, the subjective — that highly psychologized interior in Western psychodynamic theories that Bondarenko references — existed in a tricky relationship to Soviet power. Termed by turns "bourgeois," "idealist," and "pessimistic," the subjective was an ideological problem. And it was criticized most fiercely when psychology located the sources of affective disorder in the utopian social. Why? According to the American social historian Raymond Bauer, whose work dominates the United States historiography of Soviet psychology, the subjective factors of behavior — particularly in the forms of neurosis, depression, or anxiety — were always vulnerable to being read as symptoms of social dysfunction. Far more ideologically preferable were clinical approaches that saw the psyche in materialist (psychoneurological) terms, and affective disorders as individual pathologies rather than signs of neurosis in an oppressive social world. As a consequence, the role that nonmedical talking cures played in the formation of Soviet psychology was minimal.
However, other materials suggest that the subjective never really disappeared from the Soviet psy-ences. Instead, it haunted Soviet scientific psychiatry and research psychiatry, sometimes spilling over into clinical practice, appearing during the post-Stalin thaw of the 1960s and again under Gorbachev. This story of burial and reemergence points to an important fact: the subjective has long been entwined with political liberalization in Russia — most obviously in the post-Soviet neoliberal reforms but also during "socialism with a human face" in the 1960s and perestroika in the 1980s. The core tension explored in this book — between recognizing individual emotional needs, on the one hand, and critiquing bourgeois social difference, on the other — is what emerged in each of these various moments when, after being buried, the subjective reemerged.
To explore these inflection points in more detail, I assemble a genealogy of applied psychology (prikladnaia psikhologiia). I draw from a historiography that is contested between and among Soviet and non-Soviet historians. Why applied psychology, a branch of psychological work that refers to labor psychotechnics, psychotherapy, clinical psychology, applied developmental psychology, and mental hygiene, to name a few? In an early alternative to biomedical psychiatry, applied psychologists pursued work closer in approach and sensibility to the psychodynamic therapies that developed in Western psychotherapy. Moreover, applied psychology's many years of marginalization during the Stalinist period offer a fascinating account, in negative form, of the priorities and philosophical underpinnings of Soviet mental health care and the contours of the New Soviet Man within socialist biopolitics. Through the institutional marginalization of applied psychology, it becomes evident what the New Soviet Man was not.
The genealogical account I offer here is also one among several. As a way to signal that, I crosscut the account that follows with interview fragments drawn from my fieldwork with practitioners trained during the Soviet period. These fragments indicate practitioners' ongoing dissatisfaction with Soviet psychology and psychotherapy in the late-Soviet period, even as the historical narrative I present appears to be one of decreasing state interference. At the same time as they provide a necessary grain of salt, these oral-history fragments themselves require seasoning. They, too, are performances that draw on remembrances of late socialism to do work in the present. Rather than seeking a single account of Soviet biopolitics, then, I am interested in the shifting relations between the ethics of care and biopolitics. Even under supposedly totalitarian conditions, there was room for maneuver, whether by departing from Soviet psychiatry's biological-materialist model of the person or by creating alternative kinds of therapy. To a degree, this room for maneuver troubles another claim practitioners made about the past — that the current "humanization" of psychology is an improvement over the harsh practices of the Soviet past. Nonetheless, I am less concerned here with which claim is true than with the ways in which, no matter the biopolitical context, experts pursue discursive and also practical strategies for distancing themselves from hegemonic structures.
The twentieth century proved tumultuous for Soviet psychologists interested in the talking cure and topics thought too subjectivist for materialist research. Yet the intensification of interest around psychotherapy in the 1990s marks not so much a subjective revolution as a another remapping, under postsocialist capitalism, of the relationships among pathology, health, scientific authority, mental health, and interiority. This genealogy I trace here is crucial for understanding the personal and political stakes for those — like the joyful and embittered Bondarenko — who have been involved in the contemporary psychotherapeutic turn.
Soviet Psychology between Scientism and Marxism: 1917–1930
SOCIAL DETERMINATION: THE MECHANISTS
The types of applied psychology — mental hygiene, psychoanalysis — that in the West led to the development of client-based psychotherapy were present in the early Soviet period but disappeared by the late 1920s. What put them on the wrong side of the Soviet project? One factor is practical: Soviet Russia had not undergone the bourgeois revolution that had gripped Euro-America; the February and October Revolutions of 1917, World War I, and the Russian Civil War (1917–22) had severely impacted Russia's industrialization, triggering famine, homelessness, and unemployment. Soviet authorities feared moral contamination from this violence, as well as hooliganism (Beer 2008). Production had fallen below 20 percent of the level it had reached in 1913 (Hosking 1993, 120). In 1924, seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution, only 23.3 percent of the population of the USSR was part of the urban-industrial matrix (10.4 percent workers, 4.4 percent white collar, and 8.5 percent bourgeois); more than three-quarters of the population were peasants. These figures were mostly unchanged by the end of the 1920s (518). Thus, the party's task of shaping new Soviet persons was as much socioeconomic as psychological, if not more. It involved turning peasants and the petit bourgeois into proletarians, and overcoming the Soviet Union's economic backwardness relative to its industrialized rivals (150). Stalin's first five-year plan (1928–33; announced as having been achieved by 1932) directed tremendous resources into heavy industry as a means of economic development. The effects were significant. The size of the working class doubled during the first five-year plan and tripled by 1940 (154).
According to Raymond Bauer, the Soviet psy-ences as a whole were given their fundamental shape during these same two decades. The future place of Marxism was central, as was the type of Marxism. Between 1917 and the early 1930s, experimentation was widespread in psychology, as it was in other fields (see Clark 1995). There were efforts to join Freudianism and Marxism (until 1927 there was a Moscow chapter of the International Psychoanalytical Association; Wortis 1950, 72; see also Attwood 1990, 53–54), to develop behaviorism, to extend physiology to brain science, to create a system of mental hygiene, and to integrate the study of culture and history into human psychology. None of these was exclusively concerned with Marxist theory, though most were sympathetic to it as a sociological and/or philosophical position.
There was great interest in psychology's potential contribution to the uplift of the proletariat and the building of a socialist society (see M. Cole 2006, 12; Miller 1985). According to the orthodox Marxist principle of economic determinism, social conditions had held back the working classes and the Soviet Union's national minorities. The famous psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria went to Uzbekistan to study cognitive function among children. They found evidence of socioeconomic determinism: a "backward" upbringing or lack of schooling had indeed produced "lower" forms of reasoning that could be amended, they argued, through structural transformations and psychologically grounded pedagogy. (Motivated by a progressive interest in the way structural factors can lead to worse learning outcomes, the researchers nonetheless assumed a problematic ethnocentrism.)
By the mid-1920s, however, as calls for a properly Marxist psychology gathered force, the period of experimentation became hamstrung by philosophical debates. This especially affected categories like consciousness (soznanie) and psyche (psikhika) in both psychological research and Marxist theory. Bauer writes that psychologists rejected introspectionism "because it reflected a contemplative approach to life, setting off thought from action, and because it was tainted with concepts like freedom of will and therefore was anti-deterministic. ... Soviet psychologists, of the twenties, then, almost without exception, either rejected or did not deal with subjective and conscious factors in human behavior in a systematic way" (1959, 74).
This produced several ideas about human beings and behavior. Instead of attributing human actions to motivation or will, individuals were viewed, in Pavlovian fashion, more deterministically: the person "was viewed as an adaptive mechanism that responded to external forces in such a way as to maintain equilibrium between himself and his environment" (75; see also Matza 2014). Little attention was given to "needs and interests," because these could all be described in the more precise language of reflexes. It was assumed that "the reshaping of human nature would take place automatically as the institutions of society were changed." For these reasons, psychology, which had already had a whiff of subjectivism, was vulnerable to being displaced by neurophysiology, the much harder and more materialist discipline of Ivan Pavlov. Researchers, who treated the mind as an empirically accessible part of the body rather than a metaphysical substance, stood more firmly on the soil of materialism. Indeed, psychologists like Konstantin N. Kornilov (the first to call, in 1923, for a psychology derived from Marxist tenets) asserted that consciousness was incompatible with materialist philosophy (Bauer 1959, 67–68).
THE DIALECTICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENT
Bauer suggests that this mechanistic trend lost its hold after Lenin's death in 1924. Still at issue was the relationship between materialism and the subjective. Bauer speculates that by the late 1920s, during the first five-year plan and the collectivization of agriculture, the mechanists' view became incompatible with a call for socialist initiative and creative thinking. Timed with the release of Lenin's posthumous writings, a more agentive view of the subject emerged. This view took up the Leninist line in philosophy, the "theory of reflection," which posited consciousness as a "reflection" of, but also action on, the objective world. This dialectical position drew subjectivist theories into Marxist terms.
By the 1930s, after heated debates at various conferences and through polemical writings, the dialectical position had become dominant. This had several important theoretical consequences. First, researchers could now account for the psyche, albeit as a "qualitatively new synthesis of matter, the laws of which were not reducible to those of physiology" (Bauer 1959, 29). Second, consciousness, while carefully couched in materialist language as a form of "highly organized matter," had been assigned a relative autonomy from its material substratum and was "therefore restored to an important role in the direction of human affairs" (29). In other words, in dialectical materialism psychologists had found a way to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy without dispensing with the subjective entirely. It offered them a material basis for the psyche, created an argument for the relevance of consciousness as an object of inquiry, and integrated the social into the individual in a way that did not, at the same time, reduce the individual to a mere function of environment. This enabled Soviet psychologists to move beyond the binary then defined by phenomenology, on the one hand, and objectivist materialism, on the other. In fact, the Russian scholar M. G. Yaroshevky (1996, 165) asserts that, far from hindering psychology, Marxism offered scholars a way of resolving the crisis between objective and subjective approaches in world psychology.
Consistent with the psychological model of active, conscious socialist workers, many speeches in the early 1930s were preoccupied with individual responsibility and initiative, marking an upsurge in the importance of "training" (i.e., various forms of self-discipline) in Soviet society (Bauer 1959, 46; Kharkhordin 1999). This was also the period of Stakhanovism, when party officials induced socialist competition by rewarding and celebrating workers who surpassed production goals.
Following the shift to dialectics, applied psychology enjoyed a temporary resurgence, peaking in 1932 and 1933 (Bauer 1959, 120; Graham 1987, 167). Nonetheless, as David Joravsky (1989, 335–54) notes, in becoming more vital to social policy, applied psychology also became more politicized. Along with the theory of reflection came an accompanying notion that theory should follow practice. According to Bauer, "In the early thirties, 'facts' themselves came to be scrutinized on a political basis, and 'objectivism' came to be a term of abuse" (1959, 105–6). "The more psychologists attempted to apply their techniques to concrete social problems, the clearer the political and social implications of their work became. In many instances these implications conflicted with the interests of the regime" (109).
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixPrelude: Bury That Part of Oneself xvii
Introduction: An Yet . . . 1
Part I. Biopoliticus Interruptus 31
Interlude: Russian Shoes 33
1. "Tears of Bitterness and Joy": The Haunting Subject in Soviet Biopolitics 37
Part II. (In)Commensurability 67
Interlude: Family Problems 69
2. "Wait, and the Train Will Have Left": The Success Complex and Psychological Difference 71
3. "Now, Finally, We are Starting to Relax": On Civilizing Missions and Democratic Desire 104
4. "What Do We Have the Right to Do?": Tactical Guidance at a Social Margin 133
Part III. In Search of a Politics 165
Interlude: Public Spaces 167
5. "I Can Feel His Tears": Psychosociality under Putin 171
6. "Hello, Lena, You Are on the Air": Talk-Show Selves and the Dream of Public Intimacy 197
Postlude: Subjects of Freedom 225
Conclusion: And Yet . . . So What? 227
Notes 243
References 275
Index 295
What People are Saying About This
“In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza offers an extensive, richly elaborated, and wonderfully nuanced history of psychotherapy as a profession while carefully attending to the ways new notions of selfhood became incorporated into an array of psychotherapeutic approaches as market economics burst into Russia. Immensely important and ethnographically, historically, and theoretically innovative, Shock Therapy intervenes in key anthropological debates about affect, biopolitics, care, and neoliberalism.”
“A compelling ethnographic inquiry into psychotherapies that arose in Russia in the immediate post-Soviet moment, Shock Therapy examines forms of ‘self-work’ that Russians employ to reckon with their futures in increasingly precarious times. Tomas Matza is especially attentive to the class differences and dynamics that psychological expertise reproduces and exacerbates, despite the progressive orientation of many of the experts. This central conundrum informs Matza’s reflections on the specific contexts, from public clinics for ‘problem children’ to radio talk shows, in which psychotherapy circulates in Russia today.”