George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion: A Creative Response To Loss After Early Childhood Trauma

Last year I had the opportunity to present a psychoanalytic discussion of Shaw's Pygmalion at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC. After reading the play, I immediately went looking for a biography to see if my preferred theoretical orientation, that of the centrality of early childhood experience on development and adult behavior, would hold me in good stead. I was both rewarded and overwhelmed by Michael Holroyd's magnificent three-volume psychobiography1 of the man who had the most profound effect on English language and theater in the twentieth century. In reading Shaw's early history, I was struck, as have been many others, by the clear autobiographical elements in Pygmalion. Reading of his later years, it became more intriguing to learn that Shaw lived the pattern of relationships portrayed in Pygmalion many times. But what was absolutely fascinating to me was that Shaw conceived of and later wrote this play at times of major crises and changes in his relationships with women. These coincided with the threat of and eventual finality of his mother's death. I will suggest that Pygmalion was Shaw's creative solution to surviving a loss for which he could not grieve.

Shaw chose the Pygmalion myth as the foundation for his work. In this prototypic tale of conflict resolution through the transformation of fantasy into reality, the sculptor Pygmalion finds so much to abhor in women, that he resolves never to marry. He gives his heart instead to an ivory statue of exquisite beauty and lifelike detail that he creates, a fantasy mate he treats as if real. He gives it gifts, dresses it in becoming clothes, and reclines it on a couch with a comfortable pillow. He caresses it and at times finds it hard to believe it is not alive. At a