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In response to Dr. Eckardt's very thoughtful and welcomed commentary, I would like to offer the following quotation from Donald Spoto's biography of Tennessee Williams:
“Whenever he said he was ill and confused and frightened, friends and colleagues too often contradicted him: he looked fine, they said; he was working hard; all was well. But he was more honest. As an artist of the first rank, Tennessee Williams felt the tragedy of the modern world—of its alienation, of its loneliness, of its loss of a sense of the transcendent. He heard its echoes of pain and despair earlier and louder, within himself, and in his great plays he told us what was wrong. But at the same time, he lived—by his own ready admission—on an alarmingly grim course of self-destruction” (Spoto, p. 304).
What I had hoped to convey in my article was not an illustration of Tennessee Willams's pathology, but the creative genius he brought to coping with the pathology with which his significant childhood traumas had left him burdened. The psychobiographies of artists and their creative works offer us unique data in the public domain with which to work in our efforts to both understand and to illustrate for the community the creative capacity for adaptation we all possess in varying degrees, as well as the explanatory potential of the psychoanalytic approach.