“Psychology of Transformative Acting” by Vladimir Mirodan: Overlooks its psychological prototype, switching personalities in multiple personality

It’s wonderful, for example, how Meryl Streep transforms into Mrs Thatcher and Anthony Hopkins transforms into Hannibal Lecter. They illustrate “transformative acting.”

Vladimir Mirodan, an expert on the theory and practice of acting, invokes various psychologists, but never mentions multiple personality, whose defining feature is the transformation from one personality to another. And persons with multiple personality may develop new alternate personalities to deal with new challenges, which is similar to an actor’s taking on a new part.

Mirodan almost addresses multiple personality when he quotes Michael Chekhov as saying actors acquire “divided consciousness” (1, p. 180). Multiple personality is a form of divided consciousness. Mirodan also says that acting students have been found to be more hypnotizable than control groups (1, p. 176), which happens also to be true of persons with multiple personality. But he never mentions multiple personality, probably because he thinks of it only in terms of mental illness.

Transformative actors may have multiple personality trait (not disorder), which, for fiction writers and actors, may be an asset.

1. Vladimir Mirodan. The Actor and the Character: Explorations in the Psychology of Transformative Acting. London, Routledge, 2019.