Or: Did Stanislavsky Know Any Psychology?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2022
In his essay on “Emotional Memory” in TDR Summer 1962, and now, I believe, published as a pamphlet by Samuel French, Inc., Mr. Robert Lewis traces the phrase “emotional memory” back as far as 1925 and adds: “During the Group Theatre days, in the Thirties, we called it ‘Affective Memory’ (a term borrowed from an earlier French psychologist). But, by whatever name, it is accomplished, roughly as follows.”
The name is actually given in David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life in these words:
Stanislavsky was struck by the fact that in his most successful part of Dr. Stockmann he had unconsciously endowed it with a number of external traits which he had observed in life and kept buried in his memory till the moment came for them to be combined in the delineation of a character with whom he felt a strong affinity.
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