The most charming fact I have stumbled on in intellectual history is that Freud and Shaw were shocked by one another. Freud's wounded romanticism speaks in his reference (in Group Psychology, 1921) to 'Bernard Shaw's malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another.' If I am right in supposing that what he had in mind is one of the speeches Undershaft addresses to Cusins at the climax of Major Barbara, 'Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another,' then Freud has performed a little secondary elaboration. In substance it is fair. The 'being in love' is extrapolated from the dramatic context, where Cusins is indeed in love. But in giving the words the formal and impersonal turn of an aphorism Freud suppresses the dramatic characterisation, including that of Undershaft as the Prince of Darkness, and attributes to Shaw himself both the supposed aphorism and its supposed taint of the 'malicious'.

LRB 2 December 1982 | PDF Download