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The Psychology of Voice and the Founding of the Roy Hart Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

Following the departure of the Roy Hart Theatre for France in 1974, and the death of Hart in a car accident shortly afterwards, his pioneering work in exploring the theatrical potential of the human voice has tended to be neglected in the English-speaking world. In the following article, Paul Newham demonstrates that, despite Hart's undoubted importance in the application of his methods of vocal self-discovery to performance, those methods were firmly rooted not only in aspects of Freud's theory of abreaction and Jung's belief in the multi-aspected or ‘polyvalent personality’, but more specifically in the practical therapeutic work on the human voice conducted by Alfred Wolfsohn, first in Germany before the war, then in Britain from Wolfsohn's exile in 1938 until his death in 1962. The author, Paul Newham, is founder and director of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy in London, and has worked therapeutically with a wide range of clients, including performing artists. His book The Singing Cure: an Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy, will be published by Random House in March.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes and References

1. Wolfsohn, Alfred, ‘Orpheus, or the Way to a Mask’, trans. Gunther, Marita, unpublished manuscript written in Berlin, 19361938Google Scholar, held at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.

2. Freud, Sigmund, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Strachey, James in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 19531974), Vol. II, p. 4Google Scholar.

3. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. II, p. 4.

4. Ibid., p. 3.

5. Ibid. p. 7.

6. Ibid. p. 6.

7. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. III, p. 37–8.

8. Ibid. p. 39.

9. Ibid. p. 35.

10. Ibid. p. 36.

11. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. II, p. 8.

12. Ibid. p. 8 and p. 201–2.

13. Jung, Carl Gustav, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series, XX, ed. by Read, H., Fordham, M., Adler, G., and McGuire, W. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge, 1953–), Vol. V, p. 1213Google Scholar.

14. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 28–9.

15. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 227.

16. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. VII, p. 174.

17. Gunther, Marita, ‘The Human Voice: on Alfred Wolfsohn’, Spring: a Journal of Archetype and Culture, No. 50 (1990), p. 71Google Scholar.

18. Newham, Paul, ‘The Voice and the Shadow’, Performance, Spring 1990, p. 3647Google Scholar.

19. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. IX, Part I, p. 284.

20. Marita Gunther, op. cit., p. 72.

21. Luchsinger, R. and Dubois, C. L., ‘Phonetische und stroboskopische Untersuchungen an einem Stimmphanomen’, Folia Phoniatrica, VIII, No. 4 (1956), p. 201–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Wolfsohn, Alfred, cited in Weiser, Eric, ‘Stimme Ohne Fessel’, Die Wellwoche, 30 09 1955Google Scholar.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Marita Gunther, op. cit., p. 73.