'Way Down Yonder in Tenn.

Playwright Tennessee Williams, 43, whose work surges with all manner of violence, from rape (A Streetcar Named Desire) to homosexualism and cannibalism (Garden District), last week took Associated Press Columnist Hal Boyle on a tour of the Williams psyche, on which a psychoanalyst is at work five times a week at $50 an hour. Observed Playwright Williams: "I find it immensely stimulating."

His treatments, Williams said, are helping his old "claustrophobia and a fear of suffocation. It was so bad that for a long time, when I went for a walk, I couldn't walk down a street unless I could see a bar --not because I wanted a drink, but because I wanted the security of knowing it was there.

"The fear of a threat to his personal security is at the root of every person's violence and hatreds. Evil is merely a sickness--a psychic distortion. Education has to be revamped so as to cope with a student's basic psychic problems, and not merely teach him trigonometry or Latin. These problems begin early and if caught in time can be corrected--but not after they explode in violence. Then it is too late. Evil matured is hard to cure."

The main evil of the age? Says Bachelor Williams: "Overpopulation. I don't understand why nothing is done to stop this spawning of children in families that can't even afford to have one. It is a crime--an awful crime."

Williams is convinced that his own dramas are basically "more concerned with morality than most plays." So far, Tennessee's sessions on the couch have not noticeably lightened or sweetened his work. Title of the next play he has in mind for Broadway: Sweet Bird of Youth. The theme: "The corruption of a young man, the corruption of an older woman, and the corruption of an entire community by a political boss."

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