Head games

So tonight, I went to the Boston Psychoanalytic Society - Bipsy, to her friends - to talk about Shakespeare and acting. It was strange, and interesting. I was approached by a very genial and generous therapist names Walker Shields, who had seen some ASP stuff and had won this prize for writing a paper called, "Imaginative Literature and Bion’s Intersubjective Theory of Thinking".

Now Bion, it turns out, is neither and ancient Greek nor an alien from "Ben 10", but british psychoanalyst from the early 20th century. My friend Walker has developed a group model whereby you use a piece of imaginative literature - a poem by Emily Dickinson and the "To be or not to be" speech in this case - as the springboard for an active exploration of the soul of a group. He was interested in the relationship between this practice and the theater, and asked me to join him in a discussion as part of his giving his paper and collecting his prize.

We've had a bunch of "My Dinner With Andre" kind of lunches at a thai place in Belmont, which I wish everyone who is interested in the personal and spiritual practices of making theater had been at - they were really cool. The main points, I guess, to summarize:

1. Theater and psychoanalysis are really similar.

2. The chance to enter into a kind of reverie in which imaginative literature causes impulsive and unexpected associations, thoughts, memories and reflections, is essential to both fields, and really cool.

3. Human beings are naturally drawn to make stories and create connections, and the feedback loop created by a storyteller and an audience is essential to get deep into the human psyche

4. To actually get deep into the human psyche, it is necessary to nudge people out of their comfort zones, and create an environment where they are dealing with their sensory input in an immediate and improvisatory way.

Now, none of that is all that strange, I guess. But it was pretty cool. Most of the time I hate talking about acting and making theater because it's mostly such self-congratulatory bullshit, but in this context, it was pretty cool. And I thought theater was pretty cool, too.