Summary
Summary PSYCHOANALYSIS OF A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE A LEVEL
- Module
- A streetcar named desire
- Institution
- PEARSON (PEARSON)
A LEVEL CRITICAL ANALYSIS FOR STREETCAR
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Psychoanalysis of StreetcarBlanche DuBois’s tragedy of incomprehension in A Streetcar Named Desire
The lack of self-realisation and an unbalanced psyche causes the failure of individuation process and
consequently, some abnormal behaviours in her character. Jung’s emphasis is on collective
unconscious, shared by all individuals in all cultured which he reagrds as the repository of racial
memories and of primordial images and patterns of experience that he calls archetypes. Blanche is
fragmented, so there are different archetypes within her that cause tensions and a lack of self-
realisation from which she suffers.
The naturalistic depiction of New Orleans’ street life whose sights/sounds periodically invade
kowalski’s apartment serves a symbolic and expressionistic function as objectifications of Blanche’s
mental disorientation and ultimate disintegration. The dispossessed and alienated Blanche has come
to her sister, searching for a place where she can belong. Each of the 11 scenes represents a step in
Blanche’s progression from arrival to expulsion in which the playwright called a tragedy of
incomprehension.
The Traces of Animus in Blanche
Traces of animus (archetype of masculine) in Blanche- it is psychic representation of sexual instinct or
the manly side of the woman. The animus, the unconscious masculine element in a woman,
compensates for her conscious femininity. The archetype of animus is projected onto the opposite sex
and causes mutual fascination. From another point of view, it can be argued that Blanche seeks love
and pity, projection and care and she feels she will get all these in her sister’s house. Blanche is
universal in being a woman dependent on men, aware of her waning physical appeal, terrified of her
longing extinction.
Blanche tries to satisfy her suppressed needs by relying on strangers. In Jungian terms, she has
unconsciously projected her animus onto strange men. It is Blanche’s fate to fail to recognise the
need to come to terms with her animus until it is too late. She cannot distinguish between the world of
men and the animus mage she has projected onto them. Blanche never has a successful relationship
with Stanley. The reason is that sometimes, woman does not accept the man who has received her
animus projection.
The Traces of persona in Blanche
The persona is a mask we take on in our everyday life, a mask that pretends individuality, it’s a
system for connecting individual consciousness with society. The word persona derives from the
Greek word for mask, and it one of the five Jungian archetypes: self, shadow, anima/animus, ego and
persona. Blanche’s role involves putting on a persona in order to function without anxiety and other
mental issues. In an ideal world, the persona reflects the truest nature of the inner ego to the outside
world.
In Blanche, complications present themselves when her inner self is in opposition with her exterior
persona. She pretends to be a joyous woman but in fact, she is depressed and anxious on the inside.
Psychological conditions (e.g depression, wavering, anxiety) in her psyche are the result of continued
portrayal of her false-self.
Projection of Shadow
Jung points out that ignoring the shadow ‘would be equivalent to death’. This is what happens for
Blanche: she undergoes sanity which is considered a kind of psychological death to her. For Blanche,
allan’s suicide would seem a failure in her psyche. She vaunts him not only as a good person but as
an ideal one, for example in scene 6 she tells that “I loved him unendurably”. When she discovers
some elements of his shadow (cheating on her, his deceptive homosexuality), she is faced with the
conflict of resolving these preclusive things into her conception of him. Blanche makes intimacies with
other men to prove her sexual desire which is part of her shadow but she is never successful. But she
tries to accept her shadowy side of her nature when confronted by Mitch about her past: “I’ll tell you
what I want. Magic! Yes, magic! I try to give that to people, I misrepresent things to them”.
The self and the process of individuation
Self is the center of the unconscious into which the other parts of the psyche must be integrated. The
process during which the self is realised is called individuation. In the play Blanche faces different
opposites such as life and death, illusion and reality, past and present. She suffers from the tension
between these opposites which originate from the archetypes of the collective unconscious. But
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