Barbra Streisand, Analyst and Patient

While watching Barbra: The Concert at Madison Square Garden in 1994, I was struck by the role psychoanalysis had played in the performer’s life and career. It was popular knowledge that Barbra Streisand had struggled with an intense fear of the stage, although the audience would never have known it by the way she performed — confident and assured, even loving of her memories of Marlon Brando and her own son, Jason Gould, an actor who appeared with his mother in The Prince of Tides. Of seeing Brando for the first time, Streisand remarked as she reminisced about an old film, “It was truly a life-altering experience.” (Brando himself was at the top of The People’s Almanac’s (1975 edition) list of “20 Celebrities Who’ve Been Psychoanalyzed.”)

But, when in Act One, Streisand took a seat on the onstage couch, I wondered what she was up to. Was she about to depict an analysis or would this be one more parody on the work that I was being trained to conduct? Although she never uses the word “psychoanalysis” throughout any of the three vignettes that depict her in therapy, in the very first one Streisand sits on the classical couch that has stood as an icon of the unconscious since Freud’s day. In the first vignette, Streisand begins talking anxiously about the present-day problems of dating. The audience then hears a disembodied voice from an empty wingback chair just behind the head of the couch. And a distinctly older, male voice says, “Vhy don’t you just let your mind vander?”

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“Vander?” Barbra gives the voice a slight double take, mimicking its unmistakable Viennese accent.

“Vander,” the voice maintains.

She pauses and then relaxes into the corner of the couch closest to the chair.

“All right,” she gives in willingly, even happily, wandering back to the memory of a blind date she’d had in high school.

It’s hard to miss the obvious references to psychoanalysis: the couch, the voice, and the implicit reference to free association by “letting your mind wander” (Viennese style), and not add Streisand to the list of celebrities who have courageously embraced the couch and, as courageously, let go of it to live and work as Streisand did on that closing night of her tour.

From the couch Streisand breaks into song, marking a tribute to the creative potential that can be released in an individual who takes the journey on the couch. She sings, “Will he like me … will he know enough to know that there’s more to me than I may always show….” She ends the song and takes her seat on another analyst’s couch.

This time, we hear the sound of a mature woman’s voice. And once again, Barbra is there to work on relationships, as the therapist reminds her. Her story continues to unfold with the therapist simply adding, when she hesitates, “And…,” the way the Viennese voice had urged in the first vignette, “Ya, go on ….” The therapist’s voice and chair fade as Streisand and her voice once again emerge from the couch.

She finishes the song about love and ends up on a chair behind the wingback from which another therapist’s voice asks her, “Have you ever been in therapy before?”

Streisand responds, “Have I ever been in therapy before?” and looks to the audience which is laughing. She continues, “Now I’m really fascinated by Jung. You know, the collective unconscious, the archetypal triangle: father‑mother‑child. It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does,” the therapist says. “I would think all the different types of therapy must have been very confusing.”

“Yeah, with all the transference and countertransference, sometimes I don’t know whether I’m the patient or the doctor,” Streisand says and then proceeds to show a series of clips from her own films in which she plays analyst and patient in alternating roles. She concludes, “I don’t care if you’re the patient or the doctor, relationships are difficult to have. I guess the only good thing about unrequited love is that it’s been the inspiration for some of the greatest songs ever written,” like the one by Gershwin she proceeds to sing.

“One of the nice things about growing older is realizing that you can survive life’s disappointments,” she says. “And you also realize that you cannot look to someone else for your happiness. Of course, that screws up the songs you can sing. You know, you can’t sing those dependent victim songs anymore with the same conviction…. But there are songs that you can sing and really mean, after many hours of therapy.” And she breaks into, “On a clear day, rise and look around you, and you see who you are.”

No doubt, she had come into the best of a good analysis where love and work are united. One might wish she would have used the word psychoanalysis. But, besides the props and the many inferences, “transference and countertransference” were words enough. It looked like analysis, it sounded like analysis, and, in fact, it was analysis. So, I’ll place my faith in what Bettelheim and Rosenfeld called “The Art of the Obvious” (1993), something that any apprentice analyst needs to learn — to trust the seen as well as the unseen.

That Streisand both wrote and directed Barbra: The Concert warrants further applause for the behind-the-scenes work of analysis, where the patient conceives herself anew and directs that self in a new way, with the voice of the analyst behind her, who says that it’s okay to speak up, to sing out, and to be heard.

Barbra is a celebration of the triumph of the couch. And for Streisand, that means more than being “truly, the greatest vocalist around,” as Marvin Hamlisch, musical director for the concert, said of her. It’s also her presence, which is to say, her personality. Maybe Streisand’s is the story of the creative possibilities of the couch. As many of the best stories on stage, in film, and on the page are told through what seems to be dramatic expressions of ordinary life, Streisand’s story may represent the extreme of the many fears that bring one to the couch and also keep one away from the couch with the complaint, “It takes too long.” What sent her to the couch? Fear for her life after being threatened in 1967 when she was politically outspoken. And for those who still believe analysis “takes too long” to be helpful, ask yourself, after

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you see her performance (rent the video), was it worth the 27 years she took to make it back to the stage?

Psychoanalysis has been so aptly referred to as “the talking cure,” from its very first patient, Anna O., who first spoke the phrase. It has become a process that strives to free up the will and the voice to speak and even to sing again — to trust that life will not be taken away when patient rises again, but rather will be shared as it was first shared on the couch. At the end of the concert, Streisand reveals, “I’ve learned a lot. I’ve conquered some of my fears even….,” giving witness that patient remains as analyst, still human and still afraid at times, but no longer paralyzed, and able to act.

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