Journal of Russian & East European Psychology

ISSN: 1061-0405 (Print) 1558-0415 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo20

Introduction

Elena T. Sokolova

To cite this article: Elena T. Sokolova (1997) Introduction, Journal of Russian & East European
Psychology, 35:6, 3-4

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-040535063

Published online: 08 Dec 2014.

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 Journal of Russian di East European Psychology,
vol. 35, no. 6, November-December 1997, pp. 3-4.
0 1998 M.E. Sharpe,Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061-0405/1998 $9.50 + 0.00.

Introduction
Before presenting the articles in this second special issue to the Ameri-
can reader, I should like, as an eyewitness and active participant in the
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psychotherapy movement in what was then still the USSR in the late
seventies, to say a few words about the particular intellectual atmos-
phere that brought people of different generations and psychotherapists
of different psychotherapeutic orientations together. In Russia, where
psychotherapeutic practice has always been the exclusive prerogative
of medical doctors, it was illegal for other professionals to practice
psychotherapy. This outlaw situation created a unique underground
zone that was a strange and dangerous, privileged domain of “apos-
tates” fiom academic psychology, requiring, moreover, a certain per-
sonal courage.
Free thinking and unshackled reflection have given rise to a special,
purely Russian psychotherapeutic mentality in which openness and
casualness have gone hand in hand with profound and serious scien-
tific reflection and thought on the uniqueness of the psychotherapeutic
culture in Russia, which is interspersed with stories, anecdotes, and
quotations from the dissident literature and the Russian classics. “I feel
fine; I am an orphan,” says one of the characters in Shalom Aleichem.
Something similar, I think, is characteristic of Russian psychotherapy
of nonmedical orientation. It is not bound to any one single current of
thought; it is naturally eclectic and gravitates toward a search for
“similarities and differences”; it is open to dialogue, antidogmatic,
ironic, and humanist, if only as a result of its relative youth. This will
be illustrated in some of the articles to be presented in our third issue.
The first article here, by Rita Turevskaia, belongs with those in our
previous issue on “Contemporary approaches to traditional areas,”
dealing, as it does, with defense mechanisms employed by adolescents.
A.B. Kholmogorova and N.G. Garanian present not only a devel-
oped theoretical explication of arguments for and against the alliance
between psychology and psychotherapy but also the empirical results
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 4 INTRODUCTION

of a test of practical application of this approach, which they used in

the psychotherapy of somatoform disorders. Their mission, as they see
it, is to integrate cognitive and psychodynamic approaches to psycho-
therapy.
I.M.Kadyrov employs the very cogent metaphor of “therapeutic
theater” with his reflections on the creativeness of dialogue and on its
integration into the contemporary multidimensional space of psycho-
therapy. The metaphor is applied in a comparison of certain aspects of
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psychoanalysis and psychodrama and enables the author to reveal “not

only contiguous but also mutually interpenetratingtraditions.”
A.Z. Shapiro takes up the case of “positive family psychotherapy”
and proposes that we assess it within a system of normative coordi-
nates such as good, truth, love, panunity, creativity, and nonmanipula-
tiveness, which, in his view, constitute the “positively oriented
moral-psychological foundations of a positive model of the family and
of psychological assistance to the family.”
Our next issue will continue ow review of current trends in Russian
psychotherapy.

ELENA T. SOKOLOVA
Clinical Psychology Department
Moscow University