Theater through the Psychoanalysts' Lens

There are many reasons to anticipate that psychoanalysts will have a professional affinity for theater: the multi-layered complexity of actor, character, and author, the real space that extends like a dreamscape into an infinite offstage regress, the real time that is also imagined and pliable, and the inevitable lens of audience subjectivity. All this before considering the possibility that, inside the coiled spring of analytic restraint, the listening, the stillness, lies the occasional yearning to share the stage.

Only moments after the final lines and curtain calls of Caryl Churchill's play, A Number, two psychoanalysts occupied the space vacated by the performers and a cadre of analysts attending the winter 2005 meeting gathered in the front rows. In the two-actor play, a man having lost his wife to suicide, neglects and then abandons his young son. Seeking a second chance, a do-over, and a return to better times, he offers his son's cells to a scientist who clones a replacement. The play begins at the moment that the abandoned son, now 40, returns to confront the clone and to announce his discovery that, unbeknownst to the father, other copies were made.

Reviews of A Number focused on the ethics and realities of cloning, but a room of analysts came to question whether the play was not ultimately more concerned with pathological mourning, attempts at self-perfection through children, and the possibility that, even when technology appears to redefine such limits as mortality and generation and to offer new powers to reset the clock, the timeless unconscious still finds a route to repetition, in this case, repetitions of murder and loss. The joke is that, when we finally meet the pure clone, a clone raised apart from the father and family ghosts, he is not a monster at all. In fact, he is the only well adjusted and loving soul we encounter (Although at least one analyst found him self-less.)

Pre- and post-performance discussions and liaisons between institute and theaters have been increasing around the country. At times, these collaborations, combined with individual initiatives, have created opportunities for analysts to become involved in productions as performers, consulting directors, and producers.

In recent years, the chairs of a revived discussion group at the national meetings, “Psychoanalysis and Theater,” have coordinated attending a play with analyst discussions and encounters with members of the production. Invited dramaturges and performers and videotaped readings have enhanced prepared talks and various formats of post-production question and answer sessions. While the logistics required to anticipate and secure tickets to plays having runs coincident with the meetings can be tricky, plans are to continue efforts to coordinate attendance and discussion in a manner that invites analysts to participate in the exhilaration of the stage.