30 norm) and the overt politically-charged “othering” language that surrounded the practitioners themselves, the anti-Russian, pro-American bias through which his work was filtered in the USA can clearly be seen. This bias manifests itself in how Hapgood’s translation engages with Stanislavski’s choices and paradigms of the bodymind, which signals to the American reader how they should approach the text and their practice of Stanislavski’s System. For example, while Stanislavski’s Kostya says nothing that would indicate there could be something unknown within yourself when reflecting on his creative urges, Hapgood inserts into Stanislavski’s text the idea of the Freudian unconscious that was immensely popular in American psychology at the time; Hapgood’s Kostya describes, as early as in the first chap- ter, that upon reading a script, “my hands, arms,...facial muscles, and something inside me all began to move” (Stanislavski 1989:2), likely alluding to (or at the very least, easily read as an allusion to) the second, unconscious self that dictates one’s urges and instincts within Freud’s theory of mind. To an American actor and critic interpreting Stanislavski’s work, it might be com- pelling to “discover” a psychological primacy to the System that favours individu- alism and seems to exist in parallel to modern psychoanalytic technique; for ex- ample, William Worthen (1983) asserts, somehow, that the Stanislavskian actor is “principally committed to self-discovery” (1983:33), while Sullivan identifies “dis- cipline, concentration, self-hypnosis, and emasculation of the self” (1964:107) as key tenets of Stanislavski’s System. Hapgood’s subtle changes in meaning towards American popular psychology bias the actor towards continually analysing and practicing Stanislavski’s System through this lens.
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