The Psychoanalyzing of Eugene O'Neill

THE PSYCHOANALYZING OF EUGENE O'NEILL PART Two IN THIS SURVEY of the reputation of O'Neill as a psychoanalytical drama~ tist during the quarter century from about 1925 to about 1950, as reflected in the relatively brief treatments allowed in play and book reviews, in magazine articles, and in chapters of books on larger subjects, it should have become rather painfully evident that the majority of his critics felt that his capture by the school of "modem psychology," conscious or unconscious, had not, with some provocative exceptions, eventuated in his improvement as a playwright. But few of these critics had the space or perhaps the desire to go at all comprehensively into the subject. Only one critic between Miss Sparrow in 1930 and Mr. Engel and Miss Falk in the fifties took the trouble to do so. In two sections in his 1941 book, Intellectual America, entitled "The Primitives" and «The Freudians," but especially in the latter, Oscar Cargill offered some new and well-developed ideas on the presence of psychoanalytical material in O'Neill's plays. In the case of The Great God Brown he broke with the run of Freudian critics in maintaining that "Jung, rather than Aeschylus, illuminates" the play. In the Jungian psychology, he explained, the mask represents the persona or face that the Conscious offers to the world, with a corresponding mask for the Unconscious. Thus O'Neill showed the duality of his characters with their masks. But the masking and unmasking of the actors became so complicated that "the spectator, rather than the actor, needs a prompt book-an interlinear one (filled out from Jung) in order that he may understand the play." Granting that the assumptions of character were reasonable if one knew his new psychology, Cargill admitted that even if the analytical psychology of Jung is totally discarded, there yet remains a considerable interest in The Great God Brown, for the observation that we are all aliens to each other is an immutable fact. . . . . The fact that all types of Anthony, artists and mystics, are generally regarded by the American public and their own families as immature children is so just a stricture of the national intelligence that one regrets it is lost in the Freudian labyrinth of this play where only the Freudian archeologist and excavator can dig it out. The Great God Brown in some respects is an excellent social tract, just as, in others, it is a poor play....18 18. Cargill, p. 698. 357 358 MODERN DRAMA February In his laudatory treatment of Lazarus Laughed Cargill also stressed Jung and Nietzsche as well as Freud. "'Vith utter contempt to the naysayers we may pronounce Lazarus Laughed as much superior to all other dramatic conceptions in its day as were Faust, Han-det and Oedipus Rex" in theirs. Cargill decided that O'Neill had improved on the naming of his types of personalities over Jung's in his Psychological Types. Here O'Neill had reworked Jung's seven types-"(1) The Simple, Ignorant; (2) the Happy, Eager; (3) the Self-Tortured, Introspective; (4) the Proud, Self-Reliant; (5) the Servile, Hypocritical; (6) the Revengeful, Cruel; and (7) the Sorrowful, Resigned"-into his Judean, Athenian, and Roman crowds. Thus, Cargill felt, O'Neill had transcended the formulas of Jung to create this "theatrical masterpiece, one of the touchstones in dramatic art." But Cargill also saw "The Birth of Tragedy" reflected in the play: To us LazarusLaughed seems a better "tragedy" in the Nietzschean sense-a better combination of form and rhythm, of dreams and drunkenness, of the Apollonian and the Dionysian-than anything the philosopher cites. Undoubtedly the germinal idea for the play is Nietzsche's observation that "all the celebrated figures of the Greek Stage-Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus." Moreover, said Cargill, O'Neill was like both Nietzsche and Freud in denying the existence of evil and protesting that "there are only sickness and health," but unlike Nietzsche O'Neill had given to his "Dionysus" some Christian attributes, such as a belief that "Love is man's hopelove for life on earth." Nevertheless, in spite of his admiration for much of...