Eugene O’Neill’s Psychodynamics (book review)

Review of Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. ISBN 0300076762, pp. xxi + 524, $29.95.

Stephen A. Black’s biography of the playwright Eugene O’Neill sets a new standard for psychobiography, calling literary criticism back to the experiential origin of art. As America’s leading dramatist, O’Neill (1888-1953) received the Pulitzer Prize and won international recognition with the Nobel Prize for Literature. His theme was family dynamics, with plays typically examining persons in close relationships who are denied fulfillment by the limiting influences of parents and siblings. Black shows decisively how such powerful and enduring dramas as Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) arose from O’Neill’s fractured childhood which he tried to understand and heal. The Tyrone family of the play is a reworked version of O’Neill’s, although, as Black shows, the “autobiographical themes were usually so well disguised that they were seldom suspected to be that, even by close friends” (p. 258). It was O’Neill’s

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genius to give audiences seemingly universal meanings about families from the particular pathology of his own. O’Neill was steeped in the psychoanalysis of his day, to which Black brings the biography new psychoanalytic sophistication.

Stephen Black is a professor of English literature trained in psychoanalysis, the right credentials to make a striking contribution to O’Neill studies. O’Neill has other skilled biographers, and psychoanalytic critics such as Albert Rothenberg and Bennett Simon (both psychiatrists) have written insightfully about the plays as they deal with unconscious conflicts. Black seldom considers such work, preferring to pursue a different psychobiographical line: that of the loss-repair theory of creativity.

I was startled to find that Black had drawn upon my Loss and Symbolic Repair: A Psychological Study of Some English Poets (1977) to orient his thinking about O’Neill. (My book could not find an academic publisher. It was published in typescript, limiting circulation, but had favorable reviews and citations in other books.) Black also draws upon its sequel, Creativity as Repair: Bipolarity and its Closure (1982). The loss-repair theory of creativity is fully stated on pp. 212-213 of Eugene O’Neill and developed throughout the book. Black writes, “Whether or not he understood it as a general psychoanalytic idea, O’Neill intuitively grasped that people who themselves are still dependent cannot complete the process of mourning” (p. 344) and “For decades a loss or change had driven him inside, where he would spin out of himself something he could put into the world to restore what was damaged or missing” (p. 479).

Up to a point the loss-as-repair theory of creativity is helpful in understanding O’Neill’s motivation, but Black sees its limitation for a full account of his creativity. O’Neill did not suffer early loss of parent(s), as did the poet subjects of Loss and Symbolic Repair. Indeed, Marvin Eisenstadt et al see O’Neill as more affected by chronic illness than by parental loss (Parental Loss and Achievement, pp. 62, 304). Yet Black contends that “O’Neill spent most of his writing life in mourning” (p. xvi). Temperamentally he was unusually susceptible to the ordinary losses and setbacks of persons around him, of which there were many. However, the most fateful loss affecting O’Neill was his mother’s of her father, leaving her developmentally impaired — she simply could not give consistent care as a mother (see p. 130). After Eugene’s birth she became addicted to morphine (for which he blamed himself) and she was either narcissistically remote or intrusive with her growing sons. In a sense, O’Neill “lost” his mother to the drug, but there is more to the story. Their affectionate father, an actor, could not compensate for disorganized mothering. This leads Black to introduce “Oedipal” theory to assist with reconstructing the troubled family.

But isn’t it “Jocasta Mothering” he needs? The psychoanalyst Mathew Besdine’s “The Jocasta Complex, Mothering and Genius” (Parts I and II, Psychoanalytic Review 55, 1968) brilliantly reconsiders Freud to show the prevalence of intrusive, domineering, and controlling mothering in males who become both obsessively conflicted and creative. These boys fear emotional overloading in later relations with women, much as they experienced it with their mothers. They may be confused as to gender and are typically anxious with women, defensively exerting counter-control. It was this model I tested with five modern novelists in Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction (1996). I believe that the “Jocasta Mothering” model, incorporating the loss-repair theory, would have served Black’s reconstruction of O’Neill, whose depression was complicated by suicidal impulses, heavy drinking, violent outbreaks wrecking things, and inconstant relations with many women, including divorces.

Was Eugene O’Neill traumatically seduced by his mother, or at least sexually overstimulated? Black is well aware of the possibility, as he points out the theme of maternal seduction turning up forcefully in the plays (pp. 307-308). O’Neill feared maternal engulfment, sometimes hated his mother, and came to believe that she was incapable of selfless love. But as often happens in psychobiography, evidence of early attachment experience is not enough for certainty. It is, however, made clear that Eugene’s early childhood care was partially by a nursemaid, whereas his elder brother, unrelieved of his mother’s moods, was unable to marry and died tragically. We are left wondering why, after his mother’s death, “her image remained in Eugene’s mind as an object of obsessive reflection and compulsive writing…” (p. 280). Writing Long Day’s Journey into Night allowed O’Neill to end obsessive mourning for his mother, and this masterpiece was made possible by writing More Stately Mansions.

Eugene O’Neill is an immensely rewarding book for those looking for an explanation of a great

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writer’s motivation. Psychoanalysis is used consistently, with unfailing aptness and feeling for its subject. Also expert in the history of drama, Black places O’Neill’s achievement in the context of tragedy. Producers of O’Neill’s plays will be well served by this psychobiography. Readers may end up exhausted by O’Neill’s struggles to overcome false adaptations to childhood traumas, but there is a growing sense of art as healing which raises this account above the dour conclusions of Bennett Simon, for instance. O’Neill was a truth-seeker who sooner or later welcomed whatever brief analyses, and life-long self-analysis, brought him. He said that he had been “born without a skin,” for which there is no repair, no rebirth. Black never suggests that creativity changes past defects of attachments, but he shows movingly how O’Neill’s anxiety themes aggregated, organized themselves as art, and brought coherence to a life of otherwise unintelligible suffering.

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