Addressing Russian Delusions About Past, Present, and Future

A psychotherapist looks at the delusions held by Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, regarding the history of Ukraine and its Catholic Church.

From Catholic World Report

By Prof. Adam A. J. DeVille, MD

Putin’s bogus histories of paranoia and persecution are founded in delusions about the past because these justify desires and demands for present and future conquest and glory.

In June 2016, I attended a private conference at the University of Vienna that brought together Russian Orthodox and Ukrainian Greco-Catholic scholars and hierarchs with the goal of finding a common narrative of events in our shared past that continue to provoke division and disagreement. The hope was that frank discussion behind closed doors, outside of “official” channels approved by Moscow or Rome, would shift the impasse and make room for deeper unity.¹

We had hoped, in that splendid Habsburg city, to find a common historical narrative around the pseudo-sobor of Lviv of 1946. But the Russian side refused to take the conference seriously, attempting, risibly, to fob us off with a very low-level functionary who merely read a canned version of complaints that has been propagated by Moscow for decades. As a result the conference—I must speak frankly if only for myself—was, in several respects, a failure.

It was, however, helpful as a diagnostic exercise. For it confirmed something we have seen for decades, and heard again this month in Putin’s various farragos attempting to justify the war: Russian narratives about the past are profoundly delusional.

Such narratives manifest at least three unhealthy symptoms. First, they are based in a “time collapse” in which the Union of Brest of 1595/96 (which created the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church) is still a present threat to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) today. Secondly, such narratives regard Brest as a “chosen trauma” from whose glorious liberation Slavic Christians only emerged in 1946 with the pseudo-sobor of Lviv in which the UGCC was forcibly rejoined to the ROC. Thirdly, this latter event is—in Russian eyes alone—a “chosen glory” that has been heralded for decades by ROC leadership as the “restoration of unity” between “the uniates” and the “mother-church” of Moscow. These claims still represent the official Russian view today.

This small slice of Christian historiography is very closely illustrative of delusional dynamics at work in larger Russian narratives about past and present threats from Ukraine. We heard and saw those dynamics emerge from the very primal unconscious death drive of Putin this month in his attempts to rationalize war against Ukraine, about which he singularly failed to speak coherently, hallucinating instead about “de-nazification” of Ukraine, whose president is Jewish.

To listen to Putin recount Russian history is to be immersed in the realm of what Donald Spence called “narrative truth” in which historical truths are, at best, of secondary and limited usefulness and only to the extent that they support the chosen narrative.² Spence was an early pioneer in recognizing some of the psychological dynamics at work in modern historiography. More recently, the University of Virginia scholar and psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has—based originally in his work amidst the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s among Eastern Christians, Catholics, and Muslims—pioneered the three concepts of considerable explanatory power noted above: time collapse, chosen traumas, and chosen glories.³

To some extent, all myth-makers of nation-states do this, but most are at least somewhat open to alternative tellings, and to having their versions challenged by historians as new sources emerge and new interpretations become possible.

Russian narratives still today are closed to such challenges at an official level—as we saw in Vienna in 2016, and for decades before that, and as we heard again this month. Such narratives are not merely closed, but have reached the level of full-blown delusion. What, if anything, can be done?

In my clinical work with delusional and psychotic patients, one of the things I have learned—and the clinical literature supporting this is abundant—is that frontally attacking delusions almost never works. Zealous but misguided psychotherapists might believe that we must enforce upon our patients some stern “reality testing,” and we might be only too happy to attack delusions and hallucinations in order, we reassure ourselves, that we bring our patients back into the real world. But such attacks fail with great regularity in individual work—and also on a broader scale, as evidenced by the failure of our 2016 Vienna conference in crucial respects.

Instead, we must consider a prior question: what purpose do delusions hold, whether in an individual patient’s life or as part of a nation-state’s psyche?⁴ Why, that is, does Russia hold on to these narratives that nobody else accepts, and everybody else sees as profoundly out of touch with reality?

The contemporary scholar and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips likes to say that “memories always have a future in mind.”⁵ Putin’s uses and abuses of history are not about adjudicating past events. Entering into historical disputes with him is, therefore, utterly pointless.

Rather, Putin’s bogus histories of paranoia and persecution are about justifying the present war so as to secure the future. That future is fairly obvious: a recreation of the Russian empire in some form. There is no worse trauma, Putin has repeatedly said, than its loss; and there would be, for him above all, no greater glory than its recovery. How else might one explain not just his attack on Ukraine, but also his attempts to keep other regions—Georgia, South Ossetia, Tatarstan among them—tightly within his ambit of control?

Empires—including the Portuguese, French, Belgian, and British—invariably had sycophantic churchmen in their vast retinues of officials, eager to spread to the “noble savages” some nationalistic corruption of Christianity. The Russian is no different. Unlike all the others just mentioned, however, which are defunct, the Russian Orthodox Church today is eagerly suborned to Putin’s imperial project and has been for some time. Item: the furious denunciations and excommunications of Constantinople for recognizing the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—which event, I wrote for CWR, should be a cause for rejoicing.

At the end of 2021, the Russian Church set up its own territory on top of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Alexandria in retaliation for the latter’s recognition of Ukrainian autocephaly. This is in violation of the whole concept of “canonical territory,” which the ROC has used against the UGCC since at least 1991. But more than that, as Cyril Hovorun—the most important scholar today on Orthodox ecclesiology and political theology—has noted, this is a “second scramble for Africa” after the British, French, Belgian, and German empires gave up their colonies there nearly a century ago now in some cases.

The ROC, then, is expanding its reach across Africa—all of whose Russian Orthodox inhabitants, to quote the inimitable Robert Taft of blessed memory, you could probably fit into a phone booth. It is doing so because its lord and master Putin is aiming at a future in which the trauma of 1991 is reversed, and the Russian collapse is replaced by a resurgence of power and splendor whose emblems include colonies, “protectorates,” and otherwise terrorized populations ostensibly enjoying “independence” but really under Moscow’s control. Putin wants such cowed and dependent populations across Europe and Africa because in his arrested historical imagination, that is what imperial powers must do—whether in the 19^th, 20^th, or 21^st centuries.

This, then, is the rationale behind the war. It is founded in delusions about the past because these justify desires and demands for present and future conquest and glory.

Delusions are notoriously difficult to treat, and this is not the place to propose some kind of therapeutic treatment plan. Short of Putin’s removal, which seems in worldly terms unlikely to impossible at the moment, the situation is very grim.

But in other-worldly, supernatural terms? We are all about to start Great Lent, and as the Lord reminds us, some demons can only be removed by fasting and prayer. For this Lent, might all Christians daily recite Psalm 109 while praying for Vladimir Putin’s removal and/or conversion back to both reality and Christianity? The very survival of Ukraine—a country I love, where I taught in 2001 and still have friends—depends on it.

Endnotes:

¹The Vienna conference, whose proceedings I edited with Daniel Galadza, are in press with Peeters, and we hope they will finally be in print this year as The Lviv Sobor of 1946, in the publisher’s Eastern Christian Studies imprint.

² Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton, 1982). Cf. Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering (Harvard UP, 1998).

³ Volkan has pioneered and described these chosen traumas and glories in a variety of places. See esp. his 1998 book Bloodlines: from Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Basic Books). More recently, see the work of Charles Strozier, an academic historian (Harvard Ph.D.) and practicing psychoanalyst: “The Politics of Constructed Humiliation: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on War, Terrorism and Genocide,” Research in Psychoanalysis 23 (2017): 27-36.

⁴ Much of so-called mainstream American psychiatry insisted for decades that delusions and hallucinations were meaningless and to be ignored, but my own theoretical and clinical influences are with the British school of object relations which recognizes that there is at least some meaning to be found, if the clinician is patient enough, beneath delusions and hallucinations. The best representatives of this are the late W.R. Bion and the current Anglo-American psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. Stateside Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Ira Steinman, George Atwood, and Andrew Lotterman have done important work on psychotherapy with psychotic patients that understands how hallucinations and delusions may have considerable, if heavily disguised, meaning. I have written about this elsewhere.

⁵ Side Effects, 131.

Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille is associate professor at the University of Saint Francis in Ft. Wayne, IN., where he also maintains a part-time private practice in psychotherapy. He is the author and editor of several books, including Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame, 2011).