The Collective Mind: Trauma and Shell-shock in Twentieth-century Russia

Abstract

This article deals with the treatment and wider understanding of shell-shock and trauma in modern Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychiatrists in many European countries were beginning to think about the issue of shell-shock, Russian psychiatrists took part in the general debate. After the Bolshevik revolution, however, the Russian psychiatric profession became isolated and heavily ideologized, and the treatment of all forms of trauma within the Soviet Union developed along specific lines. At the social level, trauma disappeared as an issue. The idea of a damaged ego was not a central consideration in Soviet psychological thinking. People survived by working, and by reference to the collective, rather than to individual consciousness. Trauma, in its modern form of PTSD, only re-emerged in Soviet psychological discourse as a result of contact between veterans of the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan and American veterans of Vietnam. Despite the Soviet Union's anguished history, the concept of trauma is still largely ignored by the population as a whole.