What's the proper way to call a method that belongs to an object in Python when the name of the method is a variable?

You need to pass in the object instance as the first parameter to the method. For example: class myclass: def newmethod(self): ... obj = myclass() obj.__class__.__dict__['newmethod'](obj) When you access the __class__ attribute of an instance, it returns an object that refers to the class in general and knows nothing about the particular instance that you requested it from. Hence, if you then retrieve an object describing an instance method (one that has 'self' as its first parameter), you need to tell it which object instance to operate on.