The Synaesthete

Proctor, Hannah

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_6

Hannah Proctor⁴

Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

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Abstract

The final chapter focuses on Luria’s ‘romantic’ case history of a patient diagnosed with an extreme form of synaesthesia: The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory. Drawing on materials from the archives of Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, the chapter considers the friendship Luria maintained with the Soviet filmmaker from the mid-1920s until the director’s death in 1948, engaging specifically with Eisenstein’s interest in and relationship with the synaesthete subject of Luria’s case history. Most analyses of Luria and Eisenstein’s friendship characterise it as an influence flowing in one direction: from psychologist to artist. Psychologies in Revolution insists that the disciplinary distinctions between film-making and psychology led the pair to espouse very different models for understanding human consciousness and historical development.

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Notes

1.
Sacks to Luria, June 7, 1975 and June 30, 1975, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City. See also: Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 168.
2.
Luria, Shattered, p. 159.
3.
Sacks to Luria, June 30, 1975, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City.
4.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. by James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 7–64, p. 41.
5.
S.M. Eisenstein, Que Viva Mexico! (London: Vision, 1952/1971), p. 74.
6.
Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 13.
7.
Eisenstein, Que Viva Mexico!, p. 73.
8.
Eisenstein, Que Viva Mexico!, p. 27.
9.
Luria to Eisenstein, December 7, 1930, Moscow, The Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), 1923-2-1130.
10.
Luria to Eisenstein, July 7, 1931, Moscow, The Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), Sergei Eisenstein Papers, 1923-2-11301/2-69.
11.
Eisenstein, Que Viva Mexico!, p. 77.
12.
Inga Karetnikova and Leon Steinmetz, Mexico According to Eisenstein (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), p. 3.
13.
See, Molly Harrower, Kurt Koffka: An Unwitting Self-Portrait (Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1983), pp. 143–147.
14.
Luria, Cognitive Development, p. vi. As discussed in Chap. 2, Koffka explicitly denigrates Uzbek aesthetic judgment (a deficiency he ascribes to the Islamic ban on images) in a passage on Samarkand in Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), pp. 349–350.
15.
RGALI 1923/2/919 cited and translated in Naum Kleiman, ‘Fergana Canal and Tamburlaine’s Tower’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 5, 11 (2011), p. 118. The article was published in an abridged form in Pravda on 13 August 1939 (which censored the text following the ellipsis in the passage cited here).
16.
Luria, Cognitive Development, p. 164.
17.
Emma Widdis, ‘Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity’, Slavic Review, 71, 3 (2012), 590–618, p. 595.
18.
On Eisenstein’s relationship with Luria and Vygotsky, see, for example, David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 176, Oksana Bulgakowa, ‘From Expressive Movement to the “Basic Problem”: The Vygotsky-Luria-Eisenstein Theory of Art’ in The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology, ed. by Anton Yasnitsky, René van der Veer and Michel Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 423–448 and Julia Vassilieva, ‘Eisenstein/Vygotsky/Luria’s Project: Cinematic Thinking and the Integrative Science of Mind and Brain’, Screening the Past, 38 (2013), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/eisenstein-vygotsky-luria%E2%80%99s-project-cinematic-thinking-and-the-integrative-science-of-mind-and-brain/#_edn15. It is significant that these analyses were all written by film scholars rather than historians of psychology.
19.
Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Methods of Montage’ in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. by Jay Leyda (San Diego, CA: Harvest Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1977), pp. 72–83, p. 78.
20.
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969), p. 36.
21.
See Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergej Eisenstein: Eine Biographie [Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography] (Berlin: Potemkin Press, 1997), p. 80, p. 112. Elena Luria claims that they first met in 1925 or 1926, shortly after the release of Battleship Potemkin. Elena Luria, Moi Otets: A.R. Luria [My Father: A.R. Luria] (Moscow: Gnosis, 1994), p. 121.
22.
In addition to the contact with Koffka, Luria acted as a go-between, putting Eisenstein in touch with Kurt Lewin in Berlin. See, Luria to Kurt Lewin, 20 September 1929, 22 November 1929. Akron, OH, Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP), Kurt Lewin Papers, Box M2931, Folder 2.
23.
S.M. Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, in Selected Works: Volume 4, Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, ed. by Richard Taylor, trans. by William Powell (London: BFI Publishing, 1995), pp. 592–615, p. 611.
24.
Eisenstein also mentions that he began a collaborative seminar with Luria, Vygotsky and the linguist Nikolai Marr, exploring the ‘problems of the nascent language of cinematography’. See Eisenstein, Metod: Grundproblem [Method: Grundproblem] (Moscow: Muzey Kino Eizenshtein Tsentr, 2002), p. 136.
25.
Alexander Luria to Sergei Eisenstein, February 17, 1930, RGALI 1923-1-19321/26.
26.
For a particularly crude example that argues Eisenstein’s engagement with the Soviet state invalidated his aesthetic approach from the beginning, see Ron Briley, ‘The Artist in Service of the Revolution’, The History Teacher, 29, 4 (1996), pp. 525–536.
27.
See Kristin Thompson, ‘“Ivan the Terrible” and Stalinist Russia: A Reexamination’, Cinema Journal, 17, 1 (1977), pp. 30–43.
28.
For an example of an article arguing for Luria’s complicity with Stalinism, see Uwe Gielen and Samvel Jeshmaridian, ‘Lev Vygotsky: The Man and the Era’, International Journal of Group Tensions, 28, 3/4 (1999), pp. 273–301. For an account that emphasises victimisation, see Evgenia D. Homskaya, Alexander Romanovich Luria: A Scientific Biography, trans. by Daria Krotova (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 2001).
29.
In letters to Kurt Lewin Luria mentions a film made in association with the Film Institute on counting and attention in children. See Luria to Lewin, 22 November 1929 and 12 December 1929. Akron, OH, Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP), Kurt Lewin Papers, Box M2931, Folder 2. This collaboration with the Film Institute is also mentioned in Homskaya, p. 39.
30.
David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 176. Masha Salazkina similarly claims that Eisenstein’s interest in ‘primitive’ forms of thought was influenced by Luria. See Salazkina, p. 184.
31.
See Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), p. 201.
32.
Eisenstein , ‘The Psychology of Art’ in The Psychology of Composition, ed. and trans. by Alan Unchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), pp. 1–15, p. 8.
33.
Vygotsky, ‘The Problem of Age’, (1932–1934) in The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, vol. 5, trans. by Marie J. Hall, ed. by Robert W. Riener (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1998), pp. 187–205, p. 188.
34.
Luria, ‘Speech and Intellect among Rural, Urban and Homeless Children’ in Soviet Developmental Psychology, ed. by Michael Cole (New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1977), pp. 32–64.
35.
Luria, ‘Experimental Psychology and Child Development’ in The Selected Writings of A.R. Luria, ed. by Michael Cole (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), pp. 78–96, pp. 94–95.
36.
Eisenstein, ‘Beyond the Shot’ in Volume 1, Selected Writings, 1922–1934, ed. by Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), pp. 138–150, p. 142.
37.
Eisenstein, ‘Beyond the Shot’, p. 144.
38.
Luria and Vygotsky, ‘The Child and Its Behavior’ in Studies on the History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive and Child, ed. and trans. by Victor I. Golod and Jane E. Knox (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), pp. 140–231, p. 157. According to the book’s introduction ‘The Child and Its Behavior’ was written solely by Luria. See ‘Translator’s Introduction’, pp. 1–35, p. 24.
39.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behavior’, p. 158.
40.
Luria, ‘The Child and Its Behavior’, p. 158.
41.
Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’ in Film Form, pp. 28–44, p. 35. This essay (also from 1929) contains a discussion of the children’s pictures shown to Eisenstein by Luria similar to that discussed in ‘Beyond the Shot’.
42.
V. Ivanov, Chet i nechet: Asimmetriia Mozga i Znakovykh Sistem [Odd and Even: Asymmetry of the Brain and Sign Systems] (Moscow: Sovetskoe Radio, 1978) cited in Julia Vassileva, ‘Eisenstein/Vygotsky /Luria’s Project: Cinematic Thinking and the Integrative Science of Mind and Brain’, Screening the Past, 38 (2013).
43.
K.E. Levitin, ‘Epilogue: Luria’s Psychological Symphony’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 6, 36 (1998), pp. 33–62. Luria’s great-granddaughter claims that Eisenstein’s brain was stored in Luria’s fridge at home prior to dissection. See ‘Dachi’, Afisha, July 26, 2011, https://daily.afisha.ru/archive/gorod/archive/summerhouse-photostory/.
44.
This episode is recounted in Nesbet, p. 140.
45.
Eisenstein, Immoral Memories: An Autobiography, trans. by Herbert Marshall (London: Peter Owen, 1985), p. 3.
46.
Nesbet describes this shift in Eisenstein’s thought away from shock and montage (as discussed by Wollen) in the following terms: ‘Gradually Eisenstein was shifting away from his earlier emphasis on the abrupt, violent changes that shifts the course of history, towards an interest in the early protoplasmic forms of life, in the shapes and forms of things before identity is determined.’ p. 142. On Eisenstein’s late interest in early forms of life, see also Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 222–237, Yon Barna, Eisenstein (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1973), p. 268 and Salazkina, p. 133.
47.
Eisenstein, ‘Conspectus of Lectures on The Psychology of Art’ in The Psychology of Composition, ed. and trans. by Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 16–25 (transliteration modified for consistency).
48.
Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, p. 217.
49.
Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, p. 212.
50.
Eisenstein, ‘Conspectus’, p. 25.
51.
Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, p. 611.
52.
Eisenstein, ‘Film Form: New Problems’ in Film Form, pp. 122–149, p. 144. Alongside a long discussion of primitive cultures Eisenstein also mentions having been introduced to people being treated for brain injuries in Moscow who exhibit similar patterns of thought, presumably with Luria as his guide, p. 141.
53.
Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, p. 611.
54.
Eisenstein, ‘Conspectus’, p. 19.
55.
Eisenstein also drew on psychoanalytic discussions of conception and birth. For example, in ‘On Folklore’ he mentions being introduced to Sandor Ferenczi’s work on gentility by Hanns Sachs, p. 600.
56.
Eisenstein, ‘Conspectus’, pp. 16–25.
57.
Nesbet, p. 11. Nesbet argues that the vacillating movement that animates Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle also courses through Eisenstein’s later work, observing an oscillation between life and death or womb and tomb in Ivan the Terrible, Part I, pp. 198–208.
58.
Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, p. 602.
59.
Interestingly, Bulgakowa argues that Eisenstein’s shift in thought was inspired by Vygotsky: ‘Vygotsky’s interpretation of the dual structure of aesthetic reaction is precisely what spurred Eisenstein to abandon the reflexological model of montage of attractions in favour of understanding works of art as dynamic unities of opposites that both model and provoke a cathartic response.’ Bulgakowa, ‘From Expressive Movement to the “basic problem”’, p. 435. Bulgakowa claims that Eisenstein was given a manuscript copy of Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art in 1925, a text whose influence on Eisenstein is also discussed in Karla Oeler, ‘A Collective Interior Monologue: Sergei Parajanov and Eisenstein’s Joyce-Inspired Vision of Cinema’, The Modern Language Review, 101, 2 (2006), 472–487. There is no comparable text (reflecting explicitly on art and aesthetics) among Luria’s many publications.
60.
Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, p. 603.
61.
Eisenstein, ‘On Folklore’, p. 605.
62.
Eisenstein , ‘Speeches to the All-Union Creative Conference of Soviet Filmworkers’ in Selected Works: Volume 3: Writings, 1934–1947, ed. by Richard Taylor, trans. by William Powell (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), pp. 16–46, p. 38.
63.
Luria and Vygotsky’s introduction to the Russian translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (published in 1925) rejected the ‘pessimism’ of Freud’s essay and instead argued that a transformation of social conditions could transform individual consciousness in turn. See Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, ‘Introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. by René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 10–18. For a detailed discussion of their reading of Freud, see Hannah Proctor, ‘“A Country Beyond the Pleasure Principle”: Alexander Luria, Death Drive and Dialectic in Soviet Russia, 1917–1930’, Psychoanalysis and History, 18, 2 (2016), 155–182.
64.
Eisenstein, Selected Works, Volume 4, ‘The Author and his Theme’, pp. 787–796, p. 792.
65.
Luria to Sacks, July 19, 1973, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City.
66.
Luria, The Making of Mind, p. 174.
67.
Luria, The Making of Mind, p. 178.
68.
Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, trans. by Lynn Solotaroff (London: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 5.
69.
Sacks to Luria, June 14, 1975, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City.
70.
Michael Cole relayed this in conversation with Levitin, cited in G.L. Vygodskaia and T.M. Lifanova, ‘Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Part 2)’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 37, 3 (1999), 3–80, p. 67.
71.
According to Marie Seton, Eisenstein first learned of Shereshevsky when Luria attended a party at the director’s house in 1934 while Eisenstein was hosting the African American actor Paul Robeson in Moscow. Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978), p. 328. Eisenstein himself claims to have come across Shereshevsky earlier, saying that he spoke with Luria’s patient in 1928 and 1933, S.M. Eisenstein, ‘On Color’ in Selected Works, Volume 2, Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. by Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. by Michael Glenny (London: BFI, 1991), p. 260.
72.
In January 1968 Luria wrote to Jerome Bruner to inform him that Mind of a Mnemonist would be published simultaneously in Russian and English, noting with incredulity that 105,000 copies had already been ordered in Russia. Bruner replied, joking that Luria was becoming as popular as ‘Bulgakov or even Gorky!’ See 11 January 1968, Luria to Bruner and 23 February 1968 Bruner to Luria. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Archives (HUA), Jerome Bruner Papers, General Correspondence 1975–1977, HUG 4242.5, Box 88.
73.
Eisenstein, ‘On Color’, p. 258. For a detailed discussion of Eisenstein’s engagement with synaesthesia, see Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 140–201.
74.
Eisenstein, ‘On Color’, p. 260.
75.
Eisenstein, ‘On Color’, p. 261.
76.
Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. by Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 387.
77.
Eisenstein, ‘Vertical Montage’, Selected Writings, Volume 2, pp. 327–399, p. 368.
78.
Eisenstein, ‘Vertical Montage’, p. 368.
79.
Luria, ‘A.R. Luria’ in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 6, ed. by Gardner Lindzey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 253–292, p. 285.
80.
Luria, Shattered, p. 35.
81.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’ in Ficciones, trans. by Anthony Kerrigan (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2009), pp. 107–115, p. 112.
82.
Sacks to Luria, August 3, 1973, Oliver Sacks Archives.
83.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 33.
84.
Eisenstein, ‘An Unexpected Juncture’ in Selected Writings, Volume 1, pp. 115–122, p. 118.
85.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 49.
86.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 52.
87.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 26.
88.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 116.
89.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 104.
90.
Eisenstein, ‘Vertical Montage’, p. 368.
91.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 53.
92.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 35.
93.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 87.
94.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 118. Reed Johnson reveals fascinating discrepancies between Luria’s case history and Shereshevsky’s own versions of events recorded in personal notebooks. He also discusses Shereshevsky’s biography in far more detail than in Luria’s case history, revealing that Luria’s patient had died of alcoholism in 1958, ten years before the case history was published. Johnson also challenges Luria’s presentation of his patient’s flawless memory, emphasising the effort and work it took Shereshevsky to remember, foregrounding instead the question of imagination. Reed Johnson, ‘The Mystery of S. The Man with an Impossible Memory’, The New Yorker, August 12, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory.
95.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 113.
96.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 117.
97.
The Russian title of Luria’s case history is Poteriannii i vozvrashchennii mir [A Lost and Regained World]. This recalls the Russian translations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost [Poteriannii rai] and Paradise Regained [Vozrashchennii rai]. See Luria, Romanticheskie Esse [Romantic Essays] (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1996).
98.
Luria, Mnemonist, p. 116.
99.
Luria, Shattered, p. 158.
100.
Salazkina, p. 11.
101.
Sacks to Luria, June 14, 1975, Oliver Sacks Archives, Oliver Sacks Foundation, New York City.
102.
‘Sergei Eisenstein/Wilhelm Reich, Correspondence’, ed. by Francois Albera, trans. by Ben Brewster, Screen, 22, 4 (1981), pp. 79–86, p. 85. Reich had visited the Soviet Union in 1929.
103.
‘Sergei Eisenstein/Wilhelm Reich, Correspondence’, p. 85.

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Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Hannah Proctor

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Proctor, H. (2020). The Synaesthete. In: Psychologies in Revolution. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35028-4_6
Published: 14 January 2020
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