The Psychoanalytic Kindergarten Project in Soviet Russia

Political Status

The story of the psychoanalytic kindergarten is ultimately associated with a sense of political interest and obligation. Indeed, for some members of the Russian psychoanalytical network, their interest in pursuing the eugenic implications of Freud’s thoughts was not just fed by a convergence of pedagogic and political analysis, but was also built on long-standing ties to highflying members of the Bolshevik elite (Valkanova 2009). The project was informally led by Vera Schmidt (1889-1937), an educator with an extraordinary career whose work remains far too little known outside the psychoanalytic world. Vera had studied the kindergarten method at the Froebel Institute in Kiev from 1913-16 and was deeply influenced by Friedrich Froebel’s (1782-1852) philosophy (Valkanova & Brehony 2006).

The Home was an early childhood institution, run as a boarding school. In Vera Schmidt‘s words, a key feature was the closeness of the founders of the kindergarten project: “…in our small circle of people, who were interested in psychoanalysis, has emerged the idea of organising a children’s home that could allow us to seek new education on a basis of psychoanalysis” (Schmidt 2011, pll). It is striking how many of the Bolshevik leadership were in the same social and intellectual network. Amusingly, half of the enrolled children came from families of Revolutionary heroes and officials, while half were abandoned or orphaned street children. From the nomenklatura, these included the children of Kursky, Sverdlov, Frunze and Vera herself, as well as Stalin’s birth son Vasily and his adoptive son Artyom Sergeev (Tomik). The latter noted in his memoirs that Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva made only rare visits to the Children’s Home during the three-year period both children stayed there (Sergeev & Glushnik 2006).

Alliluyeva, however, helped the newly established project to find a home in the beautiful Art Nouveau Ryabushinsky House in Moscow (built by the architect Fyodor Schechtel in 1900). The choice of the Ryabushinsky House to develop the new Soviet man and woman is significant. The sculpted staircase, stained-glass windows and painted wall tiles represented the emergence of the unconscious soul and its spiritual evolution. The kindergarten project was closely monitored by the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, the People’s Commissariat for Education, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the German mine workers’ trade union organisation ‘Union’. [Union of Manual and Intellectual Workers]

Scientisation and its Power in Defining Pedagogy

The ‘scientific’ work of Vera Schmidt drew on a normative construct of a child (Valkanova, 20.

Scientisation was perceived as having a special form of social power in defining pedagogy. Norm had to be generated and clearly conveyed to politicians and teachers. This tendency rested on two interrelated premises: that psychoanalysts possessed and exercised power, and that education was an effective device in transforming habits and attitudes. Psychoanalytic thinking worked with a number of extensive concepts, such as unconsciousness, desire, otherness and drives (Schmidt 2011). An apprentice-master training model was established, with a special emphasis on analysis, and psychoanalytic knowledge was seen with an ‘uncritical aura’ (Vesely 2004). In order to cultivate the necessary professional attitude, the trainees had to go through analysis themselves.

This training was centred on experiencing the power of sublimation. Trainees were guided towards a cathartic transformation of their professional identity. Indeed, they had to discover the similarities of their own fears and desires to those observable in children. Essentially, children were allowed to express their sexual needs freely. Vera noted in her report to Sigmund Freud (Schmidt 1924) that the aim was for the trainees to take a professional stance, without disgust, when observing infantile sexual behaviours. However, knowledge of Freud’s approach was taken as a framework that devalued any other professional attributes, such as empathy or efficiency.

Moreover, excessive preoccupation with psychoanalytic knowledge generation resulted in high employee turnover, and eventually, along with an inspector’s report that insisted on children practising masturbation, contributed to the closure of the project in 1925.

Legacy of Vera Schmidt’s Work

The evaluation of acceptable theories to support the ideological role of education marginalised positive recognition of the research work done in the Children’s Home. The scientific community vigorously engaged in anti-psychoanalytic campaigns at academic forums, in scholarly journals and professional magazines. The introduction to Pavel Blonsky’s book Sexual Education (1935) is a good example of such polemics. Blonsky cited Lenin’s hostile criticism of psychoanalysis (documented in Clara Zetkin’s words): “Freud’s theory is a fashionable trick. I do not trust those who are scrupulously engaged with sexual issues…” Trotsky’s involvement was also unfortunate and provoked adverse actions. Soon after Stalin launched a series of attacks on Trotsky in 1924, the project was labelled ‘anti-Marxist’.

Related:

What’s Wrong with Sigmund Freud? – Susan Rosenthal

Facing professional isolation and possible career death, Freud recanted the following year, writing, “it was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general.” In An Autobiographical Study (1925), he reflected:

I believed those stories [of childhood sexual trauma] and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him…I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up. (p.34)

Freud’s conversion was not decisive. When WWI revived the importance of trauma in causing mental breakdown, Freud publicly defended shell-shocked soldiers who had been charged with malingering. However, as he acknowledged in The History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (1914), the trauma model and psychoanalysis are incompatible. He had to choose whether mental breakdown is caused by external events or internal conflict.

In The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984), Jeffrey Masson documents Freud’s process of conversion from courageous supporter of child victims to career-building opportunist.

Freud not only joined the skeptics who dismissed child victims, he provided them with pseudoscientific ammunition. Standing reality on its head, he insisted that reports of childhood sexual assault represent a normal yet disguised sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. Freud’s ‘Oedipus complex’ cast the child as the seducer and normalized the despicable practice of adults ‘initiating’ children into sex under the guise of assisting their maturation.

Clara Zetkin: Lenin on the Women’s Question

The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems ‘educated’, even scientific, but it is ignorant, bungling. Freudian theory is the modern fashion. I mistrust the sexual theories of the articles, dissertations, pamphlets, etc., in short, of that particular kind of literature which flourishes luxuriantly in the dirty soil of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always contemplating the several questions, like the Indian saint his navel. It seems to me that these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary hypotheses, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience. This masked respect for bourgeois morality seems to me just as repulsive as poking about in sexual matters. However wild and revolutionary the behaviour may be, it is still really quite bourgeois. It is, mainly, a hobby of the intellectuals and of the sections nearest them. There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.