The "talking cure," Freud's nickname for psychoanalysis, seems an apt label for Higgins's transformation of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's Pygmalion: Eliza is "cured" of her impoverished existence by talking to Higgins in his Wimpole Street laboratory. These sessions, in which Eliza does most of the talking while Higgins analyzes what she says, are not unlike Freud's consultations with his patients in Vienna. Even the time period is the same: Both Shaw and Freud were born in 1856. Despite the vast differences between them, these two great thinkers had a common interest in understanding and improving the human condition.

Still, it seems that the comparison cannot be pushed very far, for Higgins has little of the depth and insight that led Freud to develop his theory of psychoanalysis, as Pickering remonstrates in Act III: "Come Higgins: you must learn to know yourself." ¹ Shaw's brief preface, with its focus on phonetics, clearly shows that Pygmalion is about a phonetician's, not a psychiatrist's, talking cure. More important, 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." ² 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." ³ Raymond Williams declared that "the emotional inadequacy of his plays is increasingly obvious," and Michael Holroyd has described Shaw as "emotionally lame." ⁴ The basic tenets of Freudian theory might also seem to have little application to Eliza's problems in Pygmalion. According to classical psychoanalytic theory, mental illnesses originate early in life and, therefore, can be cured only by talking about childhood memories. In addition, traditional Freudians regard sexual problems as the source of many emotional problems. Clearly neither of these principles would apply to Eliza's talking cure: Higgins has little interest in Eliza's childhood, and he never talks frankly about her sexuality. [End Page 27]

But these assumptions about Shaw and Freud have lately been called into question. 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. ⁵ Shaw himself made an intriguing comparison between himself and Freud in a 1948 letter:

Before Freud was ever heard of I dismissed all the standard books on Psychology as worthless, because, I declared, genuinely scientific work on the subject would be so indecent that nobody could possibly print it or even write it.

I did not then believe that a human being so utterly void of any sort of delicacy as Freud could exist. But apparently I created him; for I have lived to see him come not only into existence but into vogue. ⁶

Freudian theory is also being reexamined. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, James Hillman, John Forrester, Paul Kugler, and others have de-emphasized the traditional psychological emphasis on childhood and sex to focus instead on Freud's preoccupation with language. For example, Jacques Lacan's famous seminars constitute a poststructuralist reading of Freud. Analyst James Hillman, in his book Healing Fiction, defines therapy as the shaping of a patient's tale into a "therapeutic genre"—clearly a linguistic process: "The patient is in search of a new story, or of reconnecting with her old one." ⁷ According to these psychologists, the therapeutic process must necessarily involve curing a patient's language. In this essay I explore the Freudian concepts of transference, unconscious, and analysis in the context of Eliza Doolittle's linguistic transformation, and, because Freudian theory also posits the transformation of the therapist through a transference process, I suggest that Higgins undergoes his own talking cure in the course of the play.

We can begin with Adam Phillips, a psychotherapist who describes Freudian psychoanalysis in linguistic terms, explaining that patients and analysts must struggle with language gone wrong—the problem that "the languages at their disposal don't quite work for them. . . . Both suffer from languages buried alive inside them, from censored, alternative accounts." ⁸ The linguistic features of their lives—the remembered tales that have shaped their existence and the words they use to manage their everyday affairs—need healing. It is a process fraught with anxiety, for the loss of these familiar tales and the birth of a new identity necessarily involve pain. Freud himself clearly recognized the literary elements in his psychoanalytical techniques. In his 1895 Studies on Hysteria, he remarks, "[I]t still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science." ⁹ [End Page 28]

Jacques Derrida, with his interest in exposing the repressed elements of a text, points the way to at least three important linguistic features of Freudian theory that have relevance to Pygmalion. First, like Derrida and other contemporary philosophers of language, Freud was interested in margins and absence. Instead of striving for a profound dialogue with a patient's deepest self, Freud focused his attention on slips of the tongue, dreams, jokes, hesitations, asides, and repressions—similar to the methodology employed by Derrida in his deconstructions of philosophical texts. Second, Freud's diagnostic system is similar to Derridean différance in its dismissal of such absolutes as "mental health" and "pathology." For Freud, "normal" and "abnormal" are relative points on a continuum rather than literal scientific terms.

Most important, Freud postulated a textual basis for human experience. For Freud, psychological symptoms are symbols of repressed thoughts and memories, which, Lacan has explained, "are structured like a language." ¹⁰ Unlike behaviorists, who are logocentric in their belief that symptoms are literal and real, Freud read symptoms as part of a complex, mysterious, hidden text he called the "unconscious."

The interest in language that formed the basis for Freud's "talking cure" creates a link to Shaw, who has also attracted the attention of critics interested in language and poststructural approaches, including Richard Dietrich and Peter Gahan. ¹¹ These critics see Shaw as an author intent not only on exploring ideas but also on exposing and exploiting the hidden powers of language. It seems, then, that we might be justified in examining Eliza Doolittle's talking cure in light of psychological theory, especially if we read Freud from a postmodern perspective.

According to Adam Phillips, what Freudians call "transference" is actually an attempt to resolve the "problem of identification"—the yearning to break away from the familiar and conventional selves we identify with in our everyday lives. Phillips writes, "It fascinates Freud that there is an appetite to be unlike the self one takes oneself to be. . . ." ¹² He explains that for Freud, transference "was a way of wondering what people would be like if a cure for identification was found." ¹³ The psychoanalyst's job is to bypass the client's former self, speaking instead to the hidden potential within. This process brings with it a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration, for the client is poised to lose his or her familiar, everyday identity.

We can begin our own "analysis" of Eliza by suggesting that she is haunted not by the early trauma of abandonment and rejection by her parents but, rather, by what psychologist Paul Kugler calls "the strange self alien to the ego"—the as-yet-unknown new person she senses that she could be. ¹⁴ The conflict between her familiar everyday identity as a flower girl and the yearning to be someone else propels her to Higgins's drawing room in search of a remedy. [End Page 29]

Freud made three observations about analysis that can help us understand Eliza's talking cure. First, he defined the purpose of analysis as bringing the unconscious to consciousness—or, in postmodern terminology, making the new self real through the transference process. In fact Lacan has defined the unconscious as "the discourse of the other." ¹⁵ For postmodern psychologists, and for Freud himself, the unconscious is not simply our buried childhood experiences but an unidentified longing for what we do not see in the here and now—in Eliza's case, the alien new identity she longs for. In Act IV, entering the embassy reception, she reveals that she had been aware of this "other" Eliza long before she met Henry: "I have done this fifty times—hundreds of times—in my little piggery in Angel Court in my day-dreams. I am in a dream now" (740).

In this context, Higgins's "analysis" consists of bringing the inchoate and hidden "other" Eliza to light so that she can make her way in the world. But Higgins cannot take all the credit—although he tries to, in his dismissive treatment of Eliza after her dazzling success at the reception: "You won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! I won it" (747). Despite Higgins's protests, it was the new self inside Eliza's soul that drove her to persist in her efforts until, as Mrs. Higgins explains, "she did this wonderful thing . . . without making a single mistake" (765).

Freud's second useful observation is that analysis begins with a repetition. Traditional Freudians might say that Eliza repeats, or relives, the history of her relationship with her father when she moves into Higgins's house, and Pygmalion supports that interpretation: Eliza's wistful dependence on Higgins is endearingly childish, and her defiant moments are reminiscent of childhood conflicts. Note, for example, this exchange when Eliza first comes to Higgins's study:

LIZA. One would think you was my father.

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I'll be worse than two fathers to you.

(690)

But if we remember Lacan's assertion that the unconscious "is structured like a language," we can look for deeper issues and greater complexity. Judith Butler has one insightful answer: Asserting that "the child must attach in order to persist in and as itself," she explains that dependency is critical to the creation of the "other." ¹⁶ According to Butler, power has a positive shadow that is often missed because we usually focus on its abuses: "Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being." ¹⁷ In this sense, Higgins's nurturing of the "other" Eliza is a repetition of the identity validation—limited as it was—that she received from her literal father, Alfred Doolittle, during childhood. Eliza acknowledges explicitly her dependency on Higgins: "I am a child in your country. I have [End Page 30] forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours" (770), and "I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel" (779).

And there is yet another "repetition" in Eliza's analysis. Jacques Lacan famously has described a mirroring process that can shed light on Eliza's talking cure. Looking in the mirror at its own reflection, a child discovers it can both be itself and ponder itself as a separate entity. This mirror experience is the first step in creating a human being capable of self-awareness and self-reflection: in short, a person aware of himself or herself as a distinct human being.

But this experience also causes a split and brings with it a sense of loss, for now we are conscious of a chasm within ourselves, an empty space between experience and meaning. Paul Kugler explains, "[B]y acquiring the ability to name an experience, the individual is able to symbolize himself or herself by replacing lived experience with a text, and thus gain consciousness of and distance from the immediacy of an event." ¹⁸ That distance brings with it a sense of emptiness and loss. As Judith Butler puts it, "The subject loses itself to tell the story of itself. . . ." ¹⁹ We can hear Eliza mourning for the loss of her familiar Cockney self in her wail, "Oh, if I could only go back to my flower basket!" (777).

Like all human beings, Eliza would have had this mirror experience as a small child when she first developed the awareness that she was a separate human being, perhaps by looking in a mirror, as Lacan suggests. What makes her different from other flower girls—and what initiates her talking cure—is the repetition of this experience in St. Paul's portico, where she has another, equally profound encounter with a mirror of a different kind. This time the "mirror" is a human being—Henry Higgins—who casts double reflections on Eliza—the familiar person she believes herself to be, a wretched and dirty outcast from society, and a potential duchess:

THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party.

THE FLOWER GIRL. What's that you say?

(680)

This exchange is a powerful example of what Forrester calls "speech which transforms the speaker in the very act of saying," for Eliza's new self-awareness means that she will never be the same again. ²⁰ This brief scenario exemplifies the poststructuralist principle that language is far more than a communication tool or conveyance for information: It has the power to create and destroy. Henry's words to Pickering, overheard by Eliza, encapsulate the analytic process. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Eliza's talking cure both begins and ends here, for her old life as a flower [End Page 31] girl ends in this moment. Seeing herself as a potential duchess for the first time, she can never again be resigned to a life spent peddling flowers.

Strictly speaking, however, Eliza's "analysis" ends in Act V, when she walks out of Higgins's life and into Freddy's. According to Freud, "[W]hen a client can talk to you about himself, the analysis will be over." ²¹ Eliza's confident exchanges with Higgins at the end of the play clearly demonstrate that her transformation is complete. But Eliza was also able to "talk about herself" earlier in the play. In Act II, when she first arrives at Higgins's house, she articulates exactly what she wants from both herself and Higgins. In fact, she is clearer about her purpose than Higgins, who wavers among his professional goals, winning the bet, and the fun he is having. In Act III his mother recognizes these contradictions when she chides him and Pickering: "You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll" (734). What is different later is Eliza's confidence in her ability to separate from Higgins. The childish dependency she displayed when she first came to Wimpole Street is gone now, as she snaps her fingers and derides him:

Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You cant take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! Thats done you, Henry Higgins, it has. . . . Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

(778)

We can also say that there are actually two "talking cures" in Pygmalion—Eliza's and Henry's. This again is consistent with classical analysis, which always includes both a transference and a countertransference, so that both patient and analyst are inevitably transformed. Eliza's analysis is broader and more successful, for she leaves Wimpole Street reborn and ready to become a productive member of society. Shaw, we should remember, was a social reformer as well as an artist, and Eliza's story makes an important point about community and citizenship.

But Higgins will never be the same either, although his transformation is less sweeping and dramatic. Earlier in the play he acts as a Lacanian mirror for Eliza, revealing the new identity concealed beneath her ragged dress and dirty face; at the end of the play she does the same for him, challenging him to see himself in a new way. Higgins at last has acquired a degree of consciousness—the ability to see himself as other than what he had thought himself to be. In Act III he confesses to Eliza, "You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before" (752–53). And in Act V he clumsily expresses gratitude for everything she has taught [End Page 32] him: "I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather" (775).

While Higgins seems to acquire a good dose of self-awareness, Eliza's talking cure is, perhaps, less than a complete success, for it is clear that she experiences emptiness and loss even after completing the "treatment." Like Dora, Freud's famous patient whose analysis he declared a failure, Eliza never completely resolves her inner and outer conflicts. And here again we encounter the "problem of language" that Derrida declares paramount to human existence. ²² The fact is that Eliza will always feel alienated from both herself and her fellow human beings. As a "text" created by an author who wanted to win a bet, she has no peers, no past, and no true home. After the embassy reception she makes a sad trip back to Covent Garden, only to find that she no longer belongs there. It is likely that for the rest of her life Eliza will experience what Phillips calls "the anxiety of uniqueness." ²³

Equally problematic for her is the deepening of the inner split that we all first experience in the mirror stage described by Lacan: the realization that we can never close the gap between essence and expression and, even worse, that we deepen the split as we become more articulate. "To mean," says Barbara Johnson, "is automatically not to be." ²⁴ What Eliza learns, long before postmodern psychology and philosophy came into prominence, is that she has no true self, no authentic soul. Who she is—who we all are—is a product of circumstances, surroundings, and choices. So in Act V Eliza tells Pickering and Higgins that there are no essential differences between human beings because there are no essences to differentiate them: "You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated" (769). It is différance all over again: We are distinct individuals not because our personalities our rooted in pure, Platonic essences but because of the way others imagine us and treat us.

As I write this essay, our millennium is only a few years old, and poststructuralism still seems strange and new to many of us. Surely one reason that Pygmalion continues to enchant modern audiences is its flavor of times not so long past when language theory was uncomplicated, plots were easy to follow, and dialogue was straightforward and clever. There are no hidden sexual traumas in Pygmalion and no avant-garde tricks to befuddle audiences who want to spend a pleasant evening in the theater. No matter how intrigued we are by the postmodern thinking of Lacan and Derrida, many of us will admit to finding pleasure in escaping to the simpler world of Wimpole Street and Covent Garden.

But what I have attempted to show here is that this simpler world never existed, not even on the stage of His Majesty's Theatre in London, where [End Page 33] Pygmalion had its British premiere in 1914. Eliza's "talking cure" effectively refutes the notion that poststructuralism is an academic game with little application to everyday life.

Instead, Pygmalion confirms the poststructuralist assertion that language has purposes and effects that transcend traditional commonsense notions about writing and speech. If we were to eavesdrop on one of Freud's analytic sessions, we would notice that Freud had little interest in language as a means of communication and did not conduct conventional conversations with his patients. Quite the opposite: he ignored their attempts to draw him into intimacy and often reversed the truth claims in their statements to him, so that a patient's remark that "I always loved my mother" was likely to be interpreted as "I never loved my mother." ²⁵

Similarly, Eliza's oft-repeated statements about the "rain in Spain" and "cups of tea" convey little information to Higgins, do nothing to create a personal relationship between them, and have no value as statements of fact. In both Freud's consulting room and Higgins's laboratory we keep hearing language gone wrong—linguistic exchanges that do not work in conventional ways—with an unexpected and profound result: "talking cures" that permanently transform both analyst and analysand.