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Psychoanalysis has traditionally sought to confirm its theory in larger and more extensive units of validation than the clinic can provide. Thus psychoanalysis has studied mythology, history, politics, art, among other things. The value of these endeavors to psychoanalysis needs no mention. In confirming its theories through cultural data, psychoanalysis also informs the subject disciplines. Freud's studies of art, for example, have been, in Kenneth Burke's phase, “suggestive almost to the point of bewilderment.” Burke meant this, of course, honorifically.
Bewilderment of a very different sort, however, is produced by a reading of Weissman's book. For Creativity in the Theatre—whose title describes accurately its unparalleled ambition—is a melange of many things; but by no adoption of benevolent standards is it that rigorously demanding thing, a psychoanalytic study. This is not to say that the book is either entirely uninteresting or wholly without value, only that its principal reward lies in clearing up the bewilderment as to just what it is.
It is useful to look at the book by way of the kinds of errors to be found in it, for example, the speculative lapse. The book begins with a section called “The Psychological Equipment and Development of the Artist in Modern Theatre,” in which is offered suggestive formulations of the vocational psychogenesis of actor, director and dramatist. The model for the actor's adaptation is to be found in the experience of the infant at the mother's breast. Weissman has it that the mother's “billing and cooing” is the infant's first exposure to role playing. The mother is playing the mother role. However, it is not enough to go on, as the author does, to say that the mother is thus the infant's playright and director, creating the infant's role and teaching it to him. For surely non-actors come in for their share of billing and cooing, but not every infant assumes his mother's identity and goes on to an acting career. The