This study defines Blanche’s symptoms in Tennessee Williams’ representative work, A Streetcar Named Desire, as hysteria, a sub-structure of neurosis on the basis of Freud and Lacan’s mental explanation of the hysterical pathogenesis. Thus, this study sheds light on the memory of the events that caused Blanche’s symptoms and examines her ‘hysterical structure’ by analyzing the affect associated with the events. For that purpose, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, which understands hysteria as a symptom, a structure of psychosis, and a discourse, is applied to analyzing Blanche’s unconscious desire through Blanche’s discourse reflected in the work. By looking into how Blanche perceives the world, what she distorts, and in what context she understands events or the world through the psychoanalytic approach of Freud and Lacan, this study examines Blanche’s relationship with the ‘social structure’ and tracks the cause of her mental illness more fundamentally from the psychoanalytic perspective, away from many other critics’ simply thinking that her mental illness results from Blanche’s past subjective experiences resulting in a lot of symptoms.
Through this psychoanalytic approach to Blanche’s mental illness, this study confirms that Blanche has an illusion through the identification of ‘the Other’, called The Old South, where she grew up, and exhibits unique characteristics of desire through the series of fantasies and symptoms. In the end, it is her ‘hysterical structure,’ composed of her ‘unconscious desire’ that is the ‘mental structure,’ that causes a lot of stress and tension for Blanche. In conclusion, this study argues that Blanche’s excessive identification of “The Old South” is the fundamental cause of her mental problems.