Maria Grazia Turri's Acting, Spectating, and the Unconscious considers one of the most enduring problems in dramatic theory, namely how the actor's emotions (whether real or feigned) effect emotional change in the spectator. Posing this problem in terms inherited from Aristotle and his successors, Turri tackles it with concepts developed by Freud and his own. She aims ‘to enrich the discourse on theatre scholarship with a conceptual framework grounded in psychoanalysis, in order to provide a theory and a language to describe those universal aspects of theatre reception which, embedded within our unconscious psyche, have so far been neglected’ (p. 6).
Turri is excellent at distilling large bodies of scholarship – on mimesis or katharsis, for instance – into lucid summaries that foreground the central terms of her argument without sacrificing nuances or blunting contradictions. Her terrific consideration of Brecht patiently tracks the evolution of a theorist who began by correlating identification with passivity and came to encourage identification with actors instead of characters: the spectator, she writes, was ‘permitted to mirror the actor as she observes, and indeed the actor is permitted to invite the spectator into her attitude’ (p. 4). Turri's consideration of Paradoxe sur le comédien is equally winning, especially when she analyses Diderot's misapprehension of his sources. The entanglement of sensibility and judgement in eighteenth-century acting theory, she proposes, relates directly to the entanglement of pity and fear in katharsis, since in both cases one term (sentiment, phobos) pushes us towards identification with another while a second (jugement, eleos) reinforces our detachment. Turri uses her analysis to ground a theory described, in her final two chapters, using psychoanalytic terms. Augmented by Melanie Klein's emphasis on object relations and Wilfred Bion's theory of projective identification – the ‘unconscious community between two minds’ (p. 91) – Turri purports to explain the emotional exchange between actor and spectator and thus to resolve a metaphysical mystery that has bedevilled theatre theory for centuries.
Her answer – it involves the spectator's ‘alpha-function’ – requires some suspension of disbelief. The book leaves unclear precisely how the actor can ‘turn her unconscious … towards the spectator's unconscious and be ready to receive the spectator's emotions’ (p. 101), when the encounter between actor and audience is nowhere near as intimate and bidirectional as that between analyst and analysand. Considering katharsis, Turri sidelines the arrangements of plot, so pivotal in the Poetics. And when she uncouples pity from fear – describing the ‘transition’ (p. 121) from a spectator's intense attachment (fear) to detachment (pity) as a kind of transference – she contradicts Aristotle (for whom the two emotions are concomitant) and repeats a manoeuvre made long before psychoanalysis, as early as Corneille's ‘Discours de la tragédie’ in 1660. This manoeuvre, moreover, betrays the promise of the book's first four chapters, which nimbly demonstrate the inseparability of the spectator's identification and estrangement for (and before) Brecht.
The book is strongest when it is most historical: tracing concepts across national lines in the eighteenth century, for example, or relating them to the cultural ferment of David Hume and Adam Smith. Indeed, in light of the cogency of Turri's synopses and the rigour of her argumentation, it feels strange that she accedes so willingly to the psychoanalytic master narrative. Whereas other thinkers are situated in their cultural contexts, Freud appears as transhistorical truth teller, able to explain Aristotle as effortlessly as he explained Anna O. (who, we should recall, wasn't his patient either). When Turri notes that Anna O.’s hysterical symptoms were ‘cured’ (p. 26), she does not even glance at the long-standing scepticism that has accompanied this story, or even ‘hysteria’ – not least the scepticism of the real-life patient.
Such moves are not uncommon among Freudian critics, and the book's subtitle forthrightly declares its intention to offer a ‘psychoanalytic perspective’. Certainly, the book will be essential reading for anyone convinced that the unconscious is ‘actual, tangible, and subject to experiment’ (as Freud claimed, quoted at p. 7) and satisfied that he offered a Rosetta Stone for such experiments. I am leery. But I share Turri's perspicacious belief in the intellectual engagement that subtends emotional investment in the theatre. And, if I suspect that her conclusion is faulty, her articulation of the problem and its premises is immaculate.
