The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill

THE PSYCHOANALYZING OF EUGENE O'NEILL 1 IT TOOK TIIE CRITICS a long time to make up their minds about Eugene O'Neill-perhaps because it took him so long to make up his mind about himself. The fact that even by the year of his death it was impossible to pick any single play of his and assert that it was a "typical" play may help to explain the uncertainty. For if one were to say that The Hairy Ape is a typical O'Neill play, there would be Beyond the Horizon to contradict him; if one were to choose Strange Interlude, Ah, Wilderness ! would refute him; if The Great God Brown, then where would Marco Millions fit into the picture? It was only after some years that the outlines of any pattern began to emerge. They were quite vague at first. Critics began to suspect that O'Neill was ona quest or search of some sort-not a very original sort of goal for a literary man, after all. They talked of values and illusions, of romance versus realism, of man's body and man's spirit, of poetry and the soul, of love versus hate, faith versus skepticism, life versus death. Slowly, however, certain names and certain terms began to creep into the reviews and books about the plays and their author. Some critics quickly denied their application and validity; others accepted their presence, but scorned their results; but eventually the following critical generation seized on them and made them the core of their analysis and evaluation. The situation was considerably confused by the fact that the playwright himself took the lead in rejecting the implications of this attitude and insisted on his personal and purely individual approach to the problems with which he faced his characters-usually with tragic, or at least disastrous, results. The question which inexorably pushed its way from the wings into the forestage of O'Neill criticism was this: To what extent was Eugene O'Neill to be regarded as a student and practitioner of the "new psychology ," as it was at first denominated? Was his interpretation of the motives and actions of most of his dramatis personae to be traced to the new "science" of psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as its high priests, and perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg as its John the Baptists, or did his understanding of his characters come basically from his own mind and soul, as he stoutly and consistently maintained? The problem was-and still is-a nice one. 242 1960 PSYCHOANALYZING OF O'NEILL 243 But perhaps some of the tangled skein can be partially unraveled. The first clear and traceable stirrings of a usually worried or hostile speculation about these psychoanalytical roots did not reach the surface until many years after O'Neill's short plays had appeared at Provincetown or in Greenwich Village and several years after the first of his long ones had risen to Broadway. The initial use of the actual term "psychoanalysis " as applied to O'Neill, however, was apparently made by the reviewer of Gold in the New York Evening Post for June 2,1921, when he remarked scathingly that the play was trite and incredible through its author's endeavors "to blend the realistic, psycho-analytic and purely sensational." No other early critic of the play adopted this approach, and the term remained neglected for several years. One of the first to resuscitate it and develop it at some length was T. H. Dickinson, who in 1925 wrote in his Playwrights at the New American Theatre: Given O'Neill's nature and interests he could not have lived through the second decade of the twentieth century without coming under the influence of psychoanalysis. His relation with this subject is typical of that of the better class of writers of our time. He appreciated the value of the new theory to the understanding of the mind of man. He was alive to the contributions it could make to the subject matter of plays. But the implications of the science itself were too widespread to be readily incorporated in the substance or...