Listening Like Lives Depend On It: Are psychoanalysts method actors?

“I HAVE HAD the good fortune of acting with some truly great actors,” Robin Weigert told Vanity Fair, “and what you feel … is that they are listening to you as if their lives depended on it—because in a sense, they do.” At stake is not the actor's literal survival but the life of the scene and the actor's own sense of aliveness within it, which depend on that depth of listening. In psychoanalysis, we depend on a similar intensity of attention, though we rarely acknowledge our closeness to the craft of actors. Both professions share the uncanny challenge of listening so intently that another person—whether a patient or a character—emerges.

This is the challenge Weigert, an Emmy-nominated TV and film actress known for her roles in Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy, begins to address in her evocative essay “Listening into Being,” in which she suggests that listening is an inherently creative act—irreducibly selective, the selection guided by a highly subjective form of perception, a hopefully well-nourished capacity for attention. She calls the essay, published in Psychoanalytic Inquiry in 2023, an “invitation” to analysts to contemplate the resonance between our professional disciplines. This invitation—which she later calls a “series of overtures,” that musically inflected term from the Latin apertura, an aperture, a kind of opening—is to contemplate our respective modes of listening others into being.

When Jean Laplanche remarked, almost in passing, that a psychoanalyst was really an “art critic,” he was pointing to something hidden in plain sight: that an aesthetic sensibility governs not only what the analyst says but, even more crucially, what she hears—what touches her, what inspires a response, what manages to reach her in the hourly sea of material. Weigert's actor, unlike Laplanche's analyst, is anything but a critic; she suggests that the actor's listening is not evaluative but “constructive,” as free as possible from preexisting criteria that would constrict one's listening. “Constructive listening,” she writes, “motored by a blend of compassion and curiosity, attends rather than evaluates.” Much as Freud and Bion advocated relinquishing preexisting biases in order to attend freely to the patient's material, Weigert advocates a vitalizing practice for entering a provisional state formed entirely by the task before us and the partner with whom we attend to it.

“The substance of psychoanalytic work, like the powerful forces at play in the dramatic arts, is inherently unstable, uncertain, unwieldy; so without some method, some technique, some discipline to guide its practitioners, the demands of the action can overwhelm the integrity of the actors.”

In the zone of this practice, listening becomes a kind of primordial attunement—something we depend on to feel

real, speaker and listener alike. What's at stake is not mere understanding but existential coherence: Without being met by another's attention, the character is left hovering at the brink of nonbeing. Accordingly, for Weigert, this mode of listening is a “visceral, appetite-driven project of manifestation.” Only through constructive (nonevaluative), impassioned listening do actors become their characters.

“Method [acting] and the psychoanalytic method flourished side by side, products of a shared historical urgency to find truth not by control, but through feeling, receptivity, and the courage to improvise.”

Of course, this form of investment is also constitutive of the clinical process. And though she practices her own listening on film, as opposed to behind the couch, Weigert is no stranger to the world of shrinks—and not just because she has played them on TV. Robin's grandmother, Edith Weigert, was a prominent psychoanalyst in Washington, DC, as well as a writer; her son, Robin's father, was also a psychoanalyst who convened symposia at their institute, inviting creative types to explore parallels between their disciplines. Like her grandmother and father before her, Robin is drawn to that threshold between our two disciplines, giving us an opportunity to form an invitation of our own—an overture, an aperture, an opening.

In the second-ever volume of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Edith Weigert observed that “psychoanalytic science has grown out of an art,” a technique “built on a set of rules and suggestions for practical procedures which cannot in the least cover the almost infinite variety of therapeutic situations arising in analysis.” The artist-analyst, she continues, accommodates this range only by using the unconscious—what Freud famously likened to a “receiving organ,” one that functions as variably as the patients it receives and the analysts who receive them.

This sensibility—that technique must remain alive, flexible, and governed by aesthetic intuition—finds a striking parallel in Isaac Butler's The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned To Act, a sweeping history of the style of acting that began with Stanislavsky in turn-of-the-century Russia and became ubiquitous on stage and screen during its mid-century New York heyday—a heyday it shared, of course, with psychoanalysis, the same period in which Edith Weigert practiced and wrote. It was in the mid-century theater world of New York that Russian émigrés and their students conducted a series of experiments in performance that would eventually culminate in the infamous acting technique, rooted in emotional truth drawn from personal memory and lived experience. This “Method” marked a departure from the more “symbolic” tradition of amplifying and telegraphing discrete emotions that had dominated the stages of Europe and America. Born in the same cultural moment and animated by similar convictions about inner life, presence, and emotional truth, the Method and the psychoanalytic method flourished side by side, products of a shared historical urgency to find truth not by control, but through feeling, receptivity, and the courage to improvise.

The resonance between our two traditions—analytic and theatrical—has not gone unnoticed, especially by those within the acting world; one of the Method's figureheads, Lee Strasberg, once described it as “very near the psychoanalytic method.” As Butler notes, “one of the most revolutionary ideas of the ‘system’ was that an actor's inner life could be trained.” The common element between the two methods seems to be a form of surrender to one's unformed, emerging self to guide one's conduct—indeed, to conduct oneself precisely according to the movements of one's unconscious, relying on it, as we do

through countertransference, to let us receive the patient, and to reach back toward them in turn.

But neither actors nor analysts ever surrender themselves entirely to the movements of feeling. They are bound not only by the material before them—the analyst by the patient, the actor by the script—but also by some form of, well, method, though one whose specifics are notoriously elusive, around which no pure consensus has ever truly formed. The term “psychoanalytic method,” first formalized by Freud, was less a blueprint than a provocation—an invitation to listen and interpret without fixed rules, continually reimagined by every generation, every analyst, that claimed it.

The substance of psychoanalytic work, like the powerful forces at play in the dramatic arts, is inherently unstable, uncertain, unwieldy; so without some method, some technique, some discipline to guide its practitioners, the demands of the action can overwhelm the integrity of the actors. “The profession of acting,” Strasberg wrote,

the basic art of acting, is a monstrous thing because it is done with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary deeds, real deeds. The body with which you make real love is the same body with which you make fictitious love with someone you don't like … in no other art do you have this monstrous thing.

Robin Weigert helps us understand that what safeguards the integrity of creative emergence under the threat of monstrous overwhelm, the madness for which method is urgently necessary, rests entirely on the constructive copresence of another person. It's fitting, then, that both she and Butler turn to the same figure, Marlon Brando (whom both suggest is the greatest actor of all time), as an emblem of this vital partnering. Weigert recalls a famous episode of Brando slapping a fellow actor while filming The Godfather—“not in order to gift his fellow actor with a moment of on-screen truth,” she explains, “but to insure that his fellow actor's wandering attention did not compromise the truth of his own character's existence.”

Like his life depended on it, Brando is not only listening but demanding a form of attention through a form of action. Sometimes one has to do something in order to be able to feel something; Stanislavski always insisted (contra Strasberg) that “one cannot feel and then do the problem—first act the problem for the physical action and then you will be able to feel.” Where Strasberg emphasized drawing on personal emotional memory, Stanislavski believed the key was doing—that feeling would follow from action (Action!), not precede it.

It's a principle that resonates uneasily within psychoanalysis, where “acting” has long been treated with suspicion—whether in the discouragement of acting-out or the wary curiosity surrounding enactment, that double-edged term for when unconscious dynamics leap from speech into scene.

I find myself turning to one of Weigert's own performances, perhaps her most vivid appearance in the consulting room (if not quite behind the couch), as a zero-nonsense therapist to Nicole Kidman's character, who is trapped in a violent and dangerous marriage, in the first season of HBO's Big Little Lies. Weigert, as therapist, becomes increasingly forceful in her interventions in an attempt to penetrate an atmosphere of denial, dissociation, and profound terror. As I watched the scene during its premiere (years before reading her essay), I remember wondering whether this was proper technique, true psychoanalytic method; or, more specifically, how many of my psychoanalytic colleagues actually practiced in this more active, passionate mode, a stark

contrast with the caricature of reserve and neutrality—perhaps a straw man—that continues to loom large in our field despite numerous campaigns to dismantle it.

But perhaps this caricature persists precisely because of an underlying discomfort with what a more passionate clinical stance might require. If actors have something to show us about the power of listening, of trusting an aesthetically shaped form of attention and receptivity to form us into the “scene partners” our patients need us to be, do they also have something to show us about the suffering involved in this passionate process (suffering and passion having a common origin in pathos), the doing behind feeling, the lengths we may go to summoning a patient into being, to bear the occasional agony of this birth? Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner has suggested that an audience needs to see the actor suffer. Might the same be true of what patients need in analysis—a movable scene partner—in diametric opposition to their need for the analyst to be strong, resilient, indestructible? To see the analyst destroyed while simultaneously—paradoxically, as Winnicott formulated—surviving this destruction?

The greatest synchronicity in discovering Robin Weigert's essay (other than having just finished Butler's book) was realizing she had already been present in my mind through my work—speaking immortal words from Kushner's 1991 masterpiece Angels In America, filmed for HBO in 2004. I find myself thinking of this scene when I am reaching for images or thick descriptions of grief and loss. Harper, another character trapped in a very different kind of destructive marriage (played by Mary Louise-Parker), visits the Mormon Visitors' Center and addresses a female figure, a mother, in a diorama of Mormon settlers. “Was it a hard thing, crossing the prairies?” she asks the figure, who now springs to life. “You ain't stupid,” the Mormon Mother (played by Weigert) replies. “So don't ask stupid. Ask something for real.”

If change, like Kushner (like Bion) suggests is inherently catastrophic, then we rely upon artists to show us how to suffer the psychophysical violence of life's hardships into viable ways of being human. In the most poignant moment of her essay, Weigert reflects on her analyst-father's chronic depression as “a form of sadness that affects the artist without an art form.” Drawing on her grandmother's inspiration, and her father's suffering, Robin invites analysts to become the artists their patients need them to be, prompting us to recognize in actors a practice essential to our own craft, to imagine psychoanalysis as an art form that listens the artist within the patient into being. (The appreciation between actors and analysts may in fact be mutual, as Butler recounts; responding to James Dean's entreaties for acting advice, Marlon Brando told him to go see an analyst.)

Weigert, on and off the soundstage, reminds us that becoming—whether in character or in analysis—is not a clean process. It is stitched from pain, pulled into ever-evolving forms through attuned accompaniment, and animated by the hope that someone is paying close enough attention to let us become ourselves—to experience what Winnicott once called the feeling of real, the birthright of being listened into being.

Adam Blum, PsyD, is coauthor of Here I'm Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, ). He has written and presented on psychoanalysis and the music of Björk, Kendrick Lamar, Stephen Sondheim, Frank Ocean, and Michael Jackson. He is in private practice in San Francisco.

First published online May 2025