My Psychoanalytic Journey Through Musical Theater

Cary Friedman, MD

The following piece was originally printed in the Spring/Summer 2017 edition of the BPSI Bulletin, which can be read here.

When I was four years old, I am told, I performed the song “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady for family and friends with a perfect cockney accent. As I grew older, however, and shyness set in (or neurotic conflicts emerged), my love of performing and musical theater abated (or was repressed). But 30 years later, this passion returned with a vengeance, perhaps as a result of the liberating sloughing off of shame that psychoanalysis and coming out as a gay man enabled.

Throughout the ’90s, I found myself devouring cassettes of cast albums from old and contemporary musicals, by songwriters ranging from Cole Porter to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Jerry Herman to Kander and Ebb. I was charmed by the cleverness of their lyrics and the playfulness of their melodies, and found comfort in the notion that whatever joys or woes I was facing, a show tune truly could be found to capture the mood and meaning of the moment.

It wasn’t, however, until I found my way to the works of songwriter Stephen Sondheim that I fully discovered how powerfully musical theater can both delight the senses and explicate the human condition. Or at least my human condition during that decade I spent exploring the recesses of my own mind. Sondheim combined complex melodies, witty rhyme schemes, and intricate wordplay that often paid homage to his forebears (Hammerstein was a friend and mentor) and at the same time demonstrated his unparalleled mastery of the songwriting craft. He was particularly interested in transforming the characters that he brought to life in his songs into something beyond simple caricatures, frequently revealing the complexity of their fears, pains, and inner conflicts as they searched for love, affirmation, identity, and purpose.

As I was learning to become an analyst, I found powerful echoes of my new profession and my own psyche within Sondheim’s canon. In the title song from one of his early musicals, Anyone Can Whistle, Fay is a character who yearns for help in overcoming her inhibitions:

What’s hard is simple,
What’s natural comes hard.
Maybe you can show me
How to let go,
Lower my guard,
Learn to be free.
Maybe if you whistle,
Whistle for me

In her book Art Isn’t Easy: The Theater of Stephen Sondheim, Joann Gordon writes, “This song provides the key to all Sondheim’s subsequent emotional opacity. His characters…are filled with doubt and insecurity…. Their inability to express their feelings unambiguously…is an indication of a profound angst and sensitivity.”

One feels the doubt and angst as Beth wrestles with her painful fury over a lost love in “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along:

Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting?
But I just go on
Thinking and sweating
And cursing and crying
And turning and reaching
And waking and dying.

In “Putting It Together” from Sunday in the Park with George, George’s insecurity is evident as he struggles to navigate between his painstaking devotion to his creative process and his wish to be recognized for it. And Sondheim uses dazzling rhymes and word cadence to engage us in his struggle:

Art isn’t easy.
Every minor detail is a major decision.
Have to keep things in scale,
Have to hold to your vision…
If you want your work to reach fruition,
What you need’s a link with your tradition,
And of course a prominent commission,
Plus a little formal recognition,
So that you can go on exhibit—
So that your work can go on exhibition.

And in “I Know Things Now” from Into the Woods, a riff on traditional fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood lays out her convergent conflict between her internalizations of the wolf (id) and her mother (superego). To match the youth and naïveté of his character, Sondheim’s language here is seemingly simple, but one need not be an analyst to hear her anxiety and appreciate the multiple layers of psychic meaning in her tale:

Mother said “straight ahead,”
Not to delay or be misled.
I should have heeded her advice…
But he seemed so nice.
And he showed me things,
Many beautiful things, that I hadn’t thought to explore.
They were off my path, so I never had dared.
I had been so careful, I never had cared.
And he made me feel excited— well, excited and scared.

The song goes on to describe her seduction “down a dark slimy path, where lie secrets that I never want to know,” and her subsequent rescue. It ends, as analysis typically does, with an expectation of resolution that is not, in fact, complete:

Now I know:
Don’t be scared.
Granny is right,
Just be prepared.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot?
And a little bit, not…

None of these songs, however, touched me as deeply as “Being Alive” from Company. Bobby, a perpetually single thirtysomething man, watches with skepticism as his married friends describe the nuanced joys and sorrows of intimacy and commitment. As the show concludes, he sings:

Somebody hold me too close,somebody hurt me too deep,
Somebody sit in my chair and ruin my sleep
And make me aware of being alive, being alive.
Somebody need me too much, somebody know me too well,
Somebody pull me up short, and put me through hell
And give me support for being alive.

Make me alive, make me alive.
Make me confused, mock me with praise,
Let me be used, vary my days.
But alone is alone, not alive.

Somebody crowd me with love, somebody force me to care,
Somebody let me come through, I’ll always be there
As frightened as you, to help us survive
Being alive, being alive, being alive!

To my ears, the song spoke to the complexity of both my own and my patients’ experiences of intimacy in analysis and real life. Bobby yearns for the too much—sleeplessness, challenge, confusion—that intense attachments arouse. He envisions a relationship as an ambiguous mix of pleasure and pain, without which, he concludes, one is not truly alive. While “I Know Things Now” might play subversively with classical analytic theory, “Being Alive” speaks to the central tenets of self and relational theory—which propose that we find the most vital, meaningful, and compelling aspects of who we are through our deep and persistent connections with others. One feels the internal pulls between Bobby’s wishes for autonomy and closeness in the simple plea “Somebody crowd me with love,” but he concludes that as frightening as love may be, he does not want to merely survive alone. As did I; when I married during my next decade of life, that line found its way into my wedding vows.

Life did indeed become crowded, as we quickly added three children to our family. And it naturally warmed my heart when, years later, my kids became obsessed with the defining Broadway musical of their generation, Hamilton. While Sondheim’s work largely explores intrapsychic conflicts, writer and composer Lin-Manuel Miranda employs the life story of American founding father and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton as a vehicle for exploring the competing political and social tensions at the roots of our national consciousness (and perhaps unconscious?). And following Sondheim’s guiding principle that “content dictates form,”he reflects these tensions by drawing on his own favorite and seemingly incompatible musical styles: Broadway show tunes and hip-hop, with multiple direct references to well-known works in both genres. In the show’s opening song, the supporting characters narrate for us the overwhelming challenges of Hamilton’s early life. It begins:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

And in another song early in the show, “My Shot,” we are introduced to Alexander as a young man with wide-eyed, boundless drive, as he sings to his fellow future revolutionaries:

I know the action in the streets is excitin’,
But Jesus, between all the bleedin’ n’ fightin’ I’ve been readin’ ’n writin’.
We need to handle our financial situation.
Are we a nation of states? What’s the state of our nation?
I’m past patiently waitin’. I’m passionately smashin’ every expectation,
Every action’s an act of creation!
I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow,
For the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow.
And I am not throwing away my shot, I am not throwing away my shot.
Hey yo, I’m just like my country, I’m young scrappy and hungry
And I’m not throwing away my shot.

The tension embedded in both the style and the meaning of these song lyrics, as well as in other elements of the show, abounds. The words immediately grab our attention with their bluntness in describing Hamilton’s unseemly background; we do not expect to hear about bastards and whores when our colonial forefathers are described, and certainly not at a Broadway musical. And Miranda keeps our rapt attention by bombarding us with intricately constructed internal rhymes and passionate language that, as Ben Brantley wrote in a 2015 New York Times review of the show, “makes us feel the unstoppable, urgent rhythms of a nation being born.” Miranda’s penchant for combining seemingly incompatible elements—our white founding fathers played by African American and Latino performers dressed in 18th-century costumes and rapping phrases like “hey yo”—indeed smashes our expectations, liberating us to feel the “young scrappy and hungry” excitement felt by both renegades before us: Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda. And just as with most new psychoanalytic theories, there is little in Miranda’s style that is actually brand new; instead, it is the ingeniousness of novel applications and previously unconsidered juxtapositions that engages us.

The multiracial casting and diversity of musical and lyrical styles in Hamilton, along with the emphasis on its hero’s immigrant origins, offer a timely political argument for embracing multiculturalism as an aspect of our national identity and heritage. The anxiety and distress that so many analysts and patients feel seeping into sessions from the current political assaults on these values are propelling us to be more attuned to the impact of external forces on internal psyches. For me, musical theater has at times been a cherished source of entertainment and escape, and at others it has enriched my understanding of my own internal experiences by articulating them in words and music. In “The Schuyler Sisters” and at several later points in the show, Hamilton’s wife, Eliza, sings, “Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”In these troubled times, I find Eliza’s persistent faith in humanity, despite the tumultuous events and tragic losses that she lives through, to be a source of welcome reassurance and hope.

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