Chapter 1: Why Perform?

It has been said by Marlon Brando’s friends and family that the first time he ever performed, he pretended to be the pigs and cows that populated his family farm to get his alcoholic mother’s attention. The list of classical actors with despair-laden childhoods goes on: Humphrey Bogart’s penny-hoarding parents never kissed the boy; Ingrid Bergman grew up motherless and was shuttled from home to home, all the time refusing to take off her mother’s clothes; Katharine Hepburn found her beloved older brother hanged and celebrated his birthday as her own for years. These traumatic losses might lead one to believe that the actor’s abilities formed as an adaptation to compensate for a narcissistic vulnerability, that the desire for attention and validation (Kohutian mirroring) becomes satisfied by the applause that one receives. But my sense is that the motivation to act consists of more than being applauded for balancing a ball on one’s nose for treats. It is the longing to transform the self that plays the central role.

It is my intention in this bibliography to uncover what self-psychology can tell us about the art of acting, specifically. (Although related, the arts of acting, directing, designing, and appreciating the theater are driven by distinct psychological impulses; directing and designing are much more like the visual arts than acting, which exists in the body and its reference to itself.) My question is why, exactly, the creative nature of an individual turns to acting as the artistic outlet. My claim is that acting, in particular, allows young actors to identify with another, missing part of themselves.

As someone with an impulse to perform and knowing my own history quite well, I first explore my own childhood. As a child I lived in my head; I read and I played. Most of my fantasies revolved around victimhood. My favorite book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith (2006). I wished the life that Frankie lived was mine, from the days that she sold tin can