The Pieta Lamentation of an Albee Play

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

“The function of art is to make people better.” - playwright Edward Albee

At the end of the Edward Albee play that we recently saw at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Canada, “The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?”, Stevie, a wife and mother, came out cradling the goat named Sylvia that she had just killed. It reminded my wife of the artistic Pieta, where Jesus is being mourned on the lap of the Virgin Mary. Her insight was confirmed by other viewers. Among other literal and figurative interpretations could be that it stood for sacrificing something.

The play portrays one of the extremes of human behavior. An award-winning architect, in what appears to be an ideal marriage, falls in love and has sex with a goat. He did try a bit of group therapy along the way. When his wife finds out, she is devastated, and failing in any apparent understanding and compassion, slaughters the goat. A rosy family portrait turns bloody red. A Greek-like tragedy with humor, it won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2002 and was nominated for a Pulitzer in 2003.

Thinking about it ever since, I might suggest that it is also a variation of the ancient Greek Oedipus myth and Freud’s subsequent emphasis on the Oedipal conflict where, simplistically speaking, the son and father are in conflict for the mother. Here, the father takes on an animal love and the son at first runs to his mother’s aid, to be followed by a tender embrace and kiss on the lips of his father.

We do know that human sex with animals has always occurred to some extent. Anyone who has worked in a prison, as I have, probably has especially encountered that and other extremes of carried out human desire. The worst I experienced was a patient in my medium security men’s prison who was obsessed with dead human bodies and would go to any means to find one. He was the first and only person that I ever deemed “evil,” unable to make any other diagnostic explanation, as I discussed in an article for Psychiatric Times on March 22, 2010, titled “Wrestling with Evil in Prison Psychiatry.”

Unfortunately, we are in a time of substantial sacrificing of the innocent: just recently in the COVID-19 pandemic, in the wars, in the rising mental disorders and suicidality of our youth, and in the victims of what I call the social psychopathologies.

Perhaps the solutions are also in the play:

• Do not take superficial good well-being for granted, whether in personal or professional life.
• Keep in mind the consequences for others, especially loved ones, of fulfilling such extreme desires.
• Treatment can help with these extremes, but it cannot be brief or superficial.
• Grieving adequately, which does not happen in the play, is essential for psychological movement forward with resilience and strength after acute major loss.

We in psychiatry have the privilege to often be trusted with the darkest secrets of patients, but with the accompanying challenge to maintain our own well-being, given the risks of secondary trauma or burnout.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.