ABSTRACT
Stanislavsky would not equate two words. While he uses Ribot’s psychology as a jumping off point, he also incorporates transcendental ideas of emotion in his System. When Stanislavsky asserts that acting should embody “the life of the human spirit of the role,” he does indeed mean the psyche as “soul.” In the 1935 manuscript that Stanislavsky sent to Hapgood for publication in the West, he provides an image that was deleted from the 1938 Soviet version by the censors, no doubt because of its clear spiritual tonality. As Nazvanov works through his étude about the burned money, he stands on the shore of an “ocean of the subconscious” as the tide rolls in. While Tolstoy and Diderot offered Stanislavsky ways to describe the creative state, Ribot and Ramacharaka suggested concrete and the practical approaches for the process of creative work.
