Who We Are
About us
The Moscow Psychoanalytical Society (MPS) is a public, not-for-profit organisation which represents professional psychoanalysts who are qualified to international standards. Our society aims to provide professional training to psychoanalysts, to spread information about the principles of psychoanalysis throughout the broader professional environment, and also to develop psychoanalytical practice in correspondence with the requirements of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).
The MPS is a member of international professional associations, both of the IPA and the European Psychoanalytical Federation (EPF), and it subscribes to the high professional and ethical standards outlined in the ethical code.
Our history
The Russian contemporaries of Sigmund Freud were interested solely in his theory of psychoanalysis. Take, for example, followers of his ideas such as Lou Andreas-Salomé, Max Eitingon or Sabina Spielrein, or patients such as Sergey Pankeev—the so-called ‘Wolf Man’—all of whom became world-famous. Almost all of Freud’s works were translated into Russian and psychoanalytical institutions and associations began to open, such as the Russian Psychoanalytical Society (1922-1930), the State Psychoanalytical Institute (1923-1925) and ‘International Solidarity’ (1921-1925), an experimental centre which worked with children.
In the 1930s psychoanalysis was banned in Russia, and the psychoanalytical tradition was ruptured. It was only in the 1980s that interest in psychoanalysis was renewed in Russia, and the MPS became one of the organisations striving to revive the tradition. At that time the MPS functioned as an informal group of specialists who met to discuss the works of Freud and practise psychoanalysis on real patients. Thanks to the enthusiasm of its members and the support of psychoanalysts worldwide, since 2005 the MPS has developed in line with the IPA framework. At first a study group, in 2010 it became a provisional society and finally, in 2015, the MPS was announced as Russia’s first official component society of the IPA. Over the course of its thirty-year existence, the MPS has grown steadily. If it had 11 IPA members in 2005, then by 2015 some 23 of its members were fully qualified psychoanalysts ((of whom 9 were already training analysts), and around 30 analytic candidates receiving formal training in line with the framework set out by the organisation.
Who We Are