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5 Maternal Anxieties and Political Desires in Adrienne Kennedy’s Dramatic Circle In the section titled “Marriage and Motherhood” in Adrienne Kennedy ’s postmodern autobiography People Who Led to My Plays, she writes that “by now many of our friends were ‘seeing analysts.’ We enjoyed talking about our depressions, the movie Breathless, Eve Delphy, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis. The magazines were filled with photographs of the new Kennedy babies and the perfect life they all led. And one of America’s most famous writers married Marilyn Monroe. We talked about that a lot. We talked about James Baldwin and Norman Mailer” (People 93). One does not have to look to the journal entry to affirm Kennedy’s obsession with the psyche; her Obie-winning drama Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) provides ample evidence for such an argument. But the relevance of this entry to this project’s larger concern with African Americanist revisions of psychoanalytic thought lies in the connections it draws among psychoanalysis, popular culture, and the political sphere. Regardless of its apparent lack of associative links, the note confirms that though Freudian psychoanalysis in U.S. popular culture was on the decline during the 1950s and 1960s, the broader realm of psychology was becoming increasingly accessible to a more economically and racially diverse population—so much so that, as Kennedy’s diary account attests, discussions concerning the psyche occupied an easy conversational space alongside the latest films, celebrity gossip, and jazz. The rise of psychoanalysis and the decline of psychiatry at this moment signals a shift away from Freudian logic, which had long been considered apolitical in its deft attention to familial structures rather than social systems, and toward a more radical conceptualization of psychology that sought to reconcile the relationship between individual subjectivity and the social world. Indeed, in the late 1950s and 1960s, the lexicon and paradigms of psychological thought served, as Eli Zaretsky explains, “as an inspiration to the student movements of the sixties [and] its ideas reached the highest point of influence in their history,” yet at the same time “the psychoanalytic profession collapsed, at least in its classical or Freudian form” (308). At this time, psychoanalysis also served as a focal point of critique, particularly for feminists, who understood the Freudian view to be that psychic structures were grounded in anatomical differences, thereby reducing women to emotional and static subjects. Further, African American writers were skeptical of psychoanalysis’s relevance to the social and political lives of marginalized people. Amiri Baraka’s passing reference in The Slave to the “psychological novel” as “the worst thing that ever happened to the West” (70) and Eldridge Cleaver’s disappointing experimentation with psychoanalysis read as insightful expressions of its failure to resonate among a larger African American populace during the era of Black Power.1 Given the less-than-favorable reception of psychoanalysis among feminist and African American communities in the 1960s, the centrality of psychoanalytic thought in the work of Adrienne Kennedy marks a singular moment in the intersection of feminism, black power politics, and psychoanalysis. Kennedy’s dramas, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), The Owl Answers (1965), and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) have each explored the variant ways in which the layered subjugation of black womanhood offers ample material for explorations of the psychical implications of racism and sexism. Though Kennedy’s dramas from the Black Arts era were, arguably, her most self-conscious explorations of the psyche, her most explicit foray into the culture of psychoanalysis would emerge almost forty years later in her play Dramatic Circle (1992), in which the specters of Sigmund Freud and Frantz Fanon materialize in the life of the drama’s protagonist, Suzanne Alexander. Kennedy’s engagement with these two figures in Dramatic Circle certainly confirms her interest and even investment in discourses of psychoanalysis, but more importantly it highlights the notion that, for Kennedy, the past is always present. In attempting to answer the obvious question as to why, in one of her most contemporary pieces, Kennedy brings Freud and Fanon into play (no pun intended), I would suggest that these figures speak to the ways in which the dual “problems” of race and gender within psychoanalytic and political discourses remain unresolved. By drawing upon Freud and Fanon as symbols of the psychoanalytic and black power movements, respectively, Kennedy’s drama actually allows for a rethinking of both discourses, which historically have been largely inattentive to women of color...

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