https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell3.htm
https://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/theatrics/brecht/
The distancing effect, more commonly known (earlier) by John Willett's 1964 translation as the alienation effect or (more recently) as the estrangement effect (German: Verfremdungseffekt), is a performing arts concept coined by German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).
Brecht first used the term in an essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious".[1]
´a challenge to the
unquestioned valuing of empathy (based on a reading of therapy though a Brechtian lens).
´Andrew Samuels D.H.L.
(2017) The “Activist Client”: Social Responsibility, the Political Self, and
Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, 27:6, 678-693.
