The NYPSI is celebrating its centennial in 2011 with a series of outreach programs. One of these involves a book I have edited, due out soon, titled Createdinourownimages.com. The book includes the republication of W.S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea first performed and published almost 140 years ago. Along with the play there are essays which metaphorically resonate with one of the themes of the play: our need to create others in the images we have them. The book also includes chapters by an art historian, an English professor, geneticists, ethicists, and a summary of current stem-cell research, all relating to that theme.
We intend the book to be used as a springboard in schools, community theaters, and psychoanalytic societies' outreach efforts to demonstrate the continued relevance of psychoanalytic thought in the age of biogenetic medicine. We look forward to sponsoring staged readings of the central plot of Gilbert's play with accompanying panel discussions that will include analysts, biogeneticists, and medical ethicists.
In the play, itself, Pygmalion, a sculptor, is married to Cynisca, also his model. He has many copies of her in his studio. One of them, Galatea, comes to life while Cynisca is away for a day. After she is “born,” i.e., comes to life, she experiences and describes her fantasies of merger with her creator as follows:
A sense that I am made by thee and for thee,That I've no will that is not wholly thine;That I've no thought, no hope, no enterpriseThat does not own thee as its sovereign;That I have life, that I may live for thee,That I am thine—that thou and I are one!
Later, upon her individuation into an adult sexual female, she also wants to be Pygmalion's wife. What better way to introduce the concept of infantile sexuality? She also has a striking wish fulfilling dream but, as all children, must relinquish her oedipal fantasies. Meanwhile, Pygmalion's and Cynisca's vows of marital fidelity are challenged as Pygmalion sits “sinfully” with his creation, Galatea, while Cynisca is absent, and is blinded for this “faithlessness.” By the end of the comedy Pygmalion is forgiven, his sight restored, and he is reunited with Cynicsca. Galatea returns to her place on her pedestal and the Victorian mores of Gilbert's (and Freud's) time are sustained. Freud was 14 when Gilbert's play was first produced.
The drama has critical links to Freud's discoveries in the 20th century. It also metaphorically anticipates the 21st century of the genome and provides an opening for discussions of what it might mean to create human beings in our own images of them through genetic engineering. How will our theories and practices be affected by these dramatic changes in our increasingly technological society?
I uncovered Gilbert's forgotten play while researching the Pygmalion myth for a lecture in the Muriel Gardner Humanities and Psychoanalysis Series at Yale University in 2003. I have applied this myth in the analytic treatment of couples and families by noting just how frequently couples attempt to change their partners in the images they have of them. This interpersonal transformation of our analytic understanding of transference is almost universally present in the conflicts presented by couples and families and is latently present in all psychotherapies. I have defined this dynamic as the Pygmalion-Galatea Process.
Fred M. Sander, M.D., is a faculty member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center, He authored Individual and Family Therapy: Toward an Integration, combining psychoanalytic psychology and family therapy.