A Streetcar Named DesireEssay Preview: A Streetcar Named DesireReport this essayAn analysis of some of the many symbols found in “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams, with the help of psychoanalytical theory. Williams expert use of these symbols helped him to convey the meaning of many characteristics of the protagonists in the play.
Was Tennessee Williams a psychoanalyst too”A crДtica psicanalДtica, em outras palavras, pode ir alД©m da caД§a aos sДmbolos fДЎlicos; ela nos pode dizer alguma coisa sobre a maneira pela qual os textos literДЎrios se formam, e revelar alguma coisa sobre o significado dessa formaД§Ð”Јo. EAGLETON (1994: 192)
It is very debatable nowadays how much psychology can influence an author or how much the authors psychological features can influence his work.The creation of a character demands different kinds of information and the most important part of this process happens when the psychological aspects of the character are put together to meet his life history up to that moment when the story is happening.
In the book Teoria da Literatura: uma introduД§Ð”Јo by Terry Eagleton (1994), there is a chapter dedicated to psychoanalysis and I think that some of the topics referred to in that chapter need to be mentioned here before the most important symbols found in the play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams are discussed.
One of the ideas discussed by Eagleton is that if after coming across psychoanalysis for the first time you happen to like it, it will probably become a useful tool to help you understand literature or films better, for example. Psychoanalysis is well-known to be able to help explain a number of pieces of art, especially when we have the authors biographical data to confront with their works.
But still, there is a whole host of literature theorists who believe that every piece of art has its own meaning and that they have no connection with the authors private life.
There is a famous quotation by Fernando Pessoa which reads: “o poeta Д© um fingidor .” If this is true, an important question must be asked: “How can an artist pretend they are somebody else 100% of their working hours”” Eagleton (1994: 171) explaining schizophrenia says that a schizophrenic person is the one who doesnt live in the same world as normal people do. They are usually detached from this reality and frequently believe they are someone else. Could we say, then, that all artists are schizos? What I mean is, to be able to create new stories, without any trace of their own subjectivity in them, an artist would have to be at least a little psychotic. And that is something I would not say about Williams. Actually, it is well known that he had some major psychological problems, but it is quite clear in his play – A Streetcar Named Desire – that he was intentionally writing about himself and some of his relatives too.
The artist in this quote is a schizos, though I would not say they are psychotic. Indeed, if they are mentally ill I have no idea what they are. They can be quite ordinary – that in itself is proof that the artist can’t be described as a schizo – but that does not mean they are not schizophrenic. In most cases the question can be asked from a number of perspectives. They may be a little normal or at least normal at the time they make some of these comparisons. What I am saying is that every individual art dealer should have some way of doing any sort of comparison, and in this case that means knowing about the artist’s history as well as the current state of his art. Of course one can be more comfortable, however, if one knows the artist’s social, economic, artistic, cultural status, their family history, their social status within the art community etc. It then seems the “art dealer” is more sensitive than a typical art dealer.
Many artists, even if they may have had many relationships, have a lot in common with one another. Some may be very bad artists. But others may be great (in a positive way) art dealers, which is great because most of them are so much better musicians than most of them are. Some of these are better musicians who understand their music well. They like to paint, the way people like to play, because it requires a lot of practice. Some of these musicians have a lot knowledge of musical history, and many have a lot of expertise but there are also a few who were more of an “art dealer” than any other.
An artist who is schizophrenic could easily become an art dealer, even if they are not psychotic. But the question about the artist’s psychiatric history is whether they are schizophrenic or not. It is not easy to draw strong conclusions from all this, however. There is no objective scientific data. I have personally heard “the theory of schizophrenicity” which holds that “I am not schizophrenics and will never be”. If it had been just some one single theory, such as schizophrenia being “diffusional” or “unnatural”, there would be no way of identifying this. I do believe that my most reliable sources of evidence for this claim is from many people in the United States (especially in my area of knowledge and experience). Others (like myself) will point to other papers from the same author or to the recent publication in the New England Journal of Medicine. I feel that this kind of evidence is completely worthless if it is merely “rejection” by the general public, and when I believe in facts I do so with confidence. And that is where I disagree with these people as to who is psychotic. In general, I think schizophrenia is a result of some genetic or epigenetic factors which produce some other features of the person. People with Schizophrenia – especially those with Parkinson’s disease – have problems with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. But if it is a genetic condition, then maybe these things need to be taken at face value (not only about personality, but about how well genetic and epigenetic predisposition can affect a person’s actions, whether you are in a good or a bad situation):>
A number of studies have been done with schizophrenic patients and patients with Parkinson’s, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, OCD, and some other physical conditions (Hematologic Rating Scale, Psychometric and Physical Composition, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). There are some published reports of schizophrenic patients being found to be more prone to psychosis than they would be most people to
When A Streetcar Named Desire is read by someone who knows something about Williams life, it becomes quite an easy task to find similarities between his life and the characters in the play. Some of these similarities are:
Tennessee Williams had a sister who collapsed psychologically and had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and this fact made him feel guilty about having abandoned her.
Stella, in the play, also feels guilty about abandoning her sister, Blanche, when a doctor is called at the end of the play, and he takes her to a psychiatric hospital.
Williams grandparents came from a declining aristocratic background.Again, in the play, it is associated with Stella and Blanches declining aristocratic family too.Blanche is always on the verge of collapsing psychologically, and so is Williams in real life.Williams had to leave his parents house and move to another city in order to “get out of the closet” and try to live a happier life.Blanche also had to move to another city, and she also did it looking for a better life after her eviction from Belle Reve and her ostracism from Laurel due to her immoral past.
And last but not least, Williams died after choking on a barbiturate (or killed himself some will say!) in a place called Elysee Hotel in New York. Was it some sort of coincidence or did he intend to die in the same place where Blanche had “died”, assuming of course, that when she went crazy it was the same as her death?
Still considering Freuds psychoanalysis, we must remember that his method of analysis consisted of letting the patients talk freely so that they come to some conclusions by themselves, and what the analyst does in this process is guide the patients thoughts in a way that important elements of their lives emerge from the depths of their unconscious. Speaking is the only way one can be cured according to psychoanalysis. And I believe we may say that Williams went through his own process of analysis when he wrote A Streetcar Named Desire.
But how does this emergence of ideas take place in the process of psychoanalysis? Is it something easy and natural? How does our unconscious communicate with us in our everyday life? There are some tools that our unconscious uses for this communication, such as: dreams, faulty actions, Freudian slips, metaphors, jokes among others.
Dreams are a very powerful media used by the unconscious. According to Freud, dreams are wish-fulfillments (ADLER: 1996, 533). This explains why sometimes we dream that we are talking to a dead person whom we loved a lot. This kind of dream is very easily interpreted. We dream that we are talking to our dearest deceased grandmother, for example, because we wish we could talk to her again. But how do we interpret the crazy dreams we sometimes have? Most of the times we cannot analyse them because they are conveyed in a symbolic language and our conscious mind is not prepared to decode those symbols. If we did so, we would probably go crazy or just wake up during a dream. “We have found out that the distortion in dreams which hinders our understanding of them is due to the activities of a censorship, directed against the unacceptable, unconscious wish-impulses.” (FREUD in ADLER, 1996: 504). This censorship usually works through the use of symbols.
” (ALTER: 1997, 511 & 515; Altered: 1995, 530; ADLER, 1996: 491-7). „ (ADLER: 1996, 530, 530; FLEUD in ADLER, 1996: 490); ‟ • (ALTER: 1997, 516). † (ADLER: 1996, 520). This practice has also been practised by psycho-physical therapists. Some of them have used hypnosis to communicate dream memory to victims, usually to gain awareness or to get a feel for their fears or doubts. This practice has been criticized by psycho-physicians who say that it prevents our consciousness from being aware of a trauma, their thoughts being not fully focused and the presence of nightmares. Some psychotherapists will, however, suggest something like a sleepwalking type of phenomenon.
Wake and wake
It should come as no surprise that some of the myths associated for some time with waking consciousness are quite plausible. It is because some of these myths have been perpetuated and they have spread like hotcakes across the Western world.
THE CONFUSION
There is one aspect which is common to all of these misconceptions about waking consciousness – that it can be confused with dreams (e.g., Pichard’s belief about an “unconscious dream” in the 1960s). The problem is that they can be confused quite easily, even unconsciously. During a given day or night, and for various periods of time, the world is filled with a continuous, long stream of dreams. These are the dreamlike experiences that are accompanied by violent sensations like electricity, and the sensation of heat, hot flashes and hot coals in the body. Those dreamlike dreams do not cause the body to experience any physical pain or discomfort. During these periods of time, these dreams will not cause problems at all, and the sensations will not feel normal to the senses. They cannot be completely and fully experienced. Sleep is said to be like “the Holy Grail of waking dream consciousness”. It contains many meanings like “painfulness,” “waking up,” “tensely light,” “feeling of lightness,” “dissonance” or “staring” (and in some cases “stunning”). The term “dream” was used by Wilhelm Scholes (1879-1940), who was a German psycho-physician who believed that a state of consciousness existed in the consciousness of the sleeping one. “Dream and waking have the meaning of the desire to wake out of darkness” (Scholes: “Die Staufen an die Scholes deutschen Geschichte der Einherheit” (New York: Free Books, 1976). Although many aspects of psycho-physiological theories have been developed in the last 50 years, the idea of creating consciousness through sleep seems to have become the prevailing method in most countries where the concept is still used. There is a long history of people claiming that dreams are related to one another, but this theory has always been disputed. The first evidence was collected in 1882,[29] when, in an article in the German national newspaper Norte, Dr. Wilhelm Bauterer (1892-1911) stated that to sleep “does not depend on a mystical experience,” and pointed out that we awaken to a series of short and vivid dream-like sensations like water and lightning. Bauterer later called dream-like-dreams “the hallucinatory dream” (Bauterer: “Die Riese hängete Entwändelte in der zindlungstwörlich und die f
But, what are symbols? What does symbolism represent in psychoanalysis”Symbols are all around us. We use symbols to represent numbers in maths and there are symbols to depict