The authors review certain highlights in the life of Bernard Shaw. They relate childhood events, particularly those surrounding his mother, with his

later relation to the many women in his life. Shaw had an extremely unhappy childhood, full of sordidness and disillusionment, which he associated with the cold, harsh, and ungiving attitude of his mother. The hostility to women, observable in his plays and adult life, is, in literary form, basically hostility to his mother. In real life, it is the anger of the anally fixated child.

Since his real affairs with women were without sexual contact, it is probable that Shaw was impotent, a latent homosexual, and that his teasing and hurting women was the expression of a preoedipal, oral-sadistic, and anal fixation. These observations are correlated with the creative work of men that show intensely cathected, unconscious feminine reproductive fantasies. The productive activity of the ego is dependent upon the process of neutralization of instinctual energies.