In the very beginning of his major monograph 'The Problem of the Unconscious' (1968), Filipp Bassin writes that he was compelled, for several years, to participate in discussions concerning various aspects of the theory of the unconscious, in which psychoanalytic approaches were opposed to a dialectical-materialist understanding of non-conscious forms of the psyche and higher nervous activity.
Since the 1930s, psychoanalysis - and with it the very question of the unconscious - had been de facto banned from Soviet psychological science. Yet during the late socialist period, as Bassin’s own words suggest, interest in this issue unexpectedly re-emerged. It became embedded in broader discussions unfolding between Soviet and Western psy-specialists during the Cold War. Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists not only engaged closely with Western psychoanalytic literature, but also proposed alternative conceptualizations of the unconscious, addressing both domestic and international audiences.
This paper seeks to move beyond the still largely unexamined historiographical gesture that reduces Soviet critiques of psychoanalysis to mere ideological cliches or cynical conformity. Focusing on Bassin’s case, I ask: How did he translate the problem of the unconscious into the language of Marxist science? How did his major works, written in the context of the Cold War, come to be translated into French, Polish, Spanish, and German? Finally, what role did these translations play in the specific French intellectual context of the second half of the twentieth century, marked by its own struggles with orthodox psychoanalysis and psychiatry?
To address these questions, I draw on Bassin’s published works, his contributions to Soviet and European professional journals, the translations of his texts, and his correspondence with Léon Chertok, one of the key actors in the dialogue between Soviet and French psy-specialists.