Kirsten Dahl discusses The Glass Menagerie – The Flight of the Male Adolescent from His Mom

Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie was used by Kirsten Dahl in a workshop at my institute to illustrate not just the challenges of being the mother to an adolescent male (or being an adolescent son who has a mother), but also of being the female analyst of an adolescent male (or being an adolescent boy in analysis with a female analyst).  The Glass Menagerie was particularly appropriate to this endeavor because, as she points out, what is called Williams “autobiographical” play is one that he intentionally made not about the facts of his adolescence, but about his psychological experience of it.  The mother in the play is not the mother that he had in real life (a woman who may or may not have had 17 suitors come calling in one evening), but the woman he engaged with in his other real, but internal life.  Dahl used as evidence of this two things: first, the stage directions include the use of magic lantern type devices to project words and images on the wall – the father of the protagonist, Tom, for instance is sometimes projected on the wall and sometimes not and the entire play is to be seen through a scrim so that it is hazy or dreamlike; and second, she says, Williams was relieved that when his mother sat with him and saw the play on Broadway, she did not recognize herself.  Instead, she was proud of his accomplishment – proud of the art that he had created.

Dahl, herself, is an accomplished analyst.  A faculty member at Yale, she has written extensively about child analysis and about gender and sexuality.  I was embarrassed that I had not read her work, and somewhat intimidated by the impending visit of someone so notable.   For homework, I watched a version of the play with Katherine Hepburn and a very young Sam Waterston as Tom, which I found on YouTube.  I have since found that the critics recommended a version directed by Paul Newman to showcase the acting talent of his wife Joanne Woodward and a young John Malkovich as Tom, also available onYouTube.  Dahl was introduced by one of the directors of our institute who had presented a case to her at a national meeting as being very down to earth, and I found her to be so.  She used the play and a discussion about it as a Friday night lecture that laid the groundwork for a case presentation on Saturday morning where an analyst presented her work with a male patient who was just entering adolescence, and the play and Dahl’s discussion of it nicely resonated with the work that the analyst did with this young man.

One of the ways that I evaluate a workshop or a piece of professional writing is the way the material impacts the clinical work that I do.  One way that I can feel this start is that certain patients are called to mind by the article or book chapter or talk that I am engaged with.  This started to happen on Saturday when the talk – but also my direct experience of Tom and his mother (and sister and the other character in the play – the gentleman caller Tom brings home to see his crippled sister), shaped my experience of the clinical presentation of the case.  But this has continued to unfold during the week as my perception of the people that I work with – and even more importantly, the way that I work with those people, is shaped, in what I experience as positive means, by both the play itself and by Dahl’s interpretation of it.  This is, of course, validating as I devote a fair amount of time to looking at the relationship between art and psychoanalysis in these posts – and I hope that my efforts mirror in some small way her very astute ones.

Despite the importance of Williams the artist in the product of the play, Dahl tried to direct us away from the biographical implications of the play and instead to appreciate it as a representation of Tom’s inner world.  By understanding Tom’s inner world as a legitimate focus of attention, Dahl was moving us from the world of things and relationships and people to the world of images and psychological objects and fantasies.  This is the world of the analyst – and this is one of the ways that this workshop helped me reorient my listening to my patients.  I am less concerned, when I listen to this second perspective, with who did or said what – and more importantly how the patient should or should not respond to all of that, and more concerned with – and curious about – what the patient is thinking about, wondering about, and experiencing.  This shift, at the best moments, allows an analyst to come on board with the mind of the analysand, to join in their subjectivity, as best we are able, rather than to objectify them.

Tom’s subjective world is one in which he is burdened by the needs of a mother whose husband, his father, has left her, and the needs of a sister who is frail and lives in a fantasy world – and fantasy here is a derogatory term, even though, or perhaps partly because we have access to Tom’s fantasy world.  And Tom’s fantasies – his wish to live up to the Shakespeare nickname that his co-worker, the gentleman caller Tom invites to dinner – are in danger of being suffocated by the anxiety of his mother, who is worried about the well-being of her children, which comes through clearly but is an undertone to the clanging bell of concerns about her own well-being – but more centrally her need to puff herself up with her gossamer memories of all the men who came calling – all the opportunities she had that have been wasted by her having pursued the path that has led her to have these two children, children that she loves, adores, but also feels a need to care for and worry about.

And these children – each in their own way - feel a need to care for her in return.  Tom feels torn between his duty of working in the warehouse – a spirit killing worthless job that he is no good at doing – but which keeps the lights on for his mother and sister, and his dreams of running far away – further than distance – indeed, when he does run, he says, “I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places.”  What is he running from?  Even when he is home, he is running to the movies – which also appears to be running to drink and to magic shows and to who knows what other kinds of entertainment.  We can feel the oppression of his mother – of her constant demands, of her intrusion – yelling at him when he is trying to write.  But we also see something else – the desire, expressed in the words of the gentleman caller to Tom’s sister who says, if she were his sister, he would help her see that she is worthy of being loved.  And, if we make one of those leaps that psychoanalysis and the dream-like structure of this play allow us to make, we see that Tom wants to let not just his sister, but his mother know that she is lovely – and that he loves her in ways that would feel incestuous and therefore disgusting if he were to express them directly.

Tom wants to join his father in running – but he also wants to be the man his father could not be.  He wants to stay and tend to the needs of his mother and sister, but to do so would cause lead him to sin – against god, but also against his own nature.  So run he must.  Peter Fonagy talks, in a paper about male sexuality, about the ways in which the incest taboo leads us to procreate productively.  Without it, we would be happy to just stay at home and procreate there.  This play enacts that idea.  Tom must run away from the intense feelings that are stirred by the closeness that he feels to his mother and sister.  And who could blame him?  But this also leaves him feeling adrift – cast out to join the merchant marines – to sail the seas and, in the impending World War, likely to lose his life altogether. 

But wait, you may say, isn’t Williams gay?  How does that complicate things (or simplify them)?  Yes, Williams the playwright was openly and proudly gay in the 40s and 50s when it was anything but easy to do this.  But he did.  One of the things that Dahl referred to – not directly about this, but I think it applies – was the plasticity of gender and sexuality.  It was also somewhat relieving to hear someone who has thought as deeply as she has about these things wonder about the concrete ways that we are currently thinking about gender - with surgical fixes to match the external world with the internal one - and sexuality - as if we are either gay or bi or straight.

She didn’t say this, but I think it to be true and may be an extension of what she was saying, that we are all gay and straight, male and female, and the relationships we have with our family members are potentially relationships with our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers simultaneously in the interaction with any one of them.  The characters in this play represent a relatively traditional nuclear family, but because of the scrim, of the curtain that we see them through, they are free to be whoever and whatever we need them to be, and we can be who we need to be in relationship to them.

So, this play is, at least from Dahl’s perspective, about the ways in which the “failed” treatments of adolescent boys by female treaters, meaning that the boys leave treatment before the analysis is “complete” and all their issues are resolved, may actually be the result of the mobilization of the very forces that the boys need to propel themselves forward in their lives.  Experiencing the analyst as a desired object, one who is both demanding and oppressive and present and open and therefore dangerous, may create the conditions that are necessary for the boy to move away from something that is too comfortable – the caring that occurs in the nuclear family with its incestuous overtones muted by repression – and mutates that into something that is almost conscious, and therefore increasingly uncomfortable and difficult to live with – something that must be fled.  Would that we could all flee it into the fame and fortune that Tennessee Williams discovered!

Instead, we all flee all the time – including analysts who work to solve the problems in the real world rather than to confront the difficulties in the imperfect soup that is our inner world with the interplay between conscious and unconscious elements.  We all flee from the realizations that great art allows us to discover – at least as observers – that we live in worlds that are determined by our internal realities and that, though those inner realities bear some relationship to the external circumstances in which that world was created, they have their own logic, one that we decipher as best we are able through interpretation – of art and of our own complicated ways of seeing the world.  That flight can be tremendously productive - we can produce great works of art and create standards of living that are impressive.  We can also remain in flight - and feel lost if we don't somehow work out that we also deeply love those we are fleeing from.

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