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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 R&NK, IBSEN, AND O ’NEILL: BIRTH TRAUMA AND CREATIVE WILL IN SELECTED DRAMAS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Maureen Prances Voigt, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1992 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Katherine H. Burkman Morris Beja Adviser Jon Erickson Department of English Copyright by Maureen Frances Voigt DEDICATION To my late father Charles McCarthy, who first told me about The Iceman Cometh, and to my dear husband Frank Voigt, who made it possible for me to write about it. 11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express sincere appreciation to Dr. Katherine H. Burkman for her insights, guidance, understanding, and patience throughout my project. Thanks also to the other members of my advisory committee, Drs. Morris Beja and Jon Erickson, for their suggestions and comments. To my dear children, I give you heartfelt thanks for many years of love and support. Ill VITA Oct. 25, 1931 ....................Born; Bronx, N.Y. 1978 .......................... B.A., Ohio Dominican College 1984 ............................ M.A., Ohio State University Fall, 1987-Spring, 1988 ......... Taught Freshman Composition at Ohio State 1988 to p r e s e n t ................. Attended Ohio State PUBLICATIONS "A Structural Analysis of an Irish Mumming PLay." Roomer. 6 (1986): 35-39. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English IV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION........................................... II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................Ill VITA.................................................. IV CHAPTER PAGE I . INTRODUCTION 1 II. HENRIK IBSEN 26 III. BRAND. 40 IV. ROSMERSHOLM 83 V. THE MASTER BUILDER 117 VI. EUGENE O'NEILL 155 VII. DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS 172 VIII. THE ICEMAN COMETH 206 IX. CONCLUSION 248 WORKS CITED....................................... 263 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I see the creator impulse as the life impulse made to serve the individual will. (Otto Rank, Art and Artist 39) I have been inspired by that which, so to speak, stood higher than my everyday self, and I have been inspired by this because I wanted to confront it and make it part of myself. (Henrik Ibsen, Letters. 151) I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred skyl I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! (Eugene O'Neill, Long Dav's Journey into Night 153) The father of modern drama, Henrik Ibsen and his American counterpart, Eugene O'Neill believed that there is an elusive element in life that enhances one's spiritual awareness. As artists, they strove to express this element in their writings. In this way, they would capture the essence of this mysterious substance and use it to enhance their own lives. The workings of the unconscious mind may have been the "inscrutable force" that drove Ibsen 2 and O'Neill to creative expression. Often, the force would reveal itself in sea imagery as is seen in the above quote from O'Neill and in Ibsen's Rosmersholm (1886). This study aims to show how Otto Rank's birth trauma and creative will theories are useful guides to exploring the psychology of the unconscious in selected dramas of Ibsen and O'Neill. In 1924, Rank published his work. The Trauma of Birth, in which he posits that human anxiety is caused by the psychological trauma which each individual experiences in the birth process. By this he means that we all suffer psychologically from being thrust into the world and outside the warmth and protection of the womb. Rank also believes, paradoxically, that throughout life individuals both yearn to return to the womb but because of their painful expulsion at birth, also fear regression to it. Torn between wanting to return to a pleasurable situation and fearing to repeat a traumatic event, the neurotic individual is often immobilized and cannot go forward to a normal life free of birth trauma anxiety. Nor can he or she go backwards to the womb either. Rank divides birth trauma fear further by his classification of it into "life" and "death" fears. On the one hand, the individual fears "separation from the whole" or fear of life, which means "fear of individuation" or fear of standing on one's own (Will Therapy 124). Conversely, a person fears death or "being dissolved again into the whole" 3 and the loss of selfhood (WT 124). Rank thinks that in order to lead normal lives, people must solve the dilemma of being unable to move backward or forward psychologically. They must f.ind a way to halt their regression toward a womblike state as well as relieve the painful memories associated with their withdrawal from it. They also must feel confident about their place in the world. In Rank's view, a neurotic is someone whose psychic life transpires exclusively within his or her own ego (WT 154). Unlike "average," well-adjusted people, neurotics are unable to overcome their various innate fears because their psychical development was arrested at an infantile stage. Sometimes neurotics' unhappy recollections are repressed in the form of anxietv dreams and illusions (Rank, TB. 54,69). However, neurotics often can surmount these subconscious reminders of the birth trauma through psychoanalysis, by which they relive the birth experience and project their anxieties onto a therapist. In effect, neurotics make conscious their unconscious regressive impulses and thus alleviate the mental anguish associated with the primal event. Previously, neurotics turned their worries inward on themselves; through therapy, they objectify them. Primal memories are also re-enacted positively by sexual activity, which Rank considers as a "partial return" to the womb (TB 188). However, although sex "most nearly approaches the primal situation," it does not "completely 4 re-establish it in the infantile meaning" (TB 29). Rank also views sex as somewhat akin to death because it involves a giving of oneself (g% 128). In this he follows his mentor Sigmund Freud, who once saw an analogy between sex and death. Freud first thought that the sex instinct is one in which an organism tends "toward the restoration of an earlier state of things" (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 31). Unlike Rank's study, however, Freud's does not posit any longing for the primal mother in such regressions. Later in his study, Freud repudiated his position and declared he might have overemphasized the "significance" of instincts (BEE 33). Because of her connection with pleasure, anxiety and with death (as that is the only way one can return to a womblike environment). Rank identifies "the mother as the original locus of both comfort (the womb) and of distress (birth)" (Lieberman 222). A negative result of fear of the mother has been the denigration of female power by patriarchal society. Because they practiced "the most intense repression of the mother principle," Rank blames the Greeks, the forerunners of Western civilization, for the father's displacement of the mother as an influential force in cultural development ($g.129). The Greeks, unlike various matriarchal cultures of Asia Minor, not only failed to idealize the mother but saw in her "the evil Under-God who brings children into the world thus 5 compelling them continously to endure the brth trauma" (Rank, SB. 126). In addition. Rank recognizes Freud's theory put forth in Totem and__Taboo. that "the father-God has been put in place of the primal mother," in order to "create and guarantee social organization" in other words, to prevent incest (SB 126). The modern post-Freudian, Jacques Lacan, also acknowledges "The Law of the Father" because "the child is disturbed in its libidinal relation with the mother, and must begin to recognize in the figure of the father that a wider familial and social network exists of which it is only part" (Eagleton 165). Moreover, Lacan accepts the female's role as one that merely "mirrors" the man's life, whereas Rank abhors the imposition of the "masculine way of life upon woman, both individually and collectively" (Bevond Psychology 235).