ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Soviet Scientific Film and Conceptions of Trauma, 1920s-1950s

• In Event: Film and the Mind Sciences at the Margins: Research, Diagnosis, Popularisation

English Abstract

Scholars have often assumed that the suppression of psychoanalysis in the USSR during the 1930s forced conformity to a Pavlovian model that severely neglected the mental realm and silenced the question of traumatised consciousness. Yet Soviet specialists continued to explore the link between trauma and neurosis, experimenting with a variety of methods of psychotherapeutic treatment and probing the factors that determined individuals’ susceptibility to psychological traumatisation. This paper will explore the role of film in articulating a Soviet conception of trauma between the1920s and 1950s. The paper will begin by exploring the physiological and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma that were elaborated in the scientific and feature films of the 1920s, including Mechanics of the Brain (Pudovkin, 1926) and Fragment of an Empire (Ermler, 1929). I will then proceed to explore the shifting understanding of psychological trauma displayed in a series of 1930s films documenting Ivan Pavlov’s research on experimental neurosis, including Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity (Gall, 1936). Finally, by bringing to light the thorny production history of the 1954 popular scientific film In the Name of the Human Being (Chiginskii), I explore Soviet filmmakers’ struggle to register the psychological impact of the Second World War during the heights of ‘Pavlovianisation’. As I seek to show, film became a crucial battle ground for competing scientific understandings of trauma. Rather than pointing to widespread compliance with ‘Pavlovian’ orthodoxy, the scientific film history of this period indicates the presence of lively discussion and debate on the characteristics of a ‘Soviet’ understanding of trauma.

Author

• Anna Toropova, University of Warwick