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FIRST STEPS
Art and psychoanalysis.
This program First Steps is going to show how these two elements combine on the stage.
There's one detail.
Freud's famous little watch.
His little glasses.
Now I'm Freud.
When did you first become interested in the theatre?
When I was eighteen, when I started university. It was during the dictatorship.
I was part of a group called TEU - Experimental University Theatre -
where we used to put on stage plays to denounce the dictatorship and everything
that was happening in Brazil at that time, at the beginning of the seventies.
So I did a bit of theatre at that time, while I was at university.
Then I went on to study medicine and psychiatry.
I had my training in psychoanalysis and completely abandoned the theatre.
But ten years ago I went back to it.
But this time it's a very specific type of theatre - theatre and psychoanalysis -
which as a psychoanalyst is my area of interest.
So now I research psychoanalysis and theatre here at UVA
for our Masters' and PhD' courses in psychoanalysis, health and society,
where I concentrate specifically on the interconnection between theatre and psychoanalysis.
How do you conciliate being a university professor with psychoanalysis? And art with psychoanalysis?
Good point.
I have three activities.
One is being a psychoanalyst, another is being a teacher, and the third is connected to the theatre.
But for me they are interconnected.
At the university the research that I do is of theatre and psychoanalysis.
For me the theatre has a didactic role to transmit psychoanalysis.
The theatre shows on the stage everything that the patients say about their lives.
And when they talk about their lives.
They always see their dreams, memories and fantasies.
They see them as scenes.
You remember a scene from your childhood;
if you have a dream there are certain scenes that look like films,
or you have a fantasy that is like a scene...
So what is my idea?
It is to put on the stage, with the Company that I founded called Unconscious on the Stage,
precisely those stories that we hear on the couch.
I am also interested in bringing the history of psychoanalysis to the stage -
how Freud discovered the impasses, the classic cases of psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
You are going to travel to Paris with the play. How did this invitation come about?
The invitation came from French colleagues.
Because the play narrates the meeting between Freud and Charcot
in the Salpêtrière hospital at the end of the nineteenth century.
Freud had gone to Paris to work as a trainee
and he was so impressed with the study of hysteria
and the hysterical acting out of the symptoms that he gave up being a neurologist
and returned to Vienna to create psychoanalysis.
And my play is about this.
And then to our surprise, and delight, we were invited to represent this historical meeting
during the celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of this great hospital,
the Salpêtrière, where all this took place.
I have already put the play on in Brazil, in Rio,
and now we are doing a translation into French,
to present this historical moment when Freud met the hysterics.
Was acting Freud very difficult?
It's a big challenge!
My own challenge is that I am the narrator of the play;
I narrate what is happening and then the narrator says:
"Now Freud says this"
and then I play Freud saying that; and so it goes on.
After a while I give up being the narrator.
What I try to do is to say what Freud would have said at the time.
So it's not too hard as I don't have to do a caricature of Freud,
imitate how he was,
but I try to be as true to what he really would have said as possible.
On the one hand it is fiction,
but I also researched the things he actually said at the time,
or later, and I quote him exactly.
How did you get the idea for the play?
From the connection between the theatre and hysteria;
Hysteria is theatrical and the theatre is hysterical.
So I used this connection to write a play about this moment in which,
I would say, psychoanalysis was discovered, was created.
That's why the play is called La Leçon de Charcot - Théatre Hystérique.
And so I would like to invite you all to come to Paris,
to pay tribute to Freud and Charcot at the Salpêtrière at the beginning of October.