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A comparison of certain aspects of psychoanalysis and psychodrama shows that although there are indeed a number of radical differences between these traditions, they do have a certain similarity in content (i.e., not merely at the formal, organizational level). Since the days of Freud, psychoanalysis (and psychoanalytic theory) has acquired a distinctly "psychodramatic" dimension. And psychodrama, since the time of Moreno, has acquired marked "psychoanalytic" qualities. These two "therapeutic theaters" represent not only contiguous but also mutually penetrating traditions.

In this paper, the author outlines the historical-cultural picture in the former USSR and post-Soviet Russia. He looks at some facets of psychoanalysis in Russia in the years immediately before and after the October Revolution as well as in its recent history, exploring the implicit question of how the wider social context, and specifically totalitarian and post-totalitarian reality, has influenced psychoanalytic work and analytic space in this country. With the help of Sebek's concept of the totalitarian object and Britton's formulations about the triangular space, the author attempts to understand the interaction of external and internal space and to give an introduction to the problem of establishing the analytic setting as well as finding some new possibilities of enlarging the space for new psychoanalysts in Russia.