Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 September 2012, Vol. 2, No.9, 853-863 D Colette Colligan DA VID PUBLISHING From Suffering to Satisfaction in Method Acting* Michele Vettorazzo Two Sigma Investments LLC, New York City, USA Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada We analyze the success of Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of emotion memory in Western acting schools. We propose a path that, counter-intuitively, connects the emotional distress related to this method with an attachment to it. A chain of psychological steps explains this dynamic: the delegation of power from the actor to the director, emotional suffering during the training, rise of feelings within the dyad, and eventually rise of satisfaction. Our argument draws especially on interdisciplinary research on athlete-coach relationships in sports psychology while also suggesting wider application to educational psychology and psychotherapy. Keywords: Konstantin Stanislavski, emotion memory, method acting, actor-director dyads, psychology and pedagogy Introduction Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) is the celebrated father of modern acting pedagogy. Jean Benedetti’s biography on him as well as his other critical work has solidified his contributions to the field of acting, particularly in America where his teachings have dominated. In 1897, Stanislavski co-founded the MAT (Moscow Art Theater), where he taught for many years and remained involved up until his death. In the year 1906, following a European tour of the MAT, he felt the need to formalize his teachings into a training program for actors: it was the beginning of a new systematic approach to the physical and mental aspects of the actor’s formation, commonly referred to as the Method (though the term properly applies to the American adaptation of his work). In the early 1920s, as his international reputation grew, he gave a series of successful performances in the United States, which saw American publishers requesting his biography and teachings. This interest on the part of American publishers is the reason why all of his writing was first published in translation in the West and why he has had such an important influence on American theater. Stanislavski argued that the quest for emotional truth on stage is the only principle that truly deserves the name of art. Throughout his career, he held to the principle that lived emotions are at the heart of acting, but he continued to change and develop the tools he used to awaken and control these emotions. One of the first techniques he developed was that of emotion memory (or affective memory), which he described in his book An Actor Prepares (first published in America in 1937). Emotion memory involves recalling and embodying past lived emotions in order to realize the fictive emotions demanded by any given role. Distress, anger, and happiness are just some of the experiences that constitute the emotional alphabet that an actor might have to Acknowledgments: We thank Valérie Drevon, former professional actress and director, and the actress Helène Bourgeois Leclerc for useful discussions. Michele Vettorazzo, Ph.D., researcher at Two Sigma Investments LLC. (The views expressed herein are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of Two Sigma Investments LLC or any of its affiliates.) Colette Colligan, associate professor, Department of English, Simon Fraser University. * 854 FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING reproduce. This technique, intuitively conceived by Stanislavski, had been independently developed in the scientific work of the French psychologist Théodule Ribot, whom he met in 1908 (Benedetti, 1990, p. 180). Their encounter importantly underscores the connection between Stanislavski’s acting technique and the rising discipline of psychology. Later in his career, however, Stanislavski gradually abandoned the technique of emotion memory, as he came to recognize that evoking emotions in such a manner could not be carefully controlled. One needs them at certain special moments (during rehearsal, for example), but cannot awaken them on demand. The intrinsically unreliable access to emotion memory induced Stanislavski to think more deeply about the interaction of emotions and the body. If emotions had to inspire the convincing physical gesture of the actor, the opposite was also possible. This observation led to his so-called technique of physical actions, where a sequence of purely mechanical acts helps in the recovery of the required emotions. This second step of his theorization, where the role of the body is well-developed as a complement to the inner nature of the emotion memory technique, is contained in a second incomplete book, Building a Character, translated and published in America in 1949, long after his death. A final corpus of his writings about the technique of physical action in its more mature and explicit form was arranged into a third publication called Creating a Role, published in America only in 1961. The dissemination of Stanislavski’s ideas suffered from a publishing lag which led to a distortion and transformation of his pedagogy. Because of the late translation of Building a Character, his technique of emotion memory took off in America without the benefit of the director’s later revisions to the theory. One of the persons responsible for obscuring the later developments of Stanislavski’s method was Lee Strasberg, an actor, director, and teacher who established his own version of emotion memory based on Stanislavski’s first writings, with enormous success in America. Strasberg knew about the later developments of Stanislavski’s method, but deliberately ignored them. The American actress Stella Adler, who went to Paris in 1934 to work with Stanislavski and discovered his technique of physical actions, accused Strasberg of betraying the work of the Russian master when she returned to America (Gordon, 2010, p. 155). Strasberg was dismissive, however, and insisted that any change in Stanislavski’s method was a regression, and that “his method was superior to that of the master” (Gordon, 2010, p. 61). Strasberg’s resistance shows the special attraction of the emotion memory technique for practitioners despite the testimonies about the harm it caused (Gordon, 2010, p. 44). Adler became “the nation’s Counter-Strasberg”, as Mel Gordon writes. She spoke about the long-term psychic-harm that emotional recall could produce and spoke to novices about its injurious effects: the Method “landed them in the booby-hatch and shattered them. You couldn’t be on-stage thinking of your personal life. It was just schizophrenic” (as cited in Gordon, 2010, p. 150). Despite Adler’s denunciations of its “madness”, however, the Method resisted and continues to persist. As early as 1927, before any of Stanislavski’s teachings were published in America, Chekhov asked in his autobiography The Path of the Actor (2005): “Why does the so-called Stanislavski system have such an irresistible power [over young actors]?” (p. 40). The nephew of Anton Pavlov Chekhov and a former student of Stanislavski’s had abandoned the practice of emotion memory after having suffered a nervous break-down that had allegedly been triggered by the technique (Chekhov, 2005, pp. 39, 52, 71, 74). Stanislavski himself was aware and worried that the evocation of past experiences “produced negative effects: tension, exhaustion, sometimes hysteria” (Benedetti, 2008, p. 64), though the allure of his early teachings, the influence of Strasberg, and the publishing lag all helped to make his revisions mute. Chekhov, however, had asked the right question, and the one central to our essay. FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING 855 We believe that the “irresistible power” of Stanislavski’s early teachings on emotion memory has in large part to do with a complex and intensive psychological relationship that it generates between the actor and the director. This relationship develops in the following way: first, the quest for emotional truth on stage translates, through emotion memory, into emotional enhancement or, in some cases, distress and suffering. The director asks this effort of the actor, and the actor delegates this power to his director. Using a current terminology in sports-psychology scholarship, we will refer to this couple as a dyad. There is a direct connection between over-the-limit effort in a dyadic relationship and the rise of feelings within the dyad itself. Several mechanisms that we will outline in this paper can account for these feelings. These induced feelings then turn into satisfaction in the relationship, through another series of mechanisms. Finally, in a feedback-loop, satisfaction generates an attachment to Method, and it persists in recreating the same kinds of relationships. This succession of steps within the actor-director dyad, from the motivation to delegate one’s power, to the experience of emotional distress, to the rise of personal feelings toward the director, and finally to the state of satisfaction is infinitely reproducible and explains the success of Stanislavski’s method in actual acting schools. Key to our own methodology in approaching Chekhov’s question of Method’s “irresistible power” is that this dyad operates independently from specific personalities or activities demanded from a performance. It relies more on general principles such as the acceptance of a hierarchy or being strongly motivated to work. It is of course possible for such dyads to develop in other fields than acting. Following this intuition, Sydell Weiner (1997), for example, has compared actor-director to patient-therapist relationships, arguing that “stage directors are involved in a process similar to psychotherapists” (p. 77). In this study, we turn to research in other fields, especially sports psychology where the athlete-coach dyad has received considerable attention in recent years. The actor-director and athlete-coach relationships have a good deal in common: the motivational context for the delegation of power (why someone would submit to this training), the stress of training (the emotional distress of the Stanislavski method and the physical strain of training and competition), and the need for the dyad to canalize the stress into a positive and durable interaction. The literature in sports psychology is rich in important experimental results that connect “in real life” the psychological mechanisms in both dyads. As a sideline, it is an interesting development that the words coach and coaching are more and more employed in modern acting courses. In principle, all teacher-student relationships could show aspects of the dynamic we describe, even in an educational context. What we have found, however, is that there is little research in educational psychology that touches on the positive effects of distress or power delegation in the teacher-student relationship, despite the fact that studying requires effort and teachers need to exercise their influence. David Nyberg, a scholar with expertise in educational problems, has also noticed this lacuna, observing that “the idea of power has lain more completely neglected in educational studies than in any other discipline that is of fundamental social interest” (Nyberg, 1981, p. 63). We believe that one can observe the operation of power between teacher and student even when the tenant of that power seeks a more collaborative approach. A way of rephrasing our thesis is that the method of emotion memory incorporates, via the mechanism we sketched, a management strategy, and puts the actor in the right psychological frame to interact productively with his director. Other approaches that might theoretically be superior to his method may not elicit the same sense of satisfaction as an end product. This, we believe, was not necessarily Stanislavski’s intention, and should be seen more as a “lucky coincidence”. The aim of this paper is to examine each step of this management strategy in order to show that the success of Stanislavski’s method is in fact a series of psychological and motivational tactics that hold sway over the actor. 856 FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING An Actor’s Motivation Let us begin with how Stanislavski lays out his arguments and motivates his students in his famous An Actor Prepares (1937). The book describes acting classes given by a director named Torstov (which is a pseudonym for Stanislavski himself), and in Chapter 2, “The Stage as Art and Stock-in-Trade”, he has Torstov articulate his artistic axiom on emotion memory: We firmly believe and know from our working practice, that only this kind of theater, enriched with the actor’s own experiences as a living organism, as a human being, can communicate all the elusive nuances, the hidden depth of a role. Only acting of this kind can fully capture an audience and bring them to a point where they not only comprehend but, more importantly, experience everything done on-stage, and so enrich their own inner lives, leaving a mark that time will not erase. (Stanislavski, 2008a, pp. 20, 21) Torstov also outlines the main technique of “lived human experience”: The underlying idea is that the set of our previously experienced emotions (positive and negative ones) define our emotional alphabet, or the only set of feelings that we can realistically and truly represent. By beginning with “we firmly believe”, Torstov strikes out confidently, but unavoidably admits that it is a personal view, and thus exposes Stanislavski’s method to criticism or alternative foundations. He needs his students, and by extension his readers, to adhere to his principles, since this is the basic step to motivate them to follow the training. In using Torstov as his surrogate, Stanislavski gives himself space to answer the most obvious objections that one could raise, in effect introducing doubt in order to quell it. What if, a student asks, we never experienced a certain emotion required in the play? Is it possible to go beyond our limited lived emotions? Torstov replies: Torstov: Of course, an unexpected, subconscious “find” is attractive. This is our dream, the aspect of creative work we like most. But it doesn’t follow that we should belittle the importance of the conscious recollections of our Emotion Memory […]. Student: You mean in all roles—Hamlet, Arkashka, Nestchastlichev, Bead and Sugar in The Blue Bird, do you really mean we should make use of our own personal feelings? Torstov: How could it be otherwise? […] An actor can only experience his own emotions. Do you want the actor to get new set of feelings, a new heart and mind for every role he plays? Do you think that’s possible? How many hearts is he supposed to have room for? (Stanislavski, 2008a, pp. 208, 209) Another major source of criticism of Stanislavski’s principle of truth on stage is that there could be a level of technique that makes real feelings indistinguishable from just pretending. Stanislavski first of all proclaimed that this behavior betrays the art of representation and lapses “into mimicry, copying, imitation, which has nothing to do with real creative work” (2008a, p. 25), and more practically, he added that the simulation would be unveiled in the long run, since nobody had such a technical level. To cut off discussions about the validity of his principle of truth, he additionally makes a succession of derisive comments about some common “mistakes” or “false” motivations of actors, like cabotinage or the compulsive necessity of a person to be at the center of the attention: These people profit of the ignorance of some and the depraved tastes of others, they resort to favoritism, to scheming and other means that have nothing to do with creative work. Deeds of that kind are the most pernicious enemies of art. You must fight them as hard as possible, and, if that does not work, then they must be driven off the stage. (Stanislavski, 2008a, p. 35) Although Stanislavski tries to cut off this criticism by anticipating it rhetorically, his method did have its detractors and revisionists. Other systems can be seen as alternatives of Stanislavski’s axiom. Michael Chekhov FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING 857 put more the accent on imagination as a source of inspiration, rather than the directly lived experience (Gordon, 2010, p. 99). Bertold Brecht radically opposed the method, proposing the detachment approach, and thus its exact opposite. Jerzy Grotowski proposed that the actor should not live the emotions of the character, but “the character serves as a vehicle for the actor self-expression” (Zarrilli, 2002, p. 63). Adler, in line with Chekhov, thought that the actor exists only in action: “the play itself and its unique given circumstances should stimulate the actor’s internal states” (Gordon, 2010, p. 157). Such profound relativism about the principles of good acting helps us understand that the acceptance of Stanislavski’s method implies an act of personal choice. To describe the implications of this choice, we make a first reference to a motivational model taken from sports-psychology literature: Sophia Jowett and Geneviève Mageau, among others, discuss the definition and role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. The intrinsic motivations are the ones related to personal desire, like the will to improve one’s current situation, to enhance one’s knowledge and performance, to adhere to an ideal or ideology. The extrinsic motivations are those related to reputation, recognition, or financial gains. Stanislavski calls for the highest level of intrinsic motivation: the use of true, lived emotions on stage is for the sake of art and is at the core of good acting and being a good actor. Stanislavski positions the actor as personally responsible for these principles. The mere possibility that an actor would mimic the emotional truth is treated as escaping to “mimicry, copying, imitation, which has nothing to do with real creative work”. This constraint is not subjected to any form of external control or performance, for it just calls the performer to the responsibility of true artistic creation, so that he sees his work as both a calling and a craft. This first psychological step in Stanislavski’s method is, in our view, triggering the actor to accept the emotional stress that it demands as well as the special relationship with the director. Suffering and the Quest for Truth This special relationship at the heart of Stanislavski’s method, however, has generated a sort of mythology of pain. We are reminded of Michael Chekhov’s psychological breakdown and Adler’s accusations that Strasberg’s teachings did harm. In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski also addressed the suffering that can be experienced when trying to relive difficult episodes from the past. Another class with Torstov is described in which the director encourages the students to experience different kinds of emotions in a quest for performative truth and liberation from expressive barriers. Darya, a student of the course, is asked to treat a piece of wood as a baby, and to evoke a mother’s devastation when it dies: While she was acting, floods of tears streamed from her eyes and her motherly affection turned the log of wood, representing the child, into a living being for those of us who were watching. We could feel it under the tablecloth representing the abandoned child. When we came to the moment of the child’s death we had to cut the scene short to avoid a disaster. The flood of emotions Darya was experiencing was so turbulent. We were all shattered. Torstov was weeping and so […] were the rest of us. (Stanislavski, 2008a, p. 339) The reader is informed that Darya had lost her own baby and had drawn from the memory of that tragedy in her performance. This example shows how emotion memory leads to the most convincing and truthful acting. At the same time it reveals how the pain of remembering is critical to Stanislavki’s theory. There can be therapeutic aspects to Stanisvlavki’s painful turn to memory as a performative outlet. The use of his emotion memory in other fields helps elucidate this point. Wendy Lippe, who has adapted his method as a therapeutic tool, describes a case study with young patients who were profoundly affected by the experience of remembering. During the session, one boy loses control during a memory exercise: 858 FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING He [Marlon, the patient] ran around the room screaming and throwing chairs and tables. Marlon appeared to be in a frenzy, and the other boys stood frozen until some staff members came in to seize him. I immediately neutralized Marlon by yelling, “Stop; it’s over, Marlon.” He then fell to the floor. (Stanislavski, 2008a, p. 108) The technical term “neutralization” typically represents a session of relaxation after the emotional work to let the person involved go back to his activity in a stable emotional state; in Lippe’s example, it takes the form of a violent break of the negative emotional flow. In Stanislavski’s descriptions of Darya’s performance, he has Torstov similarly neutralize the actor’s pain by stopping the scene, and demonstrates how the combined mechanisms of internal motivation and neutralization help channel the pain of remembering constructively. But the technique is clearly open to a director’s abuse or incompetent management, and the pain of remembering remains both the point of vulnerability and the fulcrum of the psychological relationship in the actor-director dyad. There is another powerful source of stress that is not necessarily specific to Stanislavski’s method, the pain of showing. It is related to the shame of performing in public. The kinds of personal disclosure demanded are described in one of Torstov’s classes: Torstov came in, looked at us intently and said: “Marya, go up on-stage”. I couldn’t begin to describe the terror that gripped the poor girl. She started rushing about the place, her feet slipped on the polished parquet floor like a young puppy. Finally we caught hold of her and carried her to Tostov who was laughing like a school boy. She covered her face with her hands and babbled over and over again “My little darlings, please, I can’t! My dears, I am scared, I am scared!” (Stanislavski, 2008a, p. 37) This shame is not necessarily pathological, and in some cases actors explicitly look for this experience to overcome excessive timidity and to liberate themselves from the barriers that prevent expression. Its effects, though, can also intensify the pain of remembering. In all of these examples the notion of the director’s self-limitation with respect to the potential outcomes of a class plays a central role. It is one of the building blocks of a constructive relationship between director and actor. In using Stanislavski’s method for psychotherapy, Lippe (1992) reports that a rule of thumb for a psychologically safe use of the method is to recall events that are more than seven years old, under the assumption that earlier memories are more likely to be unresolved, and therefore dangerous (p. 103). Although she acknowledges the poor significance of this time-scale, this attempt to create a safe memory environment is an example of an attempt to encode responsibility in the use of emotion memory into fixed rules. The potential problem is that this notion of self-limitation is dangerously left up to the director’s or practitioner’s discretion and sensibility. The Rise of Feelings The experience of emotional intensity and suffering in the practice of Stanislavski’s method triggers another psychological mechanism—the actor develops feelings for the director. When we talk about feelings, we mean real or perceived attachments such as friendship, love, hate, or jealousy. We refer to feelings which go beyond the professional collaboration and enlarge and deepen the relationship. The thin line between professional collaboration and personal feeling is well-known in the fields of psychotherapy and sports psychology in studies on patient-therapist and athlete-coach dyads (Huguet & Labridy, 2004; Weiner, 1997). Drawing on this research, we find a number of different mechanisms which lead to a similar rise of feelings in the actor-director dyad reliant on emotion memory. FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING 859 The simplest mechanism that generates feelings in the dyad is the amount of time spent together. As Drewe Bergman observes in her analysis of friendship in the context of sports psychology, it is probable that seeing each other every day for many hours in the context of work, especially one for which the intrinsic motivations are so strong, can generate feelings. But there are also more complicated mechanisms. As Nyberg (1981) observes in his analysis of power, a crucial aspect of the dyadic relationship is the delegation of power (p. 45). The coach has power over the athlete, but this power is accepted by the athlete and legitimated by this acceptance. At any moment the athlete can revoke this acceptance and refuse the dependence: This is what Nyberg (1981) calls power over power (p. 46). The notion that the delegation of power is both willing and revocable has a significant psychological effect; under distress while pushing his body to his physical limits, the athlete nonetheless knows that he is submitting himself to this pain. Because the power differentials have this safety-clause, feelings of trust and bonding are allowed to develop and be reinforced in the dyad when the coach does not exceed those limits. The same mechanism applies to the actor-director dyad in Stanislavski’s method. This concept helps nuance our discussion of the potential abuse of power. The actor’s awareness of the potential for abuse is a key component of his decision to submit, and his acknowledgment of the director’s power over him is tacit trust that he will not abuse his power. Chekhov (2005) describe his experience in Stanislavski’s school, writing: “We submitted ourselves joyfully and unquestioningly to our older colleagues. They guided us intelligently and with inspiration” (p. 51). In the adverb “intelligently”, we also read the self-limitation of power in front of the actor who “submits himself unquestioningly”. Theater scholar Gordon (2010) also notices this point: “Stanislavski’s performers […] trusted their director and did what the master required them to do” (p. 7). Yet another powerful mechanism that leads to the rise of feelings is that of transference. Huguet and Labridy (2004), again in the context of sports psychology, write that the coach’s function, “leads him almost necessarily to reproduce implicitly or explicitly for the athlete the role of a parent or an idealized adult role model, like a brother, or a confidant” (p. 111; the authors’ translation). The hierarchical positioning directly generates an “affective collusion” within the dyad, namely a psychological dependence and the perception of shared goals. This same “affective collusion”, we claim, happens between the actor and director. The pleasure of going beyond one’s limits is an additional reason for the rise of feelings within a dyad. The pleasure is individualistic in nature, but expresses itself through another form of transference. As Huguet and Labridy (2004) write: High-level sports have become a practical exercise of pushing the body to the limit: the body, the site of know-how for the athlete, is no longer exclusively attached to the notion of pleasure, but it allows the athlete to attain what Freud called “beyond the principle of pleasure”, an extreme sense of satisfaction that is close to pain. (p. 111; the authors’ translation) Exceeding corporal limits requires that coach and athlete are oriented toward the same objectives; this can generate an illusion of love that confounds love with admiration for the director’s knowledge and experience. Huguet and Labridy (2004) add that this illusion “can generate logical confusion between the need of a transferential support and a disorder of sentiments (complicity, friendship, love or sex)” and “explains what causes athletes and trainers to have intimate relationships” (pp. 113-114; the authors’ translation). Overall, transference mechanisms are special cases for a more general process of the evolution of an unequal power relationship into a close collaboration. Lorimer and Jowett (2009) describe this process in terms 860 FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING of meta-perspectives, namely “individuals shown to be responsive to […] their partners’ thoughts and feelings about them” (p. 202). Nyberg (1981), whom we cited earlier, expresses a similar view in his analysis of love and power: One is often tempted to commit a common fallacy, to say that when a relationship achieves a condition of balanced trust, shared understanding, and a mutual plan for action, we are talking about something other than power. I would argue that, in fact, we are talking about the highest form of power. (p. 81) The connection between this observation and the actor-director dyad actually constitutes our first intuition for this paper. Once we recognize that acting training implies a form of suffering and submission, we must ask what motivations could bring a person to accept this affective condition. Another mechanism responsible for the rise of feelings within the dyad is the experience of catharsis that comes from enduring physical and emotional extremes. In Lippe’s discussion of her use of Stanislavski’s emotion memory as a therapeutic tool, she describes how patients expressed relief and gratitude as well as a sense of liberation after their emotion memory sessions (see the section “Two Case Studies Illustrating the Effectiveness of Stanislavski’s Method”). For those who approach acting as a tool to overcome excessive timidity, this feeling of relief can be a powerful tool to connect with their director. And of course there is seduction. At the professional level, actors and athletes are generally chosen by their directors and coaches in protracted casting sessions and try-outs. The continued need to justify their selection and garner the same attention can give rise to personal feelings. Sports psychologists discuss this point, often in reference to the jealousy and exclusivity that can be generated in dyads (Huguet & Labridy, 2004, p. 121). For actors, this mechanism can be amplified by common narcissistic tendencies that have been clearly observed. Paul Marcus and Gabriela Marcus (2010), discussing actor narcissism, quote from People magazine: Meryl Streep and Marlon Brando have made this point [the tendency to narcissism], the former with a pinch of humor, the latter acerbically: “Let’s face it, we were all once 3-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room and everybody thought we were so adorable […]”; “Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It is a bum’s life […]”. (p. 777) We need to stress that the rise of positive feelings within the dyad does not mean individual participants feel this way during the training practice. But intense and highly stressful practice can generate positive feelings if the dyad pivots on the free delegation of power. A dyad is conditioned by the dispositions and practices of the participants, whether the participants exercise self-limitation or whether they perceive the abuse of power. A whole range of negative feelings, from intolerable uneasiness to real crimes, is also documented in sports psychology. Jodi A. Burns (2009), although more oriented toward the legal aspects of abuse, indicates how challenging it can be to generate an equilibrium within a coach-athlete dyad: Horror stories of outlandish behavior by coaches in the sport milieu: many have heard the stories, to one extent or another. Many have personally dealt with the accompanying emotions of dread, humiliation, discrimination, and fear that coaches have imposed during practices and games. (from the introduction, n.p.) Again, we argue, the same goes for the actor-director dyad. The power and durability of Stanislavki’s method is that it triggers a powerful rise of feelings across the emotional spectrum which is managed by intrinsic motivations and the voluntary delegation of power. In the wrong person’s hands, though, these feelings can aggregate on the negative end of the spectrum. FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING 861 Satisfaction Satisfaction is the last step in the development of the dyadic relationship that is integral to Stanislavski’s method. It can be understood as a desire to continue the collaboration, combined with a perception that the dyad has attained the goals initially set out and a belief in the principles and structures of the relationship. Satisfaction is the moment in which the personal motivations and the interaction with the director converge into a positive perception of the activity as a whole. As with the rise of feelings, a number of mechanisms that can generate satisfaction have been identified in sports psychology and similarly apply to the actor-director dyad. We group these mechanisms into two classes. The first class of mechanisms is based on the observation that when a student is in an intense dyadic relationship with his teacher, he will likely perform better. This mechanical and causal relationship between intimacy and success is related to the quantity and quality of work that a student can generate. This success, in turn, generates satisfaction, because the learning experience is perceived as effective. The second class of mechanisms relates to the management of stress during the performance. Stanislavski’s approach, despite other unpleasant aspects, at least offers some techniques for relieving performance anxiety while on stage. The first mechanism is just a consequence of hard work. Working beyond one’s limits implies a deeper relationship between the actor and director. Lorimer and Jowett report that athletes who believe that their partners have a positive perception of the relationship are, among other beneficial effects, more inclined to hard work. This is the effect of a positive state of mind expressed in platitudes heard in post-game interviews the world over: “I felt appreciated by him…”, “Without the coach’s efforts, I could not have achieved these results”, “I did the best I could and so did she” (Lorimer & Jowett, 2009, p. 202). Hard work will on-average have beneficial effects on performances, and thus create a sense of satisfaction. A high degree of trust and respect within the dyad also elicits a better quality of work and increased sense of satisfaction. For example, in the case of sports, a good dyadic relationship will help the coach to exert his influence more profoundly. Communication may become more efficient and better work would bring better results. Lorimer and Jowett (2009) focus on the notions of empathic accuracy in a sports dyad (“an individual’s moment-to-moment perception of the psychological condition of another” (p. 202)), and on meta-perspectives (responsiveness to a partner’s thoughts and feelings about the dyad) and relate them experimentally (via the results of questionnaires given to a large number of coach-athlete couples) to a positive and satisfying interaction. Both empathic accuracy and meta-perspective are in fact forms of interaction that deepen the communication within the dyad, with beneficial effects on the overall activity. In the context of patient-analyst relationships, Weiner (1997) conjectures a connection between the feelings of trust and creativeness: one needs “bold choices” to support creativity (p. 79), at least in the sense that one has to be confident to express himself without being judged. Closeness can help this boldness, and a higher quality work follows. This is additionally true for acting, where creativity plays a major role on stage. Jowett (2008) suggests, in the context of sports psychology, another mechanism applicable to Stanislavski’s method: an activity inspired by strong intrinsic motivations is more likely to generate “satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of achievement” (p. 665). The reason is that these motivations are experimentally shown to produce better concentration, persistence and performance in general (Mageau & Vallerand, 2003, p. 886) and lower stress levels (Iso-Ahola, 1995, p. 193). For Stanislavski’s method, as we saw, the basic motivations are strongly intrinsic. Actors are asked to focus on their emotions and the deep 862 FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING artistic commitments in their practices. This helps reduce their sensitivity to the stress of being judged by the audience because success would be perceived just as a consequence of the right internal work, and not as a purely extrinsic reward. Managing stress and stage fright were historically among the first concerns of Stanislavski himself (solved, in his early years of direction, with few drops of valerian), and most probably a point that helped him conceiving the need of a systematic acting training (Gordon, 2010, p. 7). In reviewing the connection between a deeper dyadic relationship and reasons of satisfaction, we now close the psychological loop produced by Stanislavski’s method: The sense of satisfaction translates into a positive perception of the whole activity and an affirmation of the method’s principles and techniques. A reinforced belief in the artistic principles will thus replay the psychological loop over and over again in different theaters and on different stages. This is the “irresistible power” that practitioners have felt for over a century. Conclusions In thinking through the psychological foundations of Stanislavski’s method, our goal has been to explain why it has been so influential from the beginning and remains a dominant model of acting pedagogy. In our view, its ability to attract followers through the ages has to do with how it triggers a psychologically powerful chain reaction in the actor that manufactures his consent. His method begins with the creation of strong intrinsic motivations for the actor’s delegation of power to the director; it then generates emotional enhancement or distress which leads to the rise of feelings; and these feelings are ultimately consolidated into a final and lasting sense of satisfaction. The actor then wants to recreate this feeling of satisfaction through continued practice and performance. As a consequence, this method has the property of having a built-in management strategy, which systematically canalizes the reaction of its participants, independently from their initial motivations. We also suggest two possible effects of the psychological mechanisms behind the success of Stanislavski’s method. The first is relational; we conjecture that all professional Method actors should have in their past at least one person who has been crucial for their career, and that should inspire thoughts like “only for him could I suffer so much to reach my goals and become a actor”. This feeling should not be considered a coincidence or simply a good memory about an intensive experience, but a direct cause of their success. The second effect relates to artistic performance; we might relate the success of Stanislavski’s method with audiences to the critical engagement elicited by the actors through the dyadic work of emotion memory. Perhaps what audiences admire about a Method performance is this effort, or perhaps the performative effects of the psychologically intense relationship between actor and director. We are not criticizing the principles of realism in acting, but pointing out that there is nothing intrinsically superior about the realism that Stanislavski’s method advocates and other styles of acting. All methods, if supported by sufficient motivation, can be successful. Our point is that, by a lucky psychological coincidence, Stanislavski’s method automatically induces a deeper effort, and therefore valuable artistic outcomes. At a pure level of designing a successful pedagogical strategy, the notion that a certain prescription will mechanically generate beneficial effects on students is certainly a highly desirable feature. From this point of view, we might reassess the value of Stanislavski’s contributions to acting pedagogy in the following way. His emotion memory technique has the disadvantage of emotional stress, but the advantage of strong motivational effects. His later technique of physical action draws less on emotions, but generates less profound relationships within the dyad. One conclusion could be that we are still missing the perfect method that has all the virtues FROM SUFFERING TO SATISFACTION IN METHOD ACTING 863 built-in. The enthusiasm around Stanislavski’s emotion memory technique continues to hide some of its vulnerabilities and the ways it can become an instrument of abuse. One way to develop more prescriptive rules around the limitation of power would be to take the cases of psychological harm more seriously and analytically, and to consider the ways in which further study of his method across the disciplines might develop importance checks and balances to a practice that is so operative psychologically and fascinating performatively. References Benedetti, J. (1990). Stanislavski: A biography. 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