Mordas E.S., Mul'ginova O.P. The Contribution of Russian Psychoanalysts to Child-Development Psychology

Abstract: The authors of the article present a summary of Russian research in psychoanalysis in the beginning of the XX century (based on the example of the children's home-laboratory "international Solidarity" (1921-1925)). According to the authors, Russian experience of psychoanalytic research of children should be considered as the result of the collective interaction of all participants of the experiment. I. D. Ermakov, V. F. Schmidt, S. N. Spielrein and M. V. Woolf were the most outstanding representatives of child psychoanalysis in Russia in the early twentieth century. They were the first to turn to the investigation of the child internal mental world from a position of deep understanding of internal processes that appear and proceed in a child at an early age. The authors of the present article have also considered the development of the child's activity under the genetic key and stages and process of evolution and involution of children's creativity in depending on the age characteristics of the child. Identified and explained the cultural meaning of children's games, studied its psychic mechanisms. They have developed a psychoanalytic theory of children's games under perspective of its cultural meaning in a child's life. The authors have also presented a psychological study of the child symbolic activity and the concept of sign in the psyche of the child; explored the intimate lives of children and the mental mechanisms of its occurrence. They have identified the stages of speech and thinking development of the child in terms of psychoanalysis, autism and social role of the speech in children; and made recommendations for teachers regarding the creation of a special environment which should support to the socialization of the child. The research methods used by the authors are based on the integration of a number of research means used in modern psychological science and history of psychology. The following methods have been mostly used in the research: 1) methods of analyzing scientific sources; 2) historical analysis; 3) bibliographical analysis; 4) historical and psychological research; 5) summary of results. The scientific novelty of the research is caused by the fact that the authors summarize and clarify views on the development of child psychoanalysis in Russia (based on the example of particular research results and ideas of the first Russian psychoanalysts) as theoretical and practical aspects of psychological assistance of a child. The majority of researches that contain a number of fundamental psychoanalytical texts that reveal the research activity of the first Russian psychoanalysts such as I. D. Ermakov, V. F. Shmidt, S. N. Shpilrein, M. V. Vulf an dothers are still unpublished. There is a quite deep layer of our heritage that is still to be studied and systematized in order to fill in the gaps in the Russian history of psychoanalysis as well as teaching. 

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