Vera Schmidt (psychoanalyst)

Vera Fedorovna Schmidt (1889, Starokostiantyniv, Volhynian Governorate – 1937, Moscow) was a Russian educationist and one of the leading figures in the psychoanalytic movement in Russia during the "Silver Age". After the Russian Revolution (1917) she directed a highly innovative nursery school run on psychoanalytic principles.

Her parents were both physicians. She was particularly attached to her mother, Elisaveta Yanitskaïa, who treated children suffering from neurological disorders. Vera was later to say that her mother had a determining influence on her choice of career. She attended the Kiev Women’s Educational Institute for three years from 1913 to 1916 where she received a training in the methods of Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. In 1913 she met and married Otto Schmidt who was to become a renowned scientist and Arctic explorer.

By the outbreak of the revolution, they had both developed an interest in psychoanalysis and Vera, who spoke German, had read Sigmund Freud in the original. A supporter of the revolution, Otto Schmidt rose to positions of power and influence in the new Soviet regime becoming a member of a number of People's Commissariats including Narkompros (Narodnyi Komissariat Prosvescheniya, or the People's Commissariat for Education) and he was also employed as the director of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) from 1921-1924. In this capacity, he was engaged in the publication of works by Freud and his daughter, Anna Freud.

In 1921 the Narkompros established the Russian Psychoanalytical Society in Moscow, a body that later came to contain, among others, figures like Alexander Luria, who, after the revolution, at only nineteen, was a leader of the Kazan Psychoanalytical Circle, and Mosche Wulff (Moshe Woolf) (1878-1971) who had promoted psychoanalysis during the pre-revolutionary "Silver Age". The President of the Society was Ivan Ermakov who edited a nine volume series of Freud's work in Russian. He later became known for his Freudian literary criticism of Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. Otto Schmidt, in the mean time, became vice-president of the coordinating committee of the Moscow Psychoanalytic Society and the state backed, Psychoanalytic Institute which was headed by Ermakov.

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