Rock Musical ‘Tommy’ Has Resonance in Real Life : Psychoanalysis: The work of French doctor Jacques Lacan supports the play’s basic story line.

The La Jolla Playhouse production of “Tommy” is not only a sensation, it is also a smashing portrayal of a traumatic event in a child’s life, an event so dramatic as to utterly and completely shut down his senses for almost 20 years.

Tommy’s father is called off to war shortly after Tommy’s conception, and later declared missing in action and most likely dead. Tommy’s mother mourns his loss, but with the passage of time becomes involved with another man. The traumatic event occurs when Tommy is about 4; his father suddenly reappears on the family scene, sees another man in the household who is clearly in love with his wife, struggles with him briefly, then shoots him. Tommy, who is looking at himself in a mirror in the same room during the whole of the scene, seems to become frozen in the mirror. His mother, immediately deciding to throw in her fate with that of her husband instead of lamenting the loss of her boyfriend, joins with her husband in insisting to Tommy: “You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it, you never heard it, not a word of it, you won’t say nothing to no one ever in your life. . . .”

Most observers would agree that such an event might well be traumatic for a 4-year-old, yet the casual spectator may find the event incommensurate with its effect: How could the trauma be so long-lasting? Psychoanalysis can answer that question, as long as we steer clear of such traditional American psychoanalytic accounts as the following:

A strange but not unfamiliar man (Tommy has surely seen his picture before and heard stories about him) struggles with and then shoots Tommy’s rival: his mother’s lover. As a true Oedipal son who loves his mother and hates those who compete with him for her affection, Tommy must identify with the stranger who carries out the deed he himself has always dreamed of accomplishing. Yet the stranger simultaneously becomes Tommy’s new rival. At the very moment at which Tommy’s wish for his rival’s death comes true, punishment is inflicted: a new rival is instated in the family triangle.

Such a traditional account can do no more than emphasize the maintenance in Tommy’s life of the Oedipal status quo: All of the family positions remain the same, despite the substitution of one father figure for another. Tommy will be obliged to give up one love/hate object (his mother’s lover) for another (his biological father), the only difference being that the second has shown that he is capable of killing his rivals if they do not bow out gracefully.

But to understand the truly traumatic nature of the scene portrayed in “Tommy,” and the overwhelming importance of the mirror in the staging of the play, we should look to the work of a French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan on “The Mirror Stage” (Ecrits, Norton, 1977). Indeed, I wondered whether Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff hadn’t in fact been reading Lacan’s work as they prepared their script.

The traumatic event--Tommy’s loss of sight, hearing and speech--occurs while Tommy gazes at himself in the mirror. According to Lacan, mirror images are involved in the development of a child’s sense of self. Without such a sense of self, a child can never learn to say “I” or speak of him or herself as a someone. As parents know, children have a hard time learning how to use the personal pronoun I . A sense of self has to develop before they are able to do so.

What happens to Tommy’s sense of self during the traumatic scene? His self-image--which had originally been positive and coherent--breaks down. His former sense of self shatters when he is confronted with his parents’ powerful new view of him as highly dangerous: He is someone who could, with one false move, one inadvertently uttered word, destroy his whole family forever.

Townshend and McAnuff imbue this scene with a momentum unsuspected by those familiar with the record, the volume growing to a moving crescendo as Tommy’s biological parents reunite in the urgent attempt to not merely silence Tommy, but to make him block out the whole affair: “You didn’t hear it, you didn’t see it . . . “ they sing ever more loudly and forcefully. Yet the self known as Tommy did see and hear it, and instead of blocking out the incident, he blocks himself out.

Tommy understands that to keep the family together, he must--according to his parents--sacrifice himself. Rather than give up his mother and his new father figure, he prefers to give up his precious seeing, hearing and speaking self. He thus paradoxically chooses to disappear in order to continue to be loved.

Yet Tommy remains fascinated by his former self-image, and even in his 20s imagines nothing in the mirror but his boyish reflection--the same image of innocence he saw so many years before in that very same mirror when his world exploded. Tommy’s mother eventually gets so frustrated with what she in some sense grasps to be Tommy’s fixation on that former self-image that she picks up a chair and shatters the mirror, forcing Tommy to really let go of his long-lost self.

In the play, Tommy rather miraculously develops a new sense of self almost instantaneously, whereas in reality this would normally take place over a period of several months or years. His mother’s desperate act was nevertheless necessary to put an end to his mourning of his old self, leaving the way clear for a new self-image to form.

The new self or “ego” that forms is just as much based on illusion as his old self had ever been, for the ego is by its very nature a distortion, an error and a bundle of misunderstandings. The mirror images that contribute to it are always false, as they are inverted.

But whereas the ego is based on illusion--forming, as it does, around errors and misunderstandings--it is nevertheless a necessary illusion, and the ego must be reconstructed in the case of a break as radical as Tommy’s.

In 1992, Townshend and McAnuff seem to agree that the kind of loss of self Tommy undergoes cannot provide a solution to anyone’s problems. Unlike Tommy’s 1969 counterpart, influenced no doubt by many of the Eastern religions that were all the rage in the 1960s and “ego-less” experiences induced by certain psychedelic drugs, the Tommy of the ‘90s refuses to preach shutting off your senses and switching on any kind of experience in which you “become one with the machine.” To the dismay of the crowd, he refuses to offer up a new panacea, a new master discourse with which to explain everything, a new religion at whose altar the faithful can sacrifice themselves; loss of self is not the answer to the quest. The quest goes on.