The Dream Structure of Pinter's Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach by Lucinda Paquet Gabbard (review)

Book Reviews .THE DREAM STRUCTURE OF PINTER'S PLAYS: A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH. by Lucinda Paquet Gabbard. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1976.296 pp. $15. This may sound like a supercilious question with which to open a review. but perhaps if it is posed at the outset we will at least know where we stand before deciding how to proceed. The question is, if a play can be psychoanalyzed , why can't its tonsils also be removed? Hardly a new concern this. about how lightly we leash our metaphors. and while we need not always address ourselves to the proposition that art presumes an artist (formalists could hardly care less). it is not so easy to ignore the fact that a dream presumes a real dreamer and not just a fictive or hypothetical one. Dreams may have a struct':lre. as Professor Gabbard's title assumes, but they don't "jes grow" like Topsy. True enough, to treat art as dream or as conglomerate of fantasies does have certain advantages, so long as one resists or at least balances the regressive and reductive pull indigenous to the dream model. For art has too onen been shown to have hidden areas of content. deep structures, or other obscurities to be any longer ignored by conventional criticism: and to her credit, Gabbard does surface from time to time to consider realistic levels along with the buried ones. The issue is ultimately one of adequate and consistent interpretation, The options available to a psychoanalytically informed critic are so far relatively few. He can pursue unconscious motive through either a biographicalor creative process approach, in which case the dreamer is identified with the artist. He can pursue the line currently espoused by Norman Holland of ignoring the sources of art in order to attend to response. in which case the subjective state of the artist is replaced by the subjective state of the beholder upon whose "identity theme" the work of art performs variations. Or the analytically-minded critic can develop some intriguing theory. as in the work of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence," in which case a certain fiction of another order is forced on the reader, namely that it is possible to psychoanalyze the "poet as poet" while ignoring the poet as man. Finally, a structural 89 90 BOOK REVIEWS approach based on psychoanalytic applications as yet unspecified may be developed. But while Gabbard operates in the general area of unconscious motive and very nearly succeeds in her variations, her approach is none of these quite. She assigns unconscious (dream dynamics) and pre-conscious (dream censor) processes to dramatic characters. This is in some respects a continuation of the course charted in the 1910 paper on Hamlet by Ernest Jones and is most susceptible to misguided ridicule by outsiders: how many children did Lady Macbeth have? when was Hamlet weaned? was Lear happily wed?-and so forth. Gabbard does not seek real histories for fictional beings- she is not so naive as that- but she does seek for real analogies between unconscious mental processes found in dreams and in dramatic actions. Thus the supercilious question posed above. Such an approach must expect to encounter difficulties. For one thing. it assumes a very close tie-in between the presumed unconscious item and the clinical term or explanation. Thus, in Pinter's The Room. designated as it sort of skeleton key for the other works, we are told that the house stands for Rose's psyche and at times for her womb. The basement is the "subconscious" (a Jungian slip here. since neither Freud nor psychoanalysts adopted this spatially loaded word), and the upper levels, naturally then. her conscious mind. The stage set is thus understood by the concretizing mechanism of the dream. On the one hand, the characters are taken to be the emanations from Rose's split-up psyche, rendering her the dreamer; but on the other hand, they and the playas a whole man.ifest wide-ranging oral, anal, phallic, and oedipal stages of development. For example, Bert suffers from separation anxiety and a wish to return to the womb (conveniently available as Rose's psychic concretization); on an...