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Anyone who has ever been in or around a theatrical production knows that the journey from rehearsals to scheduled performance is an intense emotional experience. All concerned invest time, energy and ideas in the final product. There are personal agendas, as well as individual technical and artistic effects, which each person involved wants to achieve. In addition, there is a group agenda: the artistic, pedagogic, and/or commercial success of the play as whole. The process of theatrical production is, in Bion's terms, a work group activity with a clear task—to bring a play to life. Bion (1961) wrote:
... any group of individuals met together for work shows work group activity, that is, mental functioning designed to further the task at hand. Investigation shows that these aims are sometimes hindered, occasionally furthered, by emotional drives of obscure origin (p. 188).
The purpose of this communication is to describe how theatrical aims are hindered and furthered by emotional interchanges which I hope to make less obscure. My aim is to formulate a psychoanalytic theory of the theatrical process as it unfolds within a production of a given play. In applying psychoanalytic concepts to the process of theater, I am reversing the usual direction of the exchange between these two disciplines. Psychoanalysts since Freud have borrowed from the theater when a metaphor seemed particularly apt. Freud's use of Oedipus to describe a triangular family romance is prototypical. Today it is commonplace for psychoanalysts to speak of their