Description
Book SynopsisFace stage fright and self-doubt with new courage!The experience of awe has rarely been considered by psychologists, but this extraordinary book makes up for that neglect. Frightful Stages explores all the shades of that strange emotion from reverence to terror. At its heart, awe is the condition of human suffering in situations that require you to act in all the senses of that deceptively simple word, whether on stage or off, whether in the presence of many or alone.Frightful Stages provides a multifaceted view of the semiotics of awe. It deals with its manifestations in film, on stage, in poetry, in ordinary lives as well as in the more extraordinary ones, including Bessie Smith, Carl Van Vechten, Barbra Streisand, Federico Fellini, Thomas Merton, and John Ashbery. This unprecedented book delineates the experience of awe in moments of stage fright, performance anxiety, and everyday interpersonal relations. Frightful Stages takes place on and off stage, b
Table of ContentsContents
- Awe: Dionysian and Appollonian (A Preface)
- Introduction-A Hermit in Times Square: Setting the Stage
- One Sings, the Other Doesn't: Stage Fright and the Psychoanalytic Theater
- The Awesome and the Awestruck: Bessie Smith and Carl Van Vetchen
- Burnt Offerings to Prometheus: The Consultation Meetings Between Thomas Merton and Gregory Zilboorg
- The Nights and Knights of Cabiria: Modern Woman in Search of Her Soul
- From the Couch to The Concert: Streisand as Doctor and Patient
- Awe and Terror in the Living of the Resolution of the Polarity of Insight and Expression
- Standing in Awe: The Cosmic Dimensions of Effective Psychotherapy
- You Will Have These Awe-Full Moments When You Have Your Own Experiential Session
- What It Was Like to Go Through Three Awe-Full Moments in My Own Experiential Session
- The Role of Awe in Experiential Personal Construct Psychology
- Reflections on Mystery and Awe
- On Anguish and Other Frightful Moments in the Process of Self-Discovery
- I'm Not Crazy, They Are Coming Around with Guns!
- Finding the True Self Onstage: Dialogue with a Comedienne
- The Little Old Lady
- Poetic Schizophrenia: Regarding the Performative Process of Composition
- In Awe of the Superindividual: A Conversation with E. Mark Stern and Rob Marchesani
- Index
- Reference Notes Included
