The Law of Determined Movement is eighth of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity. “This law could be listed first or last,” Strasberg writes, although he has listed it next-to-last. Possibly at one point in his writing it was last, and the Law of Love was added later as a kind of coda.
In any case, the Law of Determined Movement is so important, Strasberg writes, that “without it no amount of talent, imagination, organic thinking, intentional dreaming, spontaneous inspiration, truth, or transformative capacity will suffice,” ticking through his preceding seven laws. The acting out of thoughts and feelings is movement; the following through on ideas and impulses is movement.
One of the key meanings of the word act, dating to the 14th century, is “to set in motion.” Clearly movement is at the heart of what it means to act. Similarly emotion, which in Strasberg’s approach is of course not to be generated artificially, nonetheless has at its core the meaning “moving out” or expression.
Although he does not mention it specifically in the section devoted to the law of movement, the importance Strasberg places on it is likely also related once again to the writings of Wilhelm Reich. In Ether, God & Devil, Reich writes “… all emotions and reactions in life spring from and correspond to organ sensations and expressive movements….”
In Reichian terms, a “living” organism will respond to “impressions it derives from the world around it; an “armored” organism responds to “its own state of motility and expression.” Reich uses the word “armored” to refer to the range of defenses that an individual may build up. While arising initially as the individual’s attempt to protect itself from painful experience, its eventual effect is to limit and cut off experience that could otherwise lead to growth. Reich compares the perception of unarmored and armored organism to reflections of the world in two different mirrors, one clear and one scratched. Both will reflect the world, but the image in the scratched mirror, corresponding to the armored organism, will be distorted.
At the end of the earlier discussion of the Law of Spontaneous Inspiration Strasberg mentions several physical techniques, including Alexander, Feldenkrais, yoga, tai chi, and others which, as he puts is “integrate rather than split our perception of who we are.” Movement is key here. “Without movement, life is unthinkable,” Moshe Feldenkrais, creator of the eponymous mind-body technique, famously wrote. The Law of Spontaneous Inspiration emphasizes that the actor must strive for a state in which they are focused, and “in the flow,” and there is no self-consciousness. This seems to me to share features with Reich’s “unarmored” state, in which the individual is able to perceive the world around them, and not just their own “state of motility and expression.” Part of an integrated self-perception, I would suggest, is that it enables “determined movement” in response to our perceptions of the world, relatively unencumbered by our own defenses and anxieties.
In conclusion of the section on the Law of Determined Movement Strasberg observes that enjoyment can be found in “completely exploring and expressing whatever we are obsessed or possessed to do..”The suffering and pain we experience is difficult,” he writes, but “in the long run, much more pleasurable than the pain and suffering that results from not trying to do what we want to do.”