Taking It To Art

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


You can always tell how useful something is by the number of applications it can be used for. This general rule applies equally to a workman’s tool, or a piece of clever software or even a theory of the mind. This notion struck me when I was asked recently to write a psychoanalytic review of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days*. The play ran at the Abbey Theatre, our national theatre, during the Theatre Festival at the end of 2008.
Setting out to apply a therapeutic theory that is used daily in consulting rooms around the world to explain a 1961 play by the Irish playwriting genius appeared daunting at first. But then I remembered that psychoanalytic theory has a long history of interpreting works of art.
Even in Dublin today there is a vibrant discussion group of working psychoanalysts that focuses on cinema. And Jacques Lacan, Freud’s re-inventor in the 1960s and 1970s, was a friend and physician to Picasso, a collector of his paintings, and someone who also used Shakespeare’s Hamlet to explain aspects of his theory on human desire. Freud himself wrote about writers and the creative drive.
In that sense I was in good company and the more I worked on my humble offering, the more I began to see how versatile psychoanalytic theory can be.
The Abbey Theatre’s recent production had Fiona Shaw (Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter movies) as Winnie and Tim Potter as her rarely seen husband, Willie. For those who are unfamiliar with it, the first act consists of lonely Winnie stuck in her mound under a hot sun, constantly talking and obsessively fiddling with the contents of her handbag, being interrupted by a loud bell-buzzer that marks out the divisions of her day.
There is a twist in the second act. The mound after the interval is larger so that only the head of Winnie is visible. Meanwhile in the back, mostly out of sight, is Willie, who lives in a hole and who, unlike Winnie, enjoys the relative luxury of crawling about on all fours, fiddling with his genitals, reading an out of date newspaper and saying the occasional word or two.
In the sense that it is the same day being lived over and over, the play is a bit like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ except Winnie never reaches the Zen state of perfection from endlessly repeating the same rituals and experiences as Bill Murray's cynical TV weatherman. Rather she stays stuck; much like her body is stuck, in a state of unchanging imperfection.
Peppering the play are typical Beckett themes such as loneliness and the need for companionship; stagnation masquerading as change; and the failure and emptiness of language. With its focus on this last one, the failure of language to change anything, ‘Happy Days’ could be interpreted as Beckett’s criticism of psychoanalysis which, after all, depends on words and language for its very existence. This could be further supported by Beckett’s attitude towards his own analysis with renowned analyst Wilfred Bion at the Tavistock Clinic in London from 1934 to late 1935. Afterwards Beckett remained doubtful and hostile towards psychoanalytic theory and practice. And yet one of Beckett’s biographers said he retained a secret curiosity about it. French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu goes further and believes Beckett's mature, post-War work is a direct response to his experience of analysis.
In this light, therefore, when you step back from ‘Happy Days’ you could be looking at the analytical space. Winnie, unwittingly, is undergoing an analysis, except instead of lying on a couch she is bolt upright. She speaks like a client, freely, with associations following one after another. Occasionally resistances break out too, stopping her in her tracks as she shifts to new ideas.
Behind her, unseen, is Willie, a presence that says very little but which is essential to her because she is terrified of being alone and unheard. He is her husband, lover, analyst and the bigger cultural backdrop of society dramatically condensed into a single figure. His main role is to listen and only rarely speak. This is a two-handed relationship in which one party is searching for some semblance of meaning while the other listens. And so then if words fail, in a curious way they also offer salvation. They are the only things Winnie has – or indeed Beckett has – to deal with the emptiness with which she - and he - is grappling. If language is nothing, therefore, it is also everything.
But for all the bleakness, Beckett’s characters do not succumb to madness. How do they do that? What sustains them?
The short answer is it is the power of speech, the very speech act through language – for all its imperfections and inadequacies – that keeps Winnie and Willie anchored in their imperfect world, buttoned down with meaning of sorts. So without perhaps intending it, rather than an anti-psychoanalytic criticism, Beckett has written a grand advertisement, in the old style, as Winnie herself might say, for the usefulness of the ‘talking cure’.
And why does psychoanalytic theory have such a wide application, whether interpreting organizations, art, society, human relations or the inner psyche? Perhaps it is because, as humans, we all travel a similar path to get to where we are and psychoanalysis travels that same path. We are born, raised by parents, are joined by siblings and, regardless of how we emerge as sexualised individuals from our earliest experiences, we are called upon to deal with life’s tumbling mix of confusions, setbacks, traumas and disappointments, as well as its achievements, joys, beauties and happiness.
* In 'The Review', newsletter of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI), Issue 14, Spring 2009, pp. 24-26.