The Identity Construction and Split Self of Eliza in Pygmalion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective/ la Construction D'identite at L'autodivision D'eliza Dans Pygmalion: Une Perspective Psychanalytique (Report‪)‬

Although born in the same year with Freud in 1856, Shaw has often been labeled "unpsychological" by critics. As Richard F. Dietrich has noted, many critics harbor "doubts about whether Shaw's life and work have any psychological depth, or even any psychological dimension" (1984: 150). Shaw's contemporary Max Beerbohm, for example, complained that Shaw's "serious characters are just so many skeletons, which do but dance and grin and rattle their bones" (1969: 26). Raymond Williams declared that "the emotional inadequacy of his plays is increasingly obvious" (1968:256), and Michael Holroyd has described Shaw as "emotionally lame" (1988:108). The basic tenets of Freudian theory might also seem to have little application to Eliza's problems in Pygmalion, for Higgins has little interest in Eliza's childhood, and he never talks frankly about her sexuality. However, critics have begun to reexamine the notion that Shaw was uninterested in psychology. Dietrich, for example, has formulated a Shavian psychological system based on the three classifications in Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism: realist, idealist, and philistine (1984: 150). Jean Reynolds,in Pygmalion's Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw, reveals an unexpected side of Shaw--his acute insight into linguistic and psychological concepts that dominate postmodern thought--that will be provocative to Shavians and Derrideans alike(www.upf.com/spring1999/renolds.html).