Word: frights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Writing in the current issue of New York University's Drama Review, Psychoanalyst Donald M. Kaplan traces stage fright through three phases, and then sets the phenomenon in Freudian perspective. Stage fright, he notes, usually begins with the actual scheduling of an event. An actor need only recall "the simple fact of the impending performance" to bring on moods of depression, spells of manic agitation, outbursts among intimates. And that goes for veterans as well as tyros. Marlene Dietrich acted out a classic example of the problem in the 1950 movie Stage Fright. Some years ago. the late Paul...
Like other anxiety states, stage fright triggers defense mechanisms, but they ultimately fail because the fear "enlarges with the passage of time; the defense cannot alter the fixed moment of the performance." That failure induces a second-phase symptom: "the delusion that the audience is convening for an occasion of devastating ridicule and humiliation for the performer. This delusion is frankly paranoiac...
...hours and minutes are the worst. Just before his entrance, the actor may experience "blocking"-nothing less than disconnection "from all avenues of functioning, including speech." Onstage, blocking gives way to "depersonalization," wherein an observing self watches, as if from afar, a performing self. This terminal point of stage fright is blessedly brief: "Full recovery," says Kaplan, "is usually rapid...
Kaplan maintains that stage fright derives from "all levels of psychosexual development." He points to the anxious adult's tendency to touch his nose or mouth or chin, acts rooted in the infant's use of its own hand as a source of physical comfort when its mother -its source of sustenance-is absent. The actor fears a hostile or unappreciative audience, but knows he must perform, that his hands and body are strictly choreographed; he is defenseless at the height of his anxiety. (As opposed to the paranoiac, who can try to flee his imagined dangers...