Maria Dolgopolova: Hi, Lena!
Elena Novikova: Hi, Masha!
Maria Dolgopolova: This is our first interview together. I’ve never tried recording live in nature before, but I really wanted to. The topic seems to be perfect. You’ve talked about the Association of Practical Psychology, about the book you’re working on, and about what this association is doing. I think we can try to explore this topic for our listeners and reflect on whether it is relevant to them. I believe it could lead to an interesting conversation.
Elena Novikova: Thank you, Masha. I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk about the book we’ve been working on for almost a year and a half or two years with the team assembled in connection with the upcoming anniversary of the creation of the Association of Practical Psychology. We would like to release our book by this milestone.
But I’d like to start a bit differently. Since the creation of the association, which was officially registered as a legal entity in 1989, it’s been, well, how many years—35 years. So, it's a kind of anniversary, not quite round but still significant. Practical psychology, psychotherapy, school psychologists, consulting, coaching, and other variations on this theme have become firmly embedded in our lives. The world is full of practicing psychologists. In Russia, they are generally accessible. There are many resources available to find a psychologist. You can choose a psychologist based on your problem or your psychological type or expectations. All of this has become so commonplace that we can hardly imagine that it didn’t exist at all at one time. Not at all.
I graduated from the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University in 1977. At that time, psychology was a science, a quite developed science based on the Activity theory of Leontyev and the works of Vygotsky, Zaporozhets, and Galperin. I studied under Luria and Leontyev. Those were wonderful years because we learned from the founders and masters of Soviet psychology. And in part, they somehow influenced global psychology, though not significantly, to be honest. Nevertheless, there was some influence of Soviet psychology on global psychology. And all of this was entirely scientific academic psychology. Practical psychology at that time existed in forms such as psychometrics, which described various professions, or industrial psychology. For example, there were exercises for children that helped develop certain skills or behaviors. Of course, Alexander Romanovich Luria made a huge contribution to applied psychology. He worked with wounded soldiers during the war and wrote many excellent books that are still relevant and are a remarkable example of how to rehabilitate people with brain injuries. But that was it. There was neither psychotherapy nor correction.
Maria Dolgopolova: Do you mean in 1977?
Elena Novikova: At the time when I graduated from the university, 1977-1978, there were just a few meager islands, sprouts. Partially, the carriers of this knowledge were our professors. They were young back then—Puzirev, Tyukov, Stolin, Kharash, Petrovskaya. They were in their early 30s. They would bring us Freud, retyped on six pages of some kind of cigarette paper. We read Adler and Jung. But they seemed to be living beyond what was then called psychology.
Maria Dolgopolova: Let’s briefly describe how this could have happened, because when psychoanalysis first emerged, for example, at the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was one of the first countries to adopt it. We had some of the most developed psychoanalytic communities, many books were translated. Russian scholars went to Europe and America and actively exchanged psychoanalytic knowledge and practices. We participated in all the training and associations. What happened afterward?
Elena Novikova: That’s a very good question, because it brings me back to a thought I’ve been having throughout the writing of this book: Why does something emerge and then disappear? And what triggers the activation of something that slumbers as a sown seed? Indeed, we know the names of Rozanov and Bakhtin, people associated with the development of psychoanalysis in Russia. And Russia was very open to new knowledge at that time. You’re right, many people traveled abroad, and many came to Russia, and this was in the 1920s. But then everything went under the baseboards. It went under the baseboards because over time, psychoanalysis, which was then the main known stream in psychotherapy, and other approaches were recognized as a pseudoscience and as an anti-Soviet approach. Gradually, the value of an individual as a subject, as a bearer of psychic reality, was pushed down, and Stalin hammered nails into this coffin with great force. On the coffin was written: "Man is not a subject, but an object of state policy." He should serve the state, he should serve the interests of society, and as an individual, he is a random phenomenon, of no interest to anyone. Against this background, there were works by Soviet educational psychologists who said: "Look at the child, he is interesting." But this quickly turned into not helping and participating in the child's development, but into shaping the necessary skills for society. And this shift towards viewing a person not as a subject of his own psychic activity, but as an object serving the state, which is primary and essentially uses the person as a tool for realizing its ideas, gradually gained significant weight. Then the balloon deflated. And by the late 1980s—early 1990s, all this ideological construct, which had been intensively built over the years, from the post-revolutionary period to 1991, the year of your birth…
Maria Dolgopolova: Yes, I was born at the crossroads of eras.
Elena Novikova: Yes, at the crossroads of eras. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ideological foundation of everything that united us didn't just rust; it began to crumble into small pieces, into small factions. But something emerged. Suddenly, the individual became a point of interest. In essence, scientific, pedagogical, and ideologically constructed psychology started to focus again on people, what was beyond the official framework.
Your question is good because it raises the issue of the cyclic nature of events. What happened in the 1920s, in my opinion, returned in the 1990s. Once again, the individual, alongside with the collapse of social institutions and various illusory constructs marked by communist ideology, party loyalty, and ideological structuring, became central. During my student and pioneer years, every other word was somehow connected to the last CPSU congress, decisions, decrees, and so on. There was a huge amount of it, and people were simply lost in it. Then, when it turned out that all this was ephemeral, that these decrees were worth less than a broken coin, that the party was not only fictional but also corrupt, this entire construct began to gradually disintegrate, and the Soviet Union fell apart. Suddenly, amidst these crumbling bricks, some grass began to break through again, named "man," "personality."
In this sense, my experience is quite interesting because I studied at the faculty during these exact years when...
Maria Dolgopolova: Personality hadn’t yet been recognized. Personality was only acknowledged through Leontiev.
Elena Novikova: Absolutely, personality was Leontievian. That’s correct. But our professors, bless them, some of whom are no longer with us, like Volodya Stolin or recently deceased Islam Ilyasov—wonderful people—brought us books to read under the table. And we, knowing that this was beyond official science, read Jung, Freud, Rogers, and so on.
Maria Dolgopolova: Underground culture.
Elena Novikova: The underground culture was very, very well-developed. It was wonderful. Everyone participated in this underground movement. I used to type out books by Florensky or Gurdjieff, or some Indian yogis on my parents' typewriter at night. I bought my first apartment by translating Kratochwil's book “Psychotherapy” from Polish. It became the first guide to psychotherapeutic schools, the names of which no one knew. What is behaviorism? What is the Esalen Institute? What is holotropic breathing? What is transactional analysis? Nobody knew any of this. There were no books or mentions of authors. But Kratochwil’s thick volume listed them all. And when I translated it, we discovered that the world is actually much bigger and broader than Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev's textbooks on Activity theory.
Since I was always quite ideologically oppositional, I chose the field of "zoo psychology" at the university, working with dolphins. It was far from human-related psychology, but...
Maria Dolgopolova: Was the mental sphere of dolphins also a taboo?
Elena Novikova: No, thank God, it was not a taboo! I wrote my thesis under the supervision of Professor Belkovich from the Institute of Oceanology and Kozorovitsky from the Department of Physiology of Higher Nervous Activity. I had a rather formal supervisor, Fabri, who was considered the only expert in zoo psychology at our faculty. My fourth-year term paper analyzed the features of dolphin vocal behavior in various situations: hunting, play, and movement. We correlated sound signals with behavioral patterns and discovered many interesting things. I can’t believe it, but my thesis, which was dedicated to this, began with the words: “In accordance with the decisions of the 24th CPSU Congress”... And then it went on with some...
Maria Dolgopolova: It was directly related to dolphins, I'm sure.
Elena Novikova: Absolutely. It was a requirement at the time. You couldn't write texts without starting with that nonsense. But the absurdity, the comicality, and the meaninglessness of it all became increasingly apparent. But that was the social context of it.
Psychotherapy, as we know, doesn't exist without whom? Without a client who comes with a request and is willing to pay for help. Or not pay, if somehow...
Maria Dolgopolova: But for that, he needs to believe in his own personality and strive to develop it somehow.
Elena Novikova: He, at the very least, needs to feel some need. That he has some sort of belief that he is a person entitled to grieve, rejoice, or strive for something. And people began to gradually move in that direction, realizing that they were at least the owners of their own psyche, and that there could be various events within that psyche. Some of these events could be brought to a specialist who could help the person process, reframe, or optimize them. Something like that.
There were underground, literally underground, because it mostly took place in basements, so-called communication groups led by Arkady Egides or Anatoly Dobrovich. Note that they were all doctors, psychiatrists, who, as psychiatrists, understood that beyond pathological phenomena, there were just human, behavioral manifestations that some people, though few at the time, wanted to improve or develop. People suffered from loneliness, experienced difficulties in communication, wanted to manage their relationships better, and these underground events were held in the basements of various cities. The Bekhterev Institute was pioneering in this sense, still influenced by Bekhterev and many of his students like Karvasarsky or later psychologists and psychiatrists, acquiring a somewhat humanistic orientation. But I want to return to my story.
Maria Dolgopolova: About dolphins?
Elena Novikova: No, not about dolphins. I had to write my thesis not about dolphins, but there is another reason for that. The thesis was dedicated to mimicry and cross-cultural specificity in interpreting facial expressions across different nationalities. The thesis turned out to be very good, even though I wrote it in a year. I received a distribution to a graduate program. A red diploma, graduate school, articles, and so on. I was supposed to move further into ethnopsychology. But a significant event happened in my life. After graduation, I went to Poland to visit my cousins. My middle brother had gone through drug addiction himself, later overcame it, and started working in a drug rehab center near Warsaw as a cultural educator for the addicts living there. I went with Witko there. I spoke Polish fluently at the time, so I had no problems. And I discovered an incredible experience.
The rehab center was a large house on the outskirts of Warsaw, in a settlement where poppies bloomed, which greatly interested our charges. And where a team of psychiatrist Kazimi Zhenkovsky worked, consisting almost entirely of psychologists. There were no psychiatrists; there were psychologists who conducted encounter groups with these drug addicts... We had a team of 17 people. Boys and girls, mostly young, from 15 to 30 years old, who conducted encounter groups with them, engaged them in individual therapy, held psychological arrangements, role-playing, and psychodramatic sessions. And life there was completely filled and revolved around one thing: What is a drug in my life? What does it replace? What role does it play? And can I find some replacement for it? It was very unobtrusive, it was very enjoyable. I spent a little over a month there. I saw how these young people had completely changed.
Maria Dolgopolova: What year was that, then?
Elena Novikova: It was the summer of 1977, just outside Warsaw. I don’t remember the name of the village, but it was a kind of cottage settlement, as we would call it now.
Maria Dolgopolova: Were you there as a psychologist?
Elena Novikova: No, I was there as just a visitor. They actually welcomed visitors. It wasn’t a closed institution. Friends, relatives, and loved ones of our commune members could come. The commune expanded and contracted. People were released, and then they came back. They could leave. It was an entirely open situation.
We spent almost all our free time working with them on rebuilding their personal structures affected by drug addiction.
Maria Dolgopolova: Were similar studies or practices conducted in the USSR?
Elena Novikova: Not at that time. If there were any, it was a very narrow field. As soon as I returned, I started working in a psychoneurological dispensary with alcoholics. So, there was something, but I’ll talk about that a bit later.
What was important was my meeting with Pavel Boski. He was a guy from Yankovsky’s group. He was a psychologist. What was most surprising to me was that these were psychologists who were actively working…
Maria Dolgopolova: I mean, did they, like doctors, have some rights and access to people?
Elena Novikova: Yes, they had access to people.
Maria Dolgopolova: And this was not a discriminated profession?
Elena Novikova: Not only was it not discriminated against, but it was a highly respected profession. For example, I remember that families of the kids who were with us came to visit. The psychologists prepared these families for the return of their sons or daughters from the colony, advising them on how to live with them, what to pay attention to, and how to work with them effectively. I recall many cases where they brought their neighbors or friends and asked, “Can we work with you later?” They were willing to pay.
The colony was not paid for; it was state-funded. But they were acquiring clients before my eyes. When the colony closed in August or September, they all went home with full suitcases of clients to continue working with. It was perfectly normal in 1977 in Poland, a member of the socialist camp.
