Le Recherche & Hypnosis

Stanislavski is all too familiar to every professional actor, especially if they attended one of my universities,  Rose Bruford in Sidcup. He is de rigueur there. So this one with it's usual discursiveness is the interconnections of Proust, emotional memory, acting theorists, it's role in hypnosis.

This article also explains the main reason why many posts here are about the 1970s. It's not simply nostalgia, the purpose is to cultivate the collective memory of ephemeral & established culture and oral history which  plays an important but neglected part of psychological & recording changes in culture and history of society. Also chronicling the most fragile part cultural history that is oral history and ephemera.

Stanislavski is most famous for his emotional memory, which Lee Strasberg based his whole Method Acting upon. Most of Strasberg's contemporaries walked out of the Actors Studio stating that he was over emphasising the technique, and Stanislavski himself treated it as merely a minor technique; more on all that another time.

But before Stanislavski there was Marcel Proust whose sniffing of that madeleine biscuit triggered a tsunami of earlier memories transcribed into the tsunami of 7 voluminous volumes.

His  À la recherche du temps perdu is the non plus ultra of involuntary memory or involuntary autobiographical memory. The affective memory of Stanislavski & emotional memory of Strasberg.

The significance of this in psychology is it's multisensory engagement including emotional and synesthesia occurring: images & symbols which did not appear in  the original memory but have an important unspecified aspect in the current memory.

Hypnosis connection-
The above affective memory is usually the recalling of a childhood experience, and at its most intense and vivid.

From my own research, which corroborates experimental psychology, the use of regression & regression memory produces hyper suggestibility: the brain responds more effectively to hypnotic suggestions than by standard techniques.

The more sensory information is remembered or vividly imagined the more powerful the hypnotic operation. Therefore the  more of the senses that are engaged in conjunction with using feelings is the ideal.

The long term memory especially childhood recall unleashes a far more intense and deeper hypnotic response. The response can be measured through the intensity of the imagination, the immersion into the cognition, ie the thoughts being experienced, and physical responses perceived by the subject or physiological responses measured by medical instruments.


The Books-
I had the good fortune to find in Bexley libraries a copy of Anthony Blythe's 1974 book Autohypnosis. As a medical doctor his writing on the subject is from the objective of a medical and psychological purpose; instead of the sensationalist tomes which became popular since the 80s.

His father Peter Blythe, also a doctor quel surprise. wrote an earlier book on hypnosis but it lacks the hypnotic scripts that his son had transcribed, taken from medical practice of various professionals.

R.N. Shrout wrote another superior text  which included the Time Dilation practices which were established as efficacious in experiments at Harvard Music School in the 70s.

Anthony Blythe referenced a book called PSI: Secrets behind the Iron Curtain written by two American psychology post grads in '69. It contains discussions with Soviet psychologists. Much of  this is sensationalist & over enthusiastic and typifies the fin-de-siecle  that ended the 1960s on a wave of optimism believing Transcendental Meditation & positive  waves would put an end to the bad vibes. Within months America was secretly carpet bombing Cambodia which turned a tiny Communist group into the ever growing Khmer Rouge filled with grief stricken survivors who's families and villages had been destroyed. So much for meditating under your pyramid!

Anyway, the PSI book contains Blythe's reference: Artificial Reincarnation, a hypnotic technique which is very powerful. The Russian psychologist interpreted it in terms of psychic communication.  The more prosaic and accurate mechanism is that it bypasses the subjects self concept & self esteem, or lack of it. The mind responds to the positive suggestions unconditionally.

Fame- the heroin that screws up artists

Picasso was famous long before he completely lost it. His greatest period was probably 1934-1939. His Crying Woman  a depiction of  the Spanish Civil War & Guernica are from this period & were a return to the vigour of  Nude in the Forest  in 1908. 1951 he produced Massacre in Korea, an awful rehash of his tropes particularly from the 1920s accompanied by metalised execution squad ala Doctor Who monsters.    The whole painting is a laughable parody of Goya's The Third of May (Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo) the execution of Spanish resistance against Napoleon during the Peninsula War.

Picasso's abilities had not deteriorated, he had lost the fire and the passion for art. Fame, privileges & money had brought comforts that made him lazy & apathetic. Now he churned out paintings, one an hour, either sloppily executed or tediously transgressive, such as Woman Pissing (1965), it's only transient interest is the subject which is as trivial as a student's posturing artwork- a plague which has infested one of my former universities at Goldsmiths, except they don't do it in art anymore, now it's just hot air in the name of post modern bollocks.

Pavarotti similarly fell into the stupor of the 'complacent artist'. He still maintained his daily exercise of refusing to speak until he had done a couple of hours of humming, but as a tenor  his  performances dropped drastically in the 1980s (many things deteriorated in the 80s). In the 60s when he was still largely unknown, he would run, unthinkable with his later bulk, from the school where he was teaching to perform at the local opera house. He didn't need to exert himself but his desire to get to the stage drove him on.

In the 1970s, now famous amougst opera fans  he still had the hunger, passion and excitement to perform. La Boheme & Rigoletto show his focus and intensity not only as a singer but as an operatic actor.  Then suddenly he started to lose it. International & public or plebeian fame resulted in a more relaxed attitude, the voice was still there in its strength and timbre, he was never the greatest living the  tenor by the way, but that acting skill he had in his performances evaporated. 

Pavarotti coasted assured by instant sell outs of his stage performances that an uncritical public would attend a production he was in. And those opera performances were reduced in favour for the far less demanding aria recitals; no acting required & often  less demanding vocal works.  

As for his ubiquituous Nessun Dorma, he made sure that 'none shall sleep' by bellowing out the whole aria, devoid of any of the emotional intensity  that is the fibre of the song. The tenor is singing  about their impending execution if they don't discover Turandot's name by sunrise which is fast approaching.