Paradox and Psychoanalysis in A Streetcar Named Desire

The role of the paradox in A Streetcar Named Desire holds a poignant relationship with various theories related to the popular psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.  In fact, the role of psychoanalysis within the construction of the play is extremely conspicuous, as the concepts of fantasy and reality, desire and symptomatic repression are central to the story line.  Interestingly enough, at around the same time Williams’s play hit the stage, American’s began to develop a growing interest in mental illness or “madness” and the field of psychoanalysis (website).  

This relationship was paradoxical as well: Freud theories contested that virtually all neurotic symptoms were a result of repressed sexuality and desire; yet these same theories were eagerly consumed and analyzed by a population of American’s who actively censored and repressed their own sexuality and desire.  A psychoanalytic reading of A Streetcar Named Desire expresses the function of the paradox, such as Stanley’s desire for Blanche and Blanche’s reality based on a past that never existed, as the “domain of the subject’s impossible relation to the object-cause of its desire, the domain of the drive that circulates endlessly around it” (Zizek 6).  

On a larger scale, this reading can be metaphorically applied to American culture in the 1950s, as the paradox and hypocrisy of American consumption and interests (i.e. Playboy, the Kinsey Scale, psychoanalysis)(website) paired with the mandates of censorship and oppression reveals itself as a neurotic symptom of repression caused by American’s relationship to the “object-cause” of their desire, a relationship rendered “impossible” due to society’s constructed reality.