The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of COVID-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, for example, through Albert Camus’ (2013) The Plague and Sophocles’ (2015) Oedipus The King. It is, moreover, a word that is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work through the disorders and dis-eases of COVID times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and in this article we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical, resonances of such an implication.
This paper contributes to recent historiographical debates concerning the Soviet era and its ideological impact on Soviet psychology. It brings more nuance to an argument for the presence of engagement with psychoanalysis during the years 1930–80, and focuses on Bluma Zeigarnik’s work during the Soviet period. The article seeks to explore possible encounters between Zeigarnik and psychoanalysis through her collaboration with Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, known to be among those Russian psychologists who were inspired by psychoanalytic studies and developed Freud’s ideas, and aims to bring attention to the fact that Zeigarnik was knowledgeable about Freud’s work and his successors, and that consonance with his ideas can be found throughout her work on schizophrenia and the theory of pathopsychology. The article also outlines the often overlooked ideas Zeigarnik developed in the Soviet period of her career.
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