From Neurasthenia to “Experimental Neurosis”: Early Soviet Cinema, Psychiatry, and the Problem of Nervousness

This article uses cinematic engagements with the question of neurosis to reexamine the extent to which the Soviet psy-disciplines were subordinated to a biological model of the mind in the Stalin era. Neurosis – the “disorder of modernity” most widely linked to the problems of everyday life – took center stage in early Soviet debates on the relationship between the social and the biological. For proponents of preventative psychiatry who stressed the social basis of mental distress, the building of a socialist society free from “traumatizing” class divisions and labor exploitation made it possible to envision the elimination of neurosis. Yet, preeminent experts such as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov continued to make the case for the role of biological and constitutional factors in the genesis of neurosis. Tracing how scientific and medical debates spilled over to the cultural sphere, the article explores two major attempts to address the topic of neurosis in Soviet cinema – the 1929 film Shattered Nerves (Neurasthenia) (director Noi Galkin) and the 1936 film The Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity (director Mark Gall). These two examples of collaboration between Soviet filmmakers and psychiatrists appear to evidence a radical shift in understandings of neurosis between the 1920s and 1930s. While Shattered Nerves situates the roots of neurosis in the social environment, Physiology and Pathology (produced in consultation with Pavlov prior to his death) draws the viewer’s gaze to the role of inborn temperament and constitution. The article’s examination of the production history of the two films reveals not the victorious triumph of Pavlovianism in Soviet psychiatry, however, but a persisting uncertainty over the relationship between environmental factors and biological inheritance in the etiology of neurosis.