Acting, Spectating and the Unconscious

A psychoanalytic perspective on unconscious mechanisms of identification in spectating and acting in the theatre.

Maria Grazia Turri, Maria Turri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315517315
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

From Aristotle's theory of tragic katharsis onwards, theorists of the theatre have long engaged with the question of what spectatorship entails. This question has, directly or indirectly, often been extended to the investigation of acting.

Acting, Spectating, and the Unconscious approaches the unconscious aspects of spectatorship and acting afresh. Interweaving psychoanalytic descriptions of processes such as transference, unconscious phantasy, and alpha-function with an in-depth survey of theories of spectating and acting from thinkers such as Brecht, Diderot, Rousseau and Plato, Maria Grazia Turri offers a significant insight into the emotions inherent in both the art of the actor, and the spectator's experience.

A compelling investigation of the unconscious communication between spectators and actors, this volume is a must-read for students and scholars fascinated by theatre spectatorship.

Chapter 1
Theorizing theatre spectatorship

Starting with Brecht

Theatre masters and theorists of the distant or less distant past have always concerned themselves with spectators. Their preoccupations have been multiple: it might have been to dictate a measure for playwriting or a measure for acting, or it might have been to justify their condemnation of theatre or to defend their reformation of it. While the twentieth century has been particularly fertile in its attempts to theoretically redefine and practically reconfigure the relationship between theatre and audience, the audience has persistently been the point of reference against which theatre has defined itself (Freshwater, 2009). Brecht is exemplary in founding his criticism of conventional theatre and his reform in the direction of the epic theatre on his preoccupation with the effects of theatre on spectators.

Brecht maintains that the audience’s experience in conventional theatre amounts to katharsis and he employs the epithet of ‘Aristotelian theatre’ to illustrate theatre’s ability to entice the audience into an identification with the characters of the play through which spectators are transported into the characters’ emotional states. Although the word ‘identification’ does not feature in Aristotle’s text, Brecht decidedly interprets katharsis as entailing emotional identification. To define emotional identification, he uses the German word ‘Einfühlung’, which literally means ‘feeling into’, and whose most common English translation is ‘empathy’. Brecht (1951: 184) disapproves of emotional identification, or the ‘empathy operation’, as he will call it, on the basis that it leads the audience to a passive and uncritical submission to the situation presented by the play. In fact, by maintaining that the audience’s emotional identification amounts to becoming a passive sufferer of the art work (Brecht, 1930), he establishes an abiding correlation between the concepts of emotional identification and passivity. Such notion will remain engrained in contemporary theories of spectatorship.

An exemplary post-Brechtian description of theatrical empathy is given by Augusto Boal (2008: 30–31) in his Theatre of the Oppressed, where following Brecht’s lesson, he equates emotional identification with passive surrendering to the feelings and behaviours of the character:

From the moment the performance begins, a relationship is established between the character, especially the protagonist, and the spectator. This relationship has well defined characteristics: the spectator assumes a passive attitude and delegates the power of action to the character. Since the character resembles us (as Aristotle indicates), we live vicariously all his stage experiences. Without acting, we feel that we are acting. We love and hate when the character loves and hates.

The relationship between empathy and passivity is grounded in Brecht’s interpretation of katharsis. In line with the prevailing rendition of his times, he translates katharsis with ‘Reinigung’, the German word for ‘purgation’. While typically such purgation was intended to apply to the spectator’s emotions, Brecht’s distinctive reading extends it to mean that the spectator will undergo, through empathy, a wider cleansing not limited to his emotions, but comprising any tendency to political or social activism, or even awareness of their possibility. Because according to Brecht (1963: 151) no theatre can ever be un-political, the apparently innocuous ‘purpose of pleasure’ (Brecht, 1949: 181) at the heart of Aristotelian theatre is a powerful device for social oppression. Society uses this kind of entertainment ‘to reproduce itself’ (Brecht, 1930: 34) by keeping the audience in a state of emotional intoxication which numbs their consciousness or dissent. In his extension of the Brechtian interpretation of katharsis, Boal (2008: 29) defines it as ‘the purification of the extraneous, undesirable element which prevents the character from achieving his ends. This extraneous element is contrary to the law; it is a social fault, a political deficiency’. Therefore, katharsis is the instrument through which Aristotelian theatre becomes an ‘extremely powerful poetic-political system for intimidation of the spectator, for elimination of the “bad” or illegal tendencies of the audience’ (Boal, 2008: 3).

Brecht’s perception of katharsis as a means to political subjugation implies a profound mistrust for the value of the spectator’s emotional identification with the characters of the play, evocative of Rousseau’s. In his Lettre à d’Alembert, the French philosopher offers a gripping and authoritative precursor to Brecht’s conception of katharsis, when he asks what the Aristotelian pity amounts to:

Some will say that tragedy excites the audience to pity by means of terror: be it so; but what sort of pity is this? […] a barren pity, fed with a few tears, and never productive of the least act of humanity. Thus did the bloody Sylla weep at misfortunes, of which he himself was not the cause. Thus did the tyrant of Pherae hide himself at the play, lest he should be seen to sigh with Andromache and Priamus, while he felt not the least concern at the cries of so many unfortunates, who were every day butchered by his orders.

(Rousseau, 1759: 24)

Emotional identification with the characters of the play functions as an insulated experience which at the worst is corrupting, at the best is immaterial to human morality. In this sense Susan Bennett (1997: 1), in her theory of spectatorship as cultural phenomenon, can speak of the ‘productive and emancipated spectator’, as a spectator ‘who can think and act’, as opposed to a passive spectator who feels. The invention of the epic theatre is precisely Brecht’s attempt at transforming spectatorship from what he considered a passive emotional process founded on empathy to an active intellectual engagement grounded in reason and ultimately conducive to political action.

The epic theatre

Brecht developed the idea of the ‘epic theatre’ in the early 1920s, in the context of his activity as playwright. The concept, which ‘already enjoyed some currency’ in the Berlin theatre scene before Brecht appropriated it (Parker, 2014: 229) was originally dramaturgical, but Brecht soon made it pertinent to questions of acting and spectating. If Aristotelian theatre implies a correspondence between the spectator’s empathy and katharsis intended as passivity and conformism, in order to oppose the harmful cathartic effects of theatre it is necessary to dispel the audience’s empathic response. The epic theatre

makes nothing like such a free use as does the aristotelian of the passive empathy of the spectator; it also relates differently to certain psychological effects, such as catharsis. […] Anxious to teach the spectator a quite definite practical attitude, directed towards changing the world, it must begin by making him adopt in the theatre a quite different attitude from what he is used to.

(Brecht, 1933: 57)

The epic theatre is characterized precisely by its ability to break the emotional identification of the spectator with the characters, through a process of alienation which will activate the audience’s active and socially critical response (Brecht, 1957a: 110). For the purpose of alienation, the whole apparatus which promotes illusion is deconstructed. Titles are used to break the continuity of the play (Brecht, 1931: 43); actors’ positions are organized so to avoid naturalistic grouping and to reveal instead the socio-historical context (Brecht, 1933: 58). While these and other alienation devices are controlled by the playwright or the director, it is to the actor herself and her technique that the main responsibility for the alienation effect falls.

The implicit recognition of the actor as the principal vehicle of the spectator’s emotional identification with the character justifies Brecht’s appeal to her to mediate a different kind of experience for the spectator. From this concern originates the idea of the Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt (translated into English as alienation):

It is well known that contact between audience and stage is normally made on the basis of empathy. […] the technique producing a V-effect is the exact opposite of that aiming at empathy. The actors applying it are bound not to try to bring about the empathy operation.

(Brecht, 1951: 184)¹

In an essay dedicated to his new technique of acting, Brecht (1951) explains that the breaking of the fourth wall and the distancing of the actor from the character through ‘observation’, as opposed to empathy, are the synergic forces which create the Verfremdungseffekt. The actor portrays her character through symbolic gestures which allow her to maintain the function of actor as observer, rather than converting herself into the character through a process of emotional identification. Moreover, the function of actor as observer is fostered by her awareness of the presence of an audience who watches her. If emotional empathy is that situation in Aristotelian theatre which relies on emotional identification between actor, character and spectator, observation is the new psychological process which links actor, character and spectator in the epic theatre. As von Held (2011: 43) has argued, Brecht’s definition of acting remains grounded in ‘a mirroring relation between actor and spectator. If the actor emotes, so does the spectator. If the actor remains rationally self-detached, the spectator, too, will be rationally detached’. Admittedly, the V-effect still engenders a form of identification between spectator and actor, but this differs from the empathy aroused by conventional theatre at least in two ways: firstly, it is based on observation and critical detachment, and hence divested of the emotional charge of empathy; secondly, it is an identification which links actor and spectator with the exclusion of the character. The spectator is permitted to mirror the actor as she observes, and indeed the actor is permitted to invite the spectator to enter into her attitude, if not her feelings, as long as the character remains excluded from their psychological and aesthetic complicity.

It is of note that Verfremdungseffekt is Brecht’s neologism, which he introduces in 1936, at a time when he sharpens his attention towards the function of the actor. Until then, Brecht had employed the conventional word Entfrem-dung referring to the usage of the concept in Hegel and Marx; as has been suggested, Verfremdung ‘draws a clearer distinction between a sociological category of alienation and an aesthetic of estrangement’ (von Held, 2011: 25). Whereas Marxist Entfremdung entails the workers’ dispossession of the fruits of their labour, resulting in their estrangement from their own humanity, through Brecht’s Verfremdung the workers can enhance their social awareness by exploiting their emotional estrangement from the characters on stage. It is by refraining from portraying the characters in an empathic way, and thus at some level depriving them of their humanity, that actors promote political consciousness. It is not surprising then that the best metaphor for the job of the actor is the eyewitness at a street accident (Brecht, 1950). The eyewitness invites bystanders to form an opinion about the accident: whilst he takes upon himself the task to demonstrate to them how the accident took place, so that they can judge of it as if they had been witnessing it with their very eyes, he has no intention or desire to press them into re-experiencing the victim’s feelings as the protagonists of the tragic scene. Brecht here establishes an opposition between the victim’s subjugation to feeling and the witness’s propensity for judgement which features as a significant motif in contentions about acting and spectating, as we shall see particularly with reference to Diderot.

Spectatorship, emotions and the unconscious

Brecht’s dichotomy between a passive and an active spectator finds some correspondence with his view of a divergence between emotional and rational engagement, grounded ‘within an Enlightenment tradition of dramaturgical discourse that similarly theorizes the psychological processes at work in theatre production and perception as suspended between two poles: reason and feeling’ (von Held, 2011: 38). Brecht (1957a) condemns the emotional identification of spectators with characters as a passive experience and demands that theatre find devices to break it, and thus engage the spectator’s reason in active criticism of society. Deprived of the possibility for emotional identification, the audience is left to grapple with the play through their rational faculties. Accordingly, Brecht (1926: 14) specifically maintains that epic theatre appeals ‘to reason’.

Brecht’s (1926: 15) formulations emphasize his tendency to vilify feelings and commend reason: ‘Feelings are private and limited. Against that the reason is fairly comprehensive and to be relied on’. However, as he himself explained in an interview of 1952, he never intended to ground epic theatre on the absolute opposition between emotion and reason. The epic theatre

by no means renounces emotion, least of all the sense of justice, the urge to freedom, and righteous anger; it is so far from renouncing these that it does not even assume their presence, but tries to arouse or reinforce them. The ‘attitude of criticism’ which it tries to awaken in its audience cannot be passionate enough for it.

(Brecht, 1952: 227)

As has been pointed out (Bennett, 1997: 29), Brecht’s theatre reform does not exclude the spectator’s emotional involvement; rather, the Verfremdungseffekt ‘intervenes, not in the form of absence of emotion, but in the form of emotions that need not correspond to those of the character portrayed’ (Brecht, 1957c: 154). In fact, the apparent ambiguity towards emotions finds a resolution if it is clarified that the undesirable emotions are those that the spectator feels in identification with the character, while the permitted or even desirable ones, are those that belong to the spectator as a detached observer of the character. Brecht (1957a: 112) distinctly illustrates this point in his essay Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction, where the feelings of the spectator in the Aristotelian theatre are contrasted to those of the spectator in the epic theatre. In the first situation the spectator resonates predictably with the characters’ emotions in identification with them (‘I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh’), whereas in the epic theatre the spectator’s critical detachment leads him to unforeseen insights into the characters’ conditions which can in turn generate unexpected emotional reactions, even opposite ones to those of the characters (‘I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh’). The dichotomy between passive and active spectator is therefore not precisely the opposition between emotion and reason, but rather between an emotion which arises as a reflex to an identification unmediated by reason, such as katharsis seems to imply, and an emotion which arises as a consequence of a deliberate critical judgement, as is the case in the epic theatre. These second kind of emotions are valuable outcomes of spectatorship, whilst those which arise from emotional identification with the characters must be impeded. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A note on the text
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theorizing theatre spectatorship
• 2 Transference and katharsis, Freud to Aristotle
• 3 The Paradoxe inside out
• 4 The emotionalist theory of acting
• 5 Unconscious emotional processing in alpha-function
• 6 Acting and spectating in alpha-function
• Index