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.”)