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The author examines the play Pygmalion from a psycho-analytic angle, demonstrating that its plot reflects the author's early life and family history. The contents of the early experiences shaped the author's conflicted state during the period when he conceived of the play and also during its subsequent production. Use is made of Greenacre's concepts, the artist's world of 'collective alteratives' and the artist's resolution of personal conflict in a 'love affair with the world'.
Shaw's career was marked by acting out in vivid personal relationships of early oedipal conflicts, alternating and overlapping with attempted resolution in creative works. Shaw's infatuation with Mrs Patrick Campbell—an 'object of the world' as famous actresses are likely to be—was quickly neutralized into a created image for an artistic future production when he fantasied her as an East End donna in a play. This remained in abeyance for fifteen years till the period of his mother's final illness. This event evoked the childhood images of his mother and mobilized him to create Eliza, with the transitory object of Mrs Campbell—a conscious, desexualized world object—as the inspiration. After the completion of the play and after the death of his mother, the sexualized altercation between Shaw and Campbell occurred.
The creations of the artist are often the rearranged responses to the primal object (mother's breast), expressed in aesthetic forms (Greenacre 1957). The artist's created object, steeped as it is in the early maternal object, is often embellished with his own omniscience and omnipotence, as Galatea was by Pygmalion, Eliza by Higgins, and Mrs Campbell by Shaw, and finally as Shaw's mother in his childhood was by him. Higgins is saturated by omnipotence which he projects into Eliza and then returns to himself, in the same way as small children in normal development attribute such omnipotence to their parents and then reassign it to themselves as they dethrone the parents. In Sha