BOOK LAUNCH The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930–1980

You’re warmly invited to celebrate the launch of my first book, The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930–1980 (Routledge)

The evening will feature a conversation between Lizaveta van Munsteren, Raluca Soreanu, Catherine Humble, and Natalya Chernyshova, an open discussion, and a wine reception.

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Raluca Soreanu is a psychoanalytic and psychosocial thinker and writer. She is Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and a psychoanalyst, member of the Círculo Psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, UK. She is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and the co-author, with Jenny Willner and Jakob Staberg, of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). Her book The Psychic Life of Fragments: On Splitting and the Experience of Time in Psychoanalysis is forthcoming with Routledge. She is the project lead of the interdisciplinary research project FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant); Academic Associate of The Freud Museum London; and Editor of the Studies in the Psychosocial series at Palgrave and of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis Series at 1968 Press.

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Dr Catherine Humble works at the Institute of Psychoanalysis as Executive Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is Honorary Lecturer in Psychoanalysis at University College London, and she has taught English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at Kingston University. She has published book chapters and journal articles on psychoanalysis, literature and film, with a particular interest in gender, language and the body, and she has co-edited a book, Experiencing the Body: A Psychoanalytic Dialogue on Psychosomatics. Her writing has appeared in theIndependent, Prospect and the Observer, and she worked as a longstanding book reviewer for the Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. She has also written an award-winning short film. Her book, Women in the Shadows of Psychoanalysis, will be published with Faber in the UK, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) in the US, and in other territories.

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Dr Natalya Chernyshova is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (Routledge, 2013), as well as book chapters and journal articles on late Soviet material culture, postwar Belarus, and Soviet nationalities politics. She is currently writing her second book, a history of Soviet Belarus in the long 1970s (the project was funded by the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2020-2022). She regularly comments on Belarusian and Soviet history and current affairs for media in the UK and internationally.

Friday, 10th of October

Doors open at 6:30 PM, event starts at 7:00 PM

Kindly RVSP to help us confirm numbers for catering.

Swedenborg House

20–21 Bloomsbury Way, London,

WC1A 2TH

Hope to see you there! Bring your plus one and two!

About the book:

This book considers the changing fortunes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia from 1930 to 1980.

Approaching social history in a psychoanalytic key, Lizaveta van Munsteren argues that the growing split between official and informal languages of the time produced multiple strategies to keep alive the conversation around prohibited subjects. Through original archival research on figures such as Bluma Zeigarnik, Alexander Luria, Filipp Bassin and Dmitry Uznadze, van Munsteren offers a more nuanced understanding of Soviet studies of the unconscious and the role of language in the formation of the mind and in mental disturbances. This book makes a significant contribution to the historiography of psychoanalysis and to the study of the cultural influence of psychoanalysis and its interdisciplinary engagements.

The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930-1980 will appeal to historians of psychoanalysis and psychology in Soviet Russia, psychosocial researchers and anyone interested in the critical history of psychoanalysis.

About the author:

Dr Lizaveta van Munsteren, clinician and academic with a long-standing interest in psychoanalytic theory and history. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the FREEPSY project at the University of Essex, UK, working on theoretical formulations of the psychoanalytic frame in free clinics, and archives of free clinics in Vienna and Budapest. She is a lecturer in psychotherapy at King's College London, teaches Freud at the Bowlby Centre, and psychosocial studies at the British Psychotherapy Foundation.