Mikhail Pokrass

Mikhail Lvovich Pokrass was born on 13 June 1943 in Kuibyshev, now Samara, where his mother had travelled to stay with her parents during the Second World War. His father, Lev Petrovich Pokrass, was an inventor and design engineer, and his mother, Dina Iosifovna Pokrass, was a teacher of Russian language and literature.

He spent his childhood in Moscow. In 1954 his parents moved permanently to Kuibyshev, to the closed settlement of Upravlencheskiy. After leaving school he entered the medical faculty of the Kuibyshev Medical Institute. While a student he worked as an orderly on a psychiatric ambulance team and later as a nurse in a psychiatric clinic, and he graduated in 1966.

After qualifying he worked as a psychiatrist at the Lipetsk regional psychiatric hospital in the village of Plekhanovo, and then spent two years as district psychiatrist in the town of Gryazi, where he set up the local psychiatric service. There he worked out the first two stages of what became Behaviour Therapy. From 1967 he took patients with phobias on two-day hiking trips, an early, intuitive form of group work. In 1969 he was the youngest delegate at the All-Union Congress of Psychiatrists and Neurologists in Moscow, and that autumn he returned to Kuibyshev as a district psychiatrist at the city psychoneurological dispensary.

In 1970 he opened one of the first psychotherapy consulting rooms in the country and the first in the Kuibyshev region. In 1972 he presented his method at the neurosis department of the Bekhterev Institute in Leningrad, where its director Vladimir Myasishchev and Professor Boris Karvasarsky let him treat patients. Through Karvasarsky the work reached the German psychologist Wolfgang Lauterbach, who described it in his book on psychotherapy in the Soviet Union, published in Germany, Austria and the United States.

From 1985 to 1995 he was the first chief psychotherapist of the Kuibyshev, later Samara, region, and his consulting room became a training base where dozens of the region's doctors first specialised in psychotherapy. In 1992 he founded his own Centre for Social and Psychological Help, Okhrannaya Gramota. His psychotherapy group, begun in 1972, ran as an open and continuous group for more than fifty years, alongside longer group sessions that participants called marathons.

His books included Behaviour Therapy (1997, reissued 2012), The Pledge of the Possibility of Existence (1997), Active Depression (2001), Healing by Egoism (2002) and Mastering Loneliness (2005).

Pokrass lived and worked in Samara for most of his life. Little about his private life has been reported publicly. He remained in practice into his eighties and, according to regional media, held the last meeting of his long-running therapy group in the week before he died.

Mikhail Pokrass died in Samara on Friday 30 October 2026, in his 84th year, aged 83. His family announced the death, and it was reported by Kommersant Samara, Komsomolskaya Pravda Samara, AiF Samara, MK Samara and 63.ru. No cause of death was made public. A civil memorial service was held on Saturday 31 October 2026 at the House of the Actor on Vilonovskaya Street in Samara.

Pokrass is remembered as the founder of Behaviour Therapy, an approach to treating obsessive and phobic neuroses that was recognised in Russia and abroad, and as the figure who shaped the Samara school of psychotherapy. His book Behaviour Therapy went through further editions and has been used by specialists as a practical guide. Generations of psychotherapists, psychologists, teachers and students trained with him.