Further contributions to the understanding of stage fright: what do psychoanalysts have to say?

When I wrote something about stage fright (Feb 20), I didn’t look to see if psychoanalysts had had anything to say about it. Now I’ve finished my essay, I had the time to look.

Why do psychoanalysts reckon performers sometimes get themselves fritted into non-performance? I found two papers which outlined all the various theories.

Both were by Glen Gabbard, a New York psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and academic. One was written in 1979, the other in 1983. Both begin with quotes from songs: the first from the Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, the second from The Chorus Line’s The Music And The Mirror.

Like a good academic (and author of The Psychology Of The Sopranos), Gabbard read everything there was to read on the subject and summarised it for us lazier people. He found various ideas and theories about stage fright:

* It’s linked to anal erotism.

* It’s like blushing — gratification and punishment are combined in one symptom.

* It’s linked to guilt about early voyeurism — of the parents having sex, if only in the future performer’s fantasy world.

* It’s frozen self-regard — ‘narcissistic intoxication’ with oneself. (I really don’t get this one: narcissistic intoxication is scarcely unusual in performers: in fact, it’s more or less standard: the Madonna Complex maybe.)

* It’s castration anxiety — which the performer’s previous performances have failed to cover up.

* It sets in when the performer worries that the audience can see right through to his infantile sense of omnipotence.

* Performing is a secret attempt to recreate the perfect, idealised world of complete union with the mother — in the womb, perhaps — and the stage-frighted performer is worrying the audience will realise this is what he’s up to.

* A racial memory of being the outcast, ‘the stoned man’ is evoked — a Jungian one this. (By the by, in my — fairly extensive — experience, most performers are stoned men, after breakfast anyway.)

* It’s a flasher thing. ‘The performer is torn between the desire to expose his genitals to prove he is a fully-equipped sexual creature and the fear that the onlookers will find his equipment laughable.’

* The performer is a child. The audience is the adult. The child knows he is being childish and is terrified the adult will realise it.

* It’s linked to envy. ‘Performers tend to be an envious lot.’

* It’s linked to guilt. If I have something, it means it has to have been stolen from someone else. So I feel guilty. So . . .

* It’s narcissism.

Well, maybe. There are various variations on a basic theme there. There’s certainly something deep and uncontrollable going on with stage fright. I’m certain that it has meaning and that it’s a current reading of something historical — as that thing-of-the-past is re-read and reconstructed by the performer.

One idea I thought was a good way of expressing something that’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s spent time with musicians or actors. According to this view, performers are ‘mirror-hungry personalities’ — driven to look for approval and ‘sustenance for their famished selves’. They try again and again and fail again and again in ‘their desperate efforts to shore up a damaged self-esteem’. Even temporary success on stage only raises the prospect of future failure. So they fright themselves into inaction — which, at least, elides the possibility of failure.

Two last things. One, a witty line from Gabbard. ‘The childhood wish to romp about in the buff and display one’s genitals for all to see is revived in the act of performing.’ Again: think Madonna etc etc.

Two, a clever line from Gabbard, which resituates stage fright into the kingdom of the positive. ‘Perhaps it is fortunate that few performers ever completely master stage fright, for an intangible sense of communion between the performer and his audience might well be lost as a by-product of the mastery.’ Simple really: no possibility of failing also means no possibility of succeeding.

On re-reading

I maybe shouldn’t admit to this but I will anyway.

The other day, I was doing some reading for my course, a chapter from a book. As I read, it seemed familiar — no, not quite familiar, more like somewhere between the understood and the known. Now and again, I’d find myself thinking: I’ve read this before. And I’d think of climbing off the sofa where I was reading and walking up the stairs to my office to check on my reading log*. Then the next sentence would seem novel and fresh and I couldn’t be bothered to make the journey.

I must have been three-quarters the way through it — and this wasn’t a short, easily read chapter — when I eventually realised that I had read it before. I wish I could tell you exactly what made me realise it but I was so embarrassed at myself that I went into a state of what I can now think of as psychic blushing.

Maybe it wasn’t a sudden realisation, maybe it was a gradual evolution. But, whichever it was, there was a state change. One moment I was a person doing something for the first time. The next I was a person doing something they’d already done before. Or rather, one moment I was a person doing something they’d already done before and the next I was a person knowing they’d done something before. It wasn’t comfortable.

I decided: incipient Alzheimer’s. Of course. I thought: you stupid fool, you are too old to go back to university.

I went to my office and checked. Yes, I had read it before, about six months ago. There it was in the file, highlighted and annotated. I noticed one little thing — though I didn’t grasp its significance till later. I’d marked quite different things first time round.

Some time later, when I’d stopped blushing and trying to hide from myself, I thought again about my forgetting. I found myself thinking about those different marks. Had I really understood it that badly on first reading? I went back, looked again at those marks and highlightings. I realised that they were different for a reason. I’d read it for a different unit on the course so I was reading it through a different pair of — metaphorical — glasses.

More than that, I was a different person. The I that had read it first time was not the I who had read it the other day. Things had changed. I’d read more. I’d learned more. I grasped more, more quickly — on this subject at least.

I thought of two Frenchmen. Rimbaud: j’est un autre (I is another). And Pierre Bayard, psychoanalyst and author of How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (see Further contributions to an understanding of On reading and not reading, February 29, 2008). Here, I decided, was a fine example of what Bayard suggests is the utility of not-reading. Or rather, regressing to a state of having-not-read. By forgetting, I had made it possible for me to slip the conceptual bonds of my previous understanding of the text. My suppression of my original reading had facilitated the creation of a new text. I was now not just its reader but its writer, too.

I had freed myself from myself to be myself: the core conceptual aim of psychoanalysis some would say.

So maybe I wasn’t so senile after all. Or maybe wishful thinking is an early indicator of senility.

* Actually, all my reading is logged on a custom database I built — which is why I know exactly how many papers etc I’ve read and how many I’ve finished (see Studying by numbers, April 29, 2008). But I’m much too embarrassed about that to tell you. I am proud, though, of its colour scheme.