Sergej M. Ejzenštejn was very much involved with psychology and psychoanalysis. He was an important friend of Lev Vygotskij, founder of cultural-historical psychology, and of Aleksandr Lurija, father of modern neuropsychological...
moreSergej M. Ejzenštejn was very much involved with psychology and psychoanalysis. He
was an important friend of Lev Vygotskij, founder of cultural-historical psychology, and of
Aleksandr Lurija, father of modern neuropsychological assessment: both Vygotskij and Lurija in
the early 1920s were among the supporters of psychoanalysis in Russia and members of the
Moscow Psychoanalytic Society. In Ejzenštejn’s writings on film language we find psychological
concepts of Vygotskij, such as “agglutination” and “internal speech”, that were present in the
theory of film editing. As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, Ejzenštejn was very much interested
in the concept of regression: the art lover, including the movie spectator, must regress and at the
same time activate the most mature part of the psyche. Ejzenštejn was friend of Hanns Sachs and
knew Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander, and Wilhelm Reich. In 1929 he gave a
lecture at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In the USSR and in the USA he had two short
experiences of psychoanalytic therapy. [Keywords: Soviet cinema; Marxism and psychoanalysis;
Cinema and psychoanalysis; Lev Vygotskij; Aleksandr Lurija]
