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There are many pitfalls facing the attempt to understand George Bernard Shaw through the eyes of his biographers who have not examined his life from a psychoanalytic standpoint. Still, facets of Shaw's character can be gleaned from a study of his plays. I restrict myself here to an examination of Man and Superman.
The play was apparently written between 1901 and 1903. According to both Shaw and his biographers, this represented the turning point in his playwriting. Heretofore, his plays had mainly been comedies. Now, Shaw makes a serious attempt to dramatize the theory of creative evolution expounded by Samuel Butler, Bergson, and Lamarck. Shaw himself was especially drawn towards Lamarck.
Biographers have raised the question why the Don Juan theme enters the play, almost casually. Indeed, in many productions of Man and Superman, this scene is omitted entirely. We surmise that the Don Juan theme represents the exposure of a thinly veiled primary process from which Shaw unconsciously shied away.
In his Preface to Man and Superman, Shaw states that fifteen years before, John Walkely asked him to write a Don Juan play, but he had been frightened to undertake it. After a somewhat satirical denunciation of the legendary Don Juan character, he proceeds to develop what he terms a philosophical Don Juan, an intellectualized and desexualized character. Moreover, in Shaw's Don Juan, there is a reversal of roles and woman becomes the dreaded pursuer, the devouring Boa Constrictor type.
We know that Shaw's plays dealt with current conflicts in his life. At the time this play was written, roughly when Shaw was about 45 to 47, he had entered on a new way of life. Until the age of 29, he claims to have had no sexual experience with a woman, but then began to have affairs with many women, and thought of himself as a kind of intellectual Don Juan