Sergej M. Ejzenstejn, la psicologia e la psicoanalisi

Abstract

Sergej M. Ejzenstejn 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 Ejzenstejn’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, Ejzenstejn 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. Ejzenstejn was friend of Hanns Sachs and knew Otto Rank, Sandor 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.