Authors

Discussion

Over a seven-year period, Soviet filmmakers made two prominent attempts to address the topic of neurosis in Soviet society. Shattered Nerves (Neurasthenia) (Bol’nye nervy, dir. Noi Galkin) was released in 1929 and The Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity (Fiziologiia i patologiia vysshei nervnoi deiatel’nosti, dir Mark Gall) was completed in 1936, having been produced in consultation with Ivan Pavlov prior to his death. This paper will explore what these two examples of collaboration between Soviet filmmakers and psy-experts can tell us about understandings of neurosis and trauma in the early USSR. The extent to which Galkin’s and Gall’s films evidence a shift from a 1920s focus on preventative psychiatry and its attention to the transformation of the social environment to a biological conception of psychiatric illness in the 1930s will form the focus of the paper. Shattered Nerves and Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity first appear to articulate opposing conceptions of neurotic disorder: Galkin’s 1929 film firmly situates the roots of neurosis in the conditions of the social environment, while Gall’s 1936 film documenting Pavlov’s research on experimental neuroses in dogs, by contrast, draws the viewer’s gaze to the definitive role of biological constitution. An examination of the production history of the two films, and the work of the scientific consultants involved in their creation, however, reveals a much more complex picture of an ongoing struggle to understand the etiology of neurosis in the Soviet Union.