An Adolescent in Search of Her Identity

If It Is True, as Shakespeare said, that ‘all the world's a stage’ then it makes sense to consider the need for actors to have an audience. The trouble about all the world being a stage is that, unless there is an audience to respond, appreciate and make sense of whatever play is being acted out through whatever means, there can be no significant change in the level of self awareness in either actors or audience, the activity would simply be happening in a void. An illustration of this problem is shown in the story of Narcissus, who first falls in love with Echo. Although she reciprocates this she is only able emptily to echo back, she cannot speak her love. Narcissus, in despair, turns away to contemplate his own image in a pool of water. There he falls in love with himself and eventually languishes and dies, the water only having flatly reflected back his own image. In terms of analytical psychology (FORDHAM 1) this story, to my mind, is an example of the self not being able to de-integrate.

In Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author, it may be remembered that the play opens with a rather desultory rehearsal going on, again very flat. Suddenly six people burst onto the stage, push the actors aside, thus making them into the audience. The six characters then proceed to act out their own intense family drama in which, up to that point, they had been stuck. Through acting it out in front of an audience/author the characters become aware of themselves in a new way and start to become individuals. One final example of the imperative need for an audience is vividly described in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the unfortunate Wedding Guest is almost literally pinned to the wall while the Ancient Mariner pours into his unwilling ears the awful tale, which must be told. ‘The Wedding Guest sat on a stone:/He cannot choose but hear’. It seems the Ancient Mariner could not live with himself until someone would listen. The Wedding Guest, as we