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SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006) 27-35


The Talking Cure
Jean Reynolds

The "talking cure," Freud's nickname for psychoanalysis, seems an apt label for Higgins's transformation of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's Pygmalion: Eliza is "cured" of her impoverished existence by talking to Higgins in his Wimpole Street laboratory. These sessions, in which Eliza does most of the talking while Higgins analyzes what she says, are not unlike Freud's consultations with his patients in Vienna. Even the time period is the same: Both Shaw and Freud were born in 1856. Despite the vast differences between them, these two great thinkers had a common interest in understanding and improving the human condition.

Still, it seems that the comparison cannot be pushed very far, for Higgins has little of the depth and insight that led Freud to develop his theory of psychoanalysis, as Pickering remonstrates in Act III: "Come Higgins: you must learn to know yourself." 1 Shaw's brief preface, with its focus on phonetics, clearly shows that Pygmalion is about a phonetician's, not a psychiatrist's, talking cure. More important, Shaw has often been labeled "unpsychological" by critics. As Richard F. Dietrich has noted, many critics harbor "doubts about whether Shaw's life and work have any psychological depth, or even any psychological dimension." 2 Shaw's contemporary Max Beerbohm, for example, complained that Shaw's "serious characters are just so many skeletons, which do but dance and grin and rattle their bones." 3 Raymond Williams declared that "the emotional inadequacy of his plays is increasingly obvious," and Michael Holroyd has described Shaw as "emotionally lame." 4 The basic tenets of Freudian theory might also seem to have little application to Eliza's problems in Pygmalion. According to classical psychoanalytic theory, mental illnesses originate early in life and, therefore, can be cured only by talking about childhood memories. In addition, traditional Freudians regard sexual problems as the source of many emotional problems. Clearly neither of these principles would apply to Eliza's talking cure: Higgins has little interest in Eliza's childhood, and he never talks frankly about her sexuality. [End Page 27]

But these assumptions about Shaw and Freud have lately been called into question. Critics have begun to reexamine the notion that Shaw was uninterested in psychology. Dietrich, for example, has formulated a Shavian psychological system based on the three classifications in Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism: realist, idealist, and philistine. 5 Shaw himself made an intriguing comparison between himself and Freud in a 1948 letter:

Before Freud was ever heard of I dismissed all the standard books on Psychology as worthless, because, I declared, genuinely scientific work on the subject would be so indecent that nobody could possibly print it or even write it.

I did not then believe that a human being so utterly void of any sort of delicacy as Freud could exist. But apparently I created him; for I have lived to see him come not only into existence but into vogue. 6

Freudian theory is also being reexamined. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, James Hillman, John Forrester, Paul Kugler, and others have de-emphasized the traditional psychological emphasis on childhood and sex to focus instead on Freud's preoccupation with language. For example, Jacques Lacan's famous seminars constitute a poststructuralist reading of Freud. Analyst James Hillman, in his book Healing Fiction, defines therapy as the shaping of a patient's tale into a "therapeutic genre"—clearly a linguistic process: "The patient is in search of a new story, or of reconnecting with her old one." 7 According to these psychologists, the therapeutic process must necessarily involve curing a patient's language. In this essay I explore the Freudian concepts of transference, unconscious, and analysis in the context of Eliza Doolittle's linguistic transformation, and, because Freudian theory also posits the transformation of the therapist through a transference process, I suggest that Higgins undergoes his own talking cure in the course of the play.

We can begin with Adam Phillips, a psychotherapist who...

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