Bernard Shaw and Psychoanalysis

BERNARD SHAW AND PSYCHOANALYSIS I IT IS NO UNUSUAL SOCIAL OR psychological phenomenon to find the members of each new age, especially its artists, preening themselves on their Newness, though sometimes they are self-critical enough to allow a note of irony to intrude into their claims. Thus Ber~ nard Shaw, in his preface to the Independent Theatre edition of Widowers! Houses in 1893, began by quoting from his quondam collaborator, William Archer's, review of the play in The lVorld~ which alluded mockingly to "the New Drama, the New Criticism, the New Humour, and all the other glories of our renovated world."l Yet, although in the preface to St. Joan (1924) Shaw admitted "that the fashion in which we think changes like the fashion of our clothes, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period," both he and Archer made the attempt, even if in most ways Shaw went far beyond his fellow-critic in his iconoclasm and open-mindedness to new ideas. In fact, in certain ventures, such as his adoption of Dr. Gustav Jaeger's "Sanitary Woollen System," which called for the universal substitution of wool for cotton, linen, or any other fibrous material, and which in his younger years led him to appear spectacularly in public clad in a one-piece combination suit of knitted wool,2 he has been properly dubbed a faddist. In some of his idiosyncrasies, however, such as his vegetarianism, his teetotalism, his anti-inoculationism , and his anti-vivisectionism, his principles went much deeper, and had a more scientific basis, at least from the viewpoint of the Shavian conception of true science. Some of these attitudes led him to his bitter attack on Pavlov, with his experiments on living dogs in the study of conditioned reflexes. Pavlov, Shaw admitted in his 1937 preface to London MUSlic in I888-89~ was probably not a bad man by nature ("He bore a strong external resemblance to myself") and "was wellmeaning, intelligent, and devoted to science," but had 1 The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw (London, 1965), p. 699. This edition will be referred to throughout as C.P. 2 See Hesketh Pearson, G.B.S. A Full Length Portrait (Garden City. 1946), pp. go. 1°3; Frank Harris, Bernard ShaW' (London, 1931), pp. 114-5; Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Bernard Shaw/Collected Letters r8u-r897 (New York, 1965), pp. 138, 569. 356 1969 SHAW AND PSYCHOANALYSIS 357 been "corrupted, stultified, and sterilized" by his academic environment .3 This handicap, however, Shaw implied, was not operative in the case of his own mother's self-taught music teacher, George John Vandaleur Lee, whose unorthodox natural breathing "Method" taught both her and Shaw himself to develop the full potentialities of their voices.4 Lee's "mesmeric vitality" and antagonism toward doctors and medicine, together with his belief in the curative capabilities of nature, deeply influenced Shaw as a boy, though he ruefully had to admit that Lee later turned into a pathetic charlatan when he followed Mrs. Shaw to London and gave cheap and quick vocal lessons to rich and fashionable ladies.5 In the same preface Shaw accorded his highest tribute and admiration to another unorthodox practitioner, whose methods never caught on with the general public, though he had among his satisfied clients and admirers reputable citizens like Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, Sir Stafford Cripps, Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang, Sir Adrian Boult, James Harvey Robinson, Robert Donat, and Shaw himself. Matthias Alexander, the inventor of the "Alexander System," was originally a "musician-reciter," who "found himself disabled by the complaint known as clergyman's sore throat." In "the true scientific spirit," setting himself to learn what he was doing wrong, "In the end he found this out, and a great deal more as well. He established not only the beginnings of a far reaching science of the apparently involuntary movements we call reflexes, but a technique of correction and selfcontrol which forms a substantial addition to our very slender resources in personal education." If Pavlov, Shaw concludes, had only been taught to sing by Mrs. Shaw, using Lee's basic...