Subjects of freedom [electronic resource] : psychologists, power and politics in postsocialist Russia

This study is an ethnography of Russia's psychotherapy boom following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It inquires into the new subjectivities that have taken shape with the passing of the "New Soviet Man" and the dawn of a psychologized homo œconomicus. I draw on 14 months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2005-2007 involving participant-observation in municipal and commercial organizations, textual and media analysis, oral history, and archival work. I explore how approaches in psychotherapy, marginalized after the 1930s in Soviet-Russia, have been welcomed back into state politics, combining with democratic and market reforms to enable a whole series of new governing projects. These projects extend from education policy to intimate relations in the family, and from the psychological development of children to self-improvement courses for Russia's new middle class. The emergence of psycho-technical approaches to the self, I argue, is symptomatic of a broader shift in subjectivity following the collapse of the Soviet socialist order and the rise of capitalism, and offers an opportunity to study ethnographically the relationship between political transformation and "inner-transformation" as it concerns the practical ethics of "learning to be free." The current popularity of psychological self-work can be traced to a late-Soviet interest in "humanizing" socialist institutions during the 1960s "thaw" and again during perestroika. During the 1990s, however, as psychologists and therapists were incorporated into state institutions and commercial organizations, the late-Soviet progressive interest in "humanization" has followed divergent pathways. In the marketplace, psychologists have been enrolled in the cultivation of Russia's new elite, inciting a potential-filled, possessive individualism through the development of techniques of self-knowledge and self-esteem, entrepreneurialism and prudentialism. By contrast, in state institutions, resource constraints, audit and loose legal structures have squeezed their services into prophylaxis for the "problem child." As symptoms of a post-Soviet governmentality, psychologists have thus become integrated into the production of classed subject-positions. This results not from therapist-intent or "the state, " but the way psychotherapeutic encounters are structured by biopolitical forces under capitalism. Psychologists and psychotherapists take a different view of the social and political effects of their work. Invoking the critique of the Soviet past as a way to give moral force to their efforts, they claim to be promoting social equality and "learning to be free" through the disruption of authoritarian social relations. Other practitioners invoke the critique of capitalist rationalization in order to argue that they are fostering social connection. These claims appear incongruent with the highly classed effects of their work and the way it is tied to projects of rule; I argue that it is precisely this incongruity that characterizes the politics of freedom in Russia today. Affiliated with both the unpopular neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, as well as the ongoing appeal of democracy with a small-d, "freedom" remains simultaneously a suspected term as well as a state of desire. This ambiguity is reflected in psychological work, which I suggest can be viewed as a post-Soviet practical ethics, where "inner transformation" and the pursuit of the "good life" is always mediated by state and market constraints. As a coda to communism's "New Soviet Man, " what it means to be a "free" post-Soviet subject is being filtered through new technoscientific visions of subjectivity that are themselves caught between the state politics of population and the commoditization of self-work. Through an attention to the "rule of experts" and their ethical practices, this dissertation offers insights into the constraints and possibilities entailed in "learning to be free.".

Advisor: Ferguson James
Freidin Gregory advisor. Thesis advisor
Kohrman Matthew
Yurchak Alexei