A Self-Psychological Approach to O’Neill

Art is most useful to society when it reveals shared conflicts and fantasies, that is, when it discloses relational truths otherwise indistinct. (Or so it was held until post-modernism called in question our ability to know anything certain about an artist’s intentionality or construction of meaning.) The dramatist Eugene O’Neill was a master of making his “psychoclass” see and feel the painfully distorting relationships in families suffering from addictions and abusive parenting. O’Neill had a special ability to dramatize Freud’s Oedipus Complex, drawing from his own experience of enmeshment with mother and rivalry with father. From as early as Recklessness (1913) to the masterpieces such as Long Day’s Journey Into Night (first draft 1940) O’Neill affirmed Freud’s central thesis about the development of sexuality. Whether or not by systematic reading of Freud, O’Neill seized upon this central theme, assisted by analytic treatments he had with Smith Eli Jelliffe from 1921 to 1926 and with Gilbert V. Hamilton thereafter for marital strife, drinking, and depression.

O’Neill’s biographers and critics have turned from Freudian to post-Freudian theory. The most sensitive and insightful psychobiography is Stephen Black’s Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (reviewed in Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 7, No. 1, June, 2000, pp. 41-43). Black uses a loss-repair theory of O’Neill’s creative endeavor, relating the plays to well-documented traumatic events in the playwright’s early life and narrating his struggles with alcohol and women. Maria T. Miliora’s Narcissism, the Family, and Madness does much the same, and her findings reinforce Black’s. The difference is that she presents more formally the theory from which inferences are made, that of Heinz Kohut on the narcissistic personality. (As is well known, Kohut’s developmental theory is an important bridge between drive theory and object relations theory, devised by Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, and others in Britain and Harry Stack Sullivan in the United States. While affirming the importance of real-life relational influences, Kohut’s formulation does not forsake Freud’s as does the more radical empiricism of John Bowlby.) Miliora’s book has a brisk, clinical feel about it and may be read as much as a “Self-Psychology” primer as a study of O’Neil’s dramatic art. While readers will be grateful for her systematic ways, they may miss the biographical flow of Black’s writing.

Miliora’s discussion of how O’Neill’s plays illuminate the addictive personality is especially strong, and her remarks on his search for a secure home and family are welcome additions. She is also good on the intergenerational transmission of pathology, but the analysis of O’Neill’s probable Jocasta mothering takes us no further than Black’s. As is well known, O’Neill’s realization of his mother’s addiction to morphine, beginning at his birth, permanently upset their relations. But what accounts for anguished oedipal desire if not early sexual over-stimulation? We will never know, and probably mother and son did not fully know, what happened between them. Thus Kohut’s broad account of narcissistic pathology is appropriate for discussing O’Neill and his plays. The fine-tuning of an attachment theory analysis of mother and child is simply impossible since the psychobiographers of famous people are unlikely ever to have Adult Attachment Interview results to work with. Miliora’s is as thorough an application of Kohut’s theory to the production of great art as will be found. Kohut himself had seen the congruence of theory and art writing: “that O’Neill glued the ‘fragments of his broken self’ via the ‘creation of works of art’” (p. 150). But each new formulation of psychodynamic theory risks terminological overloading and premature closure of its boundaries. Readers of Miliora’s study will find much insight while risking “jargon fatigue.” In the longer run Kohut’s contributions will work their way smoothly into the critical possibilities which Miliora has opened so well.

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