Beyond Invisible Walls

The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma, East European Therapists and Their Patients

Jacob D. Lindy, Robert Jay Lifton, Jacob D. Lindy, Robert Jay Lifton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134946334
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Westerners watched those who had survived the era of Soviet trauma emerge into what we hoped would be the exhilarating light of freedom. What we have witnessed, however, is a slow and painful process of progression and regression, of hope and disillusionment, of unexpected psychological barriers: invisible walls that block the progress we had hoped for. In Beyond Invisible Walls, East European therapists, themselves, draw a compelling picture of the waves of trauma that their people endured, the institutions of trauma that remained well after Stalin's era, and their impact on survivors and their families. They describe the psychological remnants of those years: walls that confine people by unconsciously preserving old adaptations to political terror, walls that divide one part of the mind from another, and walls that rise between one generation and the next. These therapists' stories allow us a striking glimpse into how patients' trauma evokes the therapists' own wounds; how both speaker and empathic listener find their way to a healing process, how the two begin to dismantle these invisible walls.

1

Chapter

Introduction

A young doctor living in East Berlin in the early 1980s was considering escaping to the West. She felt her earlier respect for her country’s ideals had been tarnished. Her efforts to reform from within had brought her harassment from the secret police, the Stasi. Understanding the impact this culture, a remnant of an older culture of terror and informing, would have on her future children and her tie to them, she elected not to marry, and not to have children. One night, she had the following dream:

I was searching for something. I saw a long pole and knew this would help. It was very tall and flexible. I realized that with this pole I could vault over the wall that divided the two Berlins and escape to the West. I ran towards the wall, planted the pole solidly, and flew into the air. The vault was very successful. It was also miraculous. Bullets were flying about me, but all were missing. Soon I was aware that I was directly over the top of the wall and high above it. Without warning, I struck an invisible barrier. It knocked me from the sky. I fell back to the ground on the Eastern side.

The image of this young woman striking an invisible wall as she tried to vault away from her home in the East captures her experience of confinement by invisible psychological forces. Cseslaw Milosz (1953/1990) foresaw how East Europeans caught in the world of Soviet totalitarianism would show signs of a “captive mind.” This woman’s wish to leap into the world and mind-set of the West even before the wall had fallen, was clear and conscious; yet an equal opposite force kept her on her own side. Perhaps she wished to retain socialist ideals although tarnished, and even feared that the psychological accommodations she had unconsciously learned in order to adapt in the East would effectively repel her from the West. The dream represents to her an internal and therefore invisible wall that divides the self and would persist even when the actual wall that separated the East from the West would disappear.

In the cases of our East European colleagues and their patients, all survivors of trauma in the Communist era, we find the image of invisible walls recurring in two forms: walls which unconsciously preserve outmoded ways of adaptation (for example, guilt, sacrifice, dependency, and paranoia), and walls which maintain silence between generations (where traumas and deaths of parents and grandparents at the hands of the State go unmourned while succeeding generations feel a void in their identity). The first kind of wall represents the enduring personality traits and unconscious emotional defenses reinforced during the Communist era, which persist today as internal blocks to adaptation in a freer society. The second kind of wall divides an older generation from their children. Parents deceived children in order to protect them. Children grew up with an empty space where true knowledge of their relatives ought to have been.

This book is told through the voices of our colleagues, therapists from six countries inside the former Soviet bloc. It concerns their witness to trauma from the Soviet era and its continuing effects in the lives of their patients, their patients’ families, and in themselves. The therapies occurred in the years of perestroika and after in Russia and Central/Eastern Europe. As the narrative thread in a given treatment unfolds, we note how, around moments of discord or empathie strain, traumas of the patient resonate with traumas of the therapist. We see shame at the pressure to yield to oppressive authority, guilt taken on when crimes belong to an older generation, disdain at the sacrifice of one’s autonomy; we see yearnings for connection between children and their parents and wishes to avoid grief and mourning. Through this double exposure we gain a remarkable experiential look into the culturally specific trauma of the Soviet era and the unconscious defensive adaptations to it which have been part of its aftermath. Where unconscious aspects of patient and therapist overlap we see trauma affecting culture and culture affecting trauma, phenomena which continue to spill over into the post-Soviet period.

During the treatments the patients came to understand themselves better as they struggled to reconnect the broken threads of their lives, and similarly therapists came to understand themselves and their society better as they struggled to integrate parallel experiences. In overcoming the inner walls which split off one part of the mind from another, and in breaking down the walls that separate communications between parents and children, the book offers viable models for individuals and groups within society to confront the past. These treatments provide a road map for communication (applicable to families and groups as well as individuals) which addresses a legacy of silence, miscommunication, and suffering in these years of transition following the Soviet era.

The Patients: Search for Connection

The patients described in this book presented with a wide variety of clinical problems which turned out to be trauma-related: some were typical of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which we see in other settings: recurrent intrusive images, difficulty sleeping, alienation, psychic numbing, depression. Others are less common: phobia, obsession, eating disorder, work inhibition, suicidal behavior, and the attempt to erase an earlier diagnosis of paranoia. The patients and their relative endured a variety of political traumas: harassment, random searches by secret police, arrest, confinement, stigmatization, abuse by psychiatry, torture, thought reform, imprisonment, and labor camps. As part of the earlier terror/informer ecology (see Chapter 2), they were exposed to the era of complicity with the post-totalitarian state, and their awareness of the political trauma to key family members and friends strongly colors their own core dilemmas and identity today.

In addition the patients were exposed to an intrusive ideology which was destructive to their autonomy and growth, and which in the views of these authors was traumatogenic even to the ordinary citizen—one not subjected to the more extreme forms mentioned above.

The patients’ ages range from children to the elderly. Most lived in large cities although they and their family had a variety of rural experiences. Most are men, but in the course of their treatments, significant women in their lives interacted with the therapists. The psychopathology of all the patients was severe enough to interfere significantly with interpersonal relations and subjective distress, but only two were seen in an inpatient setting. The treatments usually lasted several months.

Either the patients themselves, or their missing relatives whose stories they are trying to reconstruct, were charged with an array of misdeeds and suspicions: having belonged as students to pro-Western political parties, having a relative who emigrated to the West, being overheard engaging in political debate, or refusing to give a dog to a KGB official, or simply belonging to the wrong group at the wrong time, being a priest or a Jew or a bourgeois or an intellectual or a student. In the course of their treatment they tried to reconstitute various broken threads of their lives, a father-daughter relationship, a father-son relationship, mourning for a best friend-turned-enemy, familial acceptance of an ostracized relative. They also tried to integrate traumatically fragmented pieces of themselves. These patients and their families experienced a malignant adaptive paranoia in which survival meant concealing one’s feelings, opinions, ideas, and heritage even from one’s children. As a result, their children felt cut off from knowledge of their own past, from the emotional life of their parents, and from the causes and values their parents held dear. As permission was gradually granted to ask questions in Central and Eastern Europe, the results were revolutionary, internally as well as externally.

The Therapists

Living with Contradiction

In their youth, these reform-minded therapists had been loyal Communists. They wrote prize-winning essays on the glory of the new age and the demands and sacrifices placed on the new Communist man. They joined Communist youth groups, and in one case even founded a new one, more rigid and idealistic than the others. In time, all became disillusioned with the power structure that implemented those ideals, ultimately rejected the Communist Party, and all entered a field that offered some expression of empathy and altruism although they understood that it was heavily infiltrated by secret police. Nearly all were asked to join the KGB or its equivalent and had somehow dealt with party officials who felt they had a right to confidential information supplied to the therapists by their patients.

Most were in their late thirties at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They served in a variety of clinics, most of which were founded during the period of perestroika such as suicide prevention services, and twentyfour-hour hot lines. Their formal education had been heavily phenomenological, pharmacological, and behavioral in orientation; reading in Western family systems theory and social psychology seemed roughly compatible with an official mind-set, but in Russia, from 1929 to 1989, no work by Sigmund Freud had been published. Western psychodynamics had been the target of official ideologues. Nonetheless, a Russian version of the unconscious had evolved and interaction with the West around this topic had begun (Miller, 1998).

Because they were interested in psychotherapy, yet practiced as psychiatrists and psychologists in a formal climate which repudiated the subjective self, it was difficult to find role models within their own field. They tended not to idealize their teachers via the formal educational track with which Westerners are familiar, where our teachers become our models for ways of listening and developing technical skills. Empathy and humanness were not particularly valued capacities. Unfortunately, many of the authority figures within the profession were implicated in collaboration with the secret police. Interestingly, we learned that the intellectual moorings placing them within the tradition valuing humanistic, intuitive, and empathie skills came from banned, or dissident, writers. Through these writers, they came to believe that the road to the subjective self was via a search for authentic memory: “What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers” (Wolf, 1976/1980).

Mind-Set of the Reformer Clinicians

The language of the reformers, like the language of dialectic materialism and applied Marxism-Leninism which they opposed, is filled with irony and contradiction. An illustration of the types of contradiction to which they were accustomed occurred when Russia, the new Communist State, contradicted its philosophy by allying itself in 1941 with fascist Germany, the arch-enemy of the Russian people. In terms of dialectic materialism the new pact was an illustration of the point that the practical is superior to the ideal. The therapists, as children, to demonstrate their mastery of this dialectic, wrote essays on topics such as “why less is more” (comparing the Communist East with the Capitalist West).

Similarly, the dissident writers, reacting to the untruths in that dialectic, also chose a language filled with ironic contradiction to express themselves. Cseslaw Milosz (1953/1990) speaks of a world in which one’s success is measured in the capacity to convince others that what you don’t believe to be true, is true, a term he called ketman. Vaclev Havel’s protagonist, Hugo Pludek, in The Garden Party (Havel, 1963/1993), an ironic play on dialectic thinking, checkmates his Marxist colleagues by out doublethinking them, but when his father asks, who are you anyhow, he replies in riddles that that is a question with no answer. Milan Kundera (1967/1992) describes his characters’ lives in terms of a dictionary of misunderstood words and uses “the joke” ironically to refer both to the offense of his protagonist which takes him to political prison, and the mentality of his political captors. Manea (1990) calls the complex contradictions inherent in maintaining grand ideals about the common man while living in a world in which the common man has nothing, mystification. Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna (1967/1988) converts her love for her doomed son into ashes by burning his letter, throwing the flame of his love for the ideals of the revolution on the floor, and stamping on it. In the end, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovitch (1962/1991) must make the most of his absurd and lethal prison world by keeping his perceptions clear. The prison guards, he says, don’t have it so easy here either.

Such clarity of perception, while living in a world full of contradiction, also characterizes the language of these reform-minded therapists. Dr. Csiszer and Katona speaks of organized irresponsibility of the simultaneous presence and denial of trauma, and of communism without community; Dr. Bernhardt sees her patient Karl seeking prison for safety, while her patient Hans obsessively washes himself so that his informer parents can have clean hands. Dr. Cucliciu understands his patient Mihai who, rather than hating his torturer, finds him fascinating.

Grounded in their sensitive critiques of the Soviet world from the inside, these therapists kept alive a humanistic tradition which had been abandoned as the State took over the mental health field, banned Freud, and diverted the purposes of that field to its ends. Like Havel’s character Joseph Gross in The Memorandum (Havel, 1966/1993) they had their own diagnosis for the times: “We’re living in a strange, complex epoch. As Hamlet says, our ‘time is out of joint.’ Just think, we’re reaching the moon and yet it’s increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves; we’re able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality; we build superb communications between the continents, and yet communication between man and man is increasingly difficult.”

Ideology of the Cold War:
Freud as Antithesis to Bolshevik Thought

The therapists in this project were more aware than we how elements in Freudian thought had come to represent the antithesis of the Marxist view of psychology. Miller (1998) describes how Soviet ideologues as late as the 1960s, fearing the intrusion of Western psychodynamic thinking in literature, the arts, and psychology, called forth a major attack on Freud. From the Marxian perspective, psychology must commandeer the psyche to the lofty struggle of historic class war. So, intellectually, Soviet psychology was at war with Freud. Freud, they said, worked with the base instincts—sex and aggression, with self-indulgence over social commitment, with an internal rather than an action-oriented external self, with a childhood which was deterministic rather than an adulthood which was rationally directed towards the State’s ends. As we shall see in the next chapter, this logic ultimately led psychiatry to become an agent of the State, a perpetrator in its own right. For opposition to the State must represent some psychic abnormality of the mind, and thus became the rationale through which psychiatry via the KGB became the State’s instrument to contain dissent in psychiatric hospitals. But for now, we wish to highlight the sympathetic chord which Freudian thought resonated within the dissident-clinicians.

Treatment under Impossible Conditions

Conducting genuine psychotherapy under these circumstances entailed considerable risks, and all the therapists assume or have indeed learned that they had extensive secret police files which charged them with such offenses as disseminating religious literature, teaching patients ideas against the state, and engaging in pro-democracy activities. How they managed to function in systems which (although they were changing) continued to attack their values, and spied on and harassed them, is a central feature of what these therapists have to teach us.

Soviet culture strained each element of the therapeutic frame and the working alliance in these treatments: a safe space, confidentiality, trust, neutrality. The very effort to create a therapeutic setting in a totalitarian society is filled with contradiction. How can the patient feel safe when the secret police could be listening, or at least exerting pressure on the therapist? Perhaps the therapist himself is a member of the KGB. There are philosophical contradictions between an individual’s wish to integrate his life experience and the State’s wish that he subsume his life to the goals of the State. Symptoms themselves could be seen as affronts to the state. Symptoms carried trauma-specific cultural as well as psychodynamic meaning.

But nonetheless, powerful treatments did occur. As we reflect on these treatments using a psychoanalytic perspective, we see that feelings which the patient irrationally placed on the therapist (transference) and feelings which the therapist, in response, irrationally placed on the patient (countertransference) make dialogue characteristic of the inner world of the totalitarian state come alive in the therapist-patient interaction reflective of dialogue between the informer and the betrayed, the captor and his victim, the purged parent and his orphaned child, the true self and a false self.

Despite enormous obstacles, these therapists chose creative ways to treat people within the old system; they also took on challenging roles within the reform movement. Dr. Bernhardt, for example, opened a clinic for East Germans confused and disoriented by the sudden merger with the West; Dr. Csiszer established a suicide prevention clinic; Dr. Cucliciu ran for political office in Romania; Dr. Konkov joined Afghani veterans inside the Yeltsin White House while tanks rolled towards them; Dr. Jernazian marched with his political friends in Freedom Square in the Armenian capital, Yerevan; and Dr. Muacevic prepared for the inevitable casualties of ethnic warfare.

Reflecting on the years of even inadvertent complicity, the therapists do not excuse themselves from the implications of belonging to a professional group that broke the public trust by joining in the State’s oppression. They agree with Havel (1979/1986) that we are all responsible. How could millions be governed in such a system, they ask, if we didn’t all cooperate? Dr. Cucliciu explains: “the division between those of us who promote change and those who oppose it is an artificial one; both exist within the self.” They see that understanding the historical aggressor with empathy is as much a part of the task that lies ahead as is identifying groups victimized by the totalitarian state.

It is from this broad yet at times painful position of responsible selfawareness that the therapists in this book, witnesses to trauma in their patients and in themselves, take their position. They carry with them wounds analogous to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Editors’ Introduction
• 2. Legacy of Trauma and Loss
• 3. Hungary: Replacing a Missing Stone
• 4. German Democratic Republic: Absorbing the Sins of the Fathers
• 5. Romania: A Time of Yielding
• 6. Russia: An Emptiness Within
• 7. Croatia: Old Scars, New Wounds
• 8. Armenia: Aftershocks
• 9. Invisible Walls
• 10. History as Trauma
• Afterword
• Glossary
• References
• Index