The Hypnotic Screen: The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy
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The Hypnotic Screen : The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy. / Toropova, Anna.
In: Social History of Medicine, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2022, p. 946-971.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The Hypnotic Screen
T2 - The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy
AU - Toropova, Anna
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The early Soviet period witnessed a number of experiments in ‘film psychotherapy’—the attempt to deploy the cinematic medium in hypnotherapeutic treatment. Exploring this pivotal, yet virtually unknown, moment in the history of cinema’s intertwinement with medicine, the article seeks to understand Soviet film psychotherapy as a response to transnational anxieties over cinema’s ‘powers of influence’, as well as a distinctively ‘Soviet’ experiment. An exploration of the project’s origins in Soviet psychophysiological studies of spectators and experiments in group hypnotherapeutic treatment is used to demonstrate the unique context that shaped Soviet doctors’ emergence as film therapy pioneers. After examining the medical and political hopes pinned on the project, the article tries to understand the reasons why film psychotherapy’s considerable potential remained largely unrealised. The project that promised to be a major boon to Soviet social medicine, it is argued, also brought the scientific premises of Soviet psychotherapy into question.
AB - The early Soviet period witnessed a number of experiments in ‘film psychotherapy’—the attempt to deploy the cinematic medium in hypnotherapeutic treatment. Exploring this pivotal, yet virtually unknown, moment in the history of cinema’s intertwinement with medicine, the article seeks to understand Soviet film psychotherapy as a response to transnational anxieties over cinema’s ‘powers of influence’, as well as a distinctively ‘Soviet’ experiment. An exploration of the project’s origins in Soviet psychophysiological studies of spectators and experiments in group hypnotherapeutic treatment is used to demonstrate the unique context that shaped Soviet doctors’ emergence as film therapy pioneers. After examining the medical and political hopes pinned on the project, the article tries to understand the reasons why film psychotherapy’s considerable potential remained largely unrealised. The project that promised to be a major boon to Soviet social medicine, it is argued, also brought the scientific premises of Soviet psychotherapy into question.
U2 - 10.1093/shm/hkac031
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkac031
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 36051847
VL - 35
SP - 946
EP - 971
JO - Social History of Medicine
JF - Social History of Medicine
SN - 0951-631X
IS - 3
ER -
ID: 362553834