In every work, a psychological profile can be made to explain each character for each character has his own unique style. This is no different in Eugene O'Neill's play, Long Day's Journey into Night. In this play, the reader can see a Freudian psychoanalytical twist to each one of the main characters' personalities.
In Freudian psychology, more specifically his theory on psychoanalysis, the human psyche is broken into three different subsections: The first one is the superego. The super-ego is categorized as this:
· It gives [a person] the sense of right and wrong, pride and guilt (Snowden, 106).
· It often gets [a person] to act in ways that are acceptable to the society, rather than to the individual. For example, it might make a person feel guilty for having extra-marital sex. The super-ego incorporates the teachings of the past and of tradition, imparting a sense of morals (Snowden, 106).
· It monitors behaviour [sic], decides what is acceptable and controls taboo areas, by means of repression. The fact that a person may not be aware of this repression shows that parts of the super-ego can operate unconsciously. In fact, Freud says that large parts of both the ego and the super-ego are normally unconscious (Snowden, 106).
· It allows the ego to measure itself and strive towards ever-greater perfection (Snowden, 107).
· It is rather bossy, always demanding perfection of the ego. In fact, it can be quite severe with the poor ego, humiliating it, ill-treating it and threatening it with dire punishments. Freud observed this sort of thing in his melancholic patients (Snowden, 107).
With the above mentioned topic's being limpidly stated, the reader must now look at the three main characters to decide who most likely fits this role. If one were to parse each character's personality traits, he would most likely adduce that James Tyrone is the most apt to fit Freud's super-ego traits. He fits all of the aforementioned traits that make him suitable for this position.
Some reasons that make James Tyrone most apt to be Freud's superego exemplar is the way he carries himself throughout the whole play. Throughout the play, he seems lost and bewildered as to what is happening with his family. There is his wife, Mary, who is seemingly caught in a continual state of stereotypy, his eldest son, Jamie, has had a rough life going from college to college, and his son, Edmund, is dying of tuberculosis. Through all of the turmoil, though, he appears to be the glue that is holding his family together. One can get the sense that if it were not for him, his family would have fallen apart a long time ago. He appears to keep his wife, Mary in check—retrieving her from her lost thoughts throughout the play. For his son, Edmund, he is the somewhat prototypical father. He spends time with him while he is sick, trying to comfort him over his mother's debilitating disease while keeping Edmund afloat towards his own disease. They can be seen carousing at bars, cavorting over card games, and laughing about the house. His being, in essence, the glue that holds his family together is what makes him a perfect candidate for the super-ego.
As Paul Roazen so eloquently expresses to his reader:
The sense of inferiority has strong erotic roots. A child feels inferior if he notices that he is not loved, and so does an adult...But the major part of the sense of inferiority derives from the ego's relation to its superego; like the sense of guilt it is an expression of the tension between them. Altogether, it is hard to separate the sense of inferiority and the sense of guilt. It would perhaps be right to regard the former as the erotic complement to the moral sense of inferiority (Roazen, 209).
One might notice that Roazen's exegesis on the relation between the ego and super-ego seems to typify the relationship between James and Edmund in the novel. Roazen claims that the "sense of guilt" is an expression of tension between the ego and super-ego. If one were to look at James' colloquies with Edmund , he would see that James is somewhat surreptitiously trying to convey a sense of guilt upon Edmund for his mother's woes even though the audience may notice James' trying to console and counsel his son. This sense of guilt is unconsciously stoking Edmund and thus keeping him afloat. In essence, James, the super-ego incognito, is laying a foundation of guilt upon the de facto ego, Edmund. This is entirely the job of the super-ego—"the part of [oneself] that tells [the person] what is right and what is wrong and judges [his] behaviour [sic] accordingly" (Snowden, 106).
The second part of Freud's psychology is the id, which is derived from the Latin word meaning, "it". "The id is the primitive, unconscious part of the mind that [a person is] born with" (Snowden, 104). The id can be categorized as being "disorganized and illogical in nature, and much of its content is negative and selfish. It can make no value judgements [sic]—it is completely amoral" (Snowden, 104).
With the above being said, the reader can infer that Mary Tyrone is Edmund's id—it is she who is the voice in Edmund's head—the aggressor—the voice in his head that starts undeniably to wear him down over time.
As Rudolph Steiner states, "The unconscious ignores all the scruples the conscious mind cannot disregard. The unconscious takes the attitude that 'the end justifies the means,' whether they harmonize with our ideas of propriety and morality or not" (Steiner, 60). In other words, the id is the dark side of a person's consciousness. It is the side that is hedonistic in nature—it is the pleasure-seeker—the part of the mind that is only concerned with itself.
Mary Tyrone is the dark side throughout this play. She single-handedly is wearing her family down right in front of the audience. Her cynicism and panic-stricken thought process causes her family much undue stress. Her actions are wearing away the glue [James, the super-ego] that is holding them together.
Snowden further buttresses Freud's argument by stating:
Because the id has no concept of time it contains impulses and impressions that may have arisen from events that occurred decades before but which still affect the person as if they were happening in the present. These can only be recognized as belonging to the past when they are made conscious by the work of analysis. Only then can they lose their importance and stop affecting the person's thinking and behaviour [sic] (Snowden, 104).
If one were to look at Mary Tyrone, he would see that, throughout the play, she is living in the past. In fact, it appears she has no concept of the past at all, which only further buttresses the argument that she is the id. She continually talks about the theater and how she has always loved her husband, but if she had known then what she knows now, she would have never married him. This is common behavior of Freud's id.
The final part of Freud's psychology of psychoanalysis is the ego, which is derived from the Latin word for "I". The ego is the part of the mind that reacts to external reality and which a person thinks of as the 'self' (Snowden, 105). Freud explains that the ego can be categorized as such:
· The ego tells us what is real. It is a synthesizer—it helps us combine ideas and make sense of things.
· It is practical and rational, involved in decision making.
· Anxiety arises from the ego. This is seen as a mechanism for warning us that there is a weakness somewhere in the ego's defences [sic].
· The ego can observe itself—in fact, in a number of its functions it can split temporarily and then come together again afterwards.
· A whole system of unconscious defence [sic] mechanisms protects the ego. These are involuntary or unconscious ways of protecting the ego from undesirable feelings and emotions.
· The ego is seen as being rather weak in comparison with the id, but it is better organized and more logical, so that it usually maintains a tenuous upper hand (Snowden, 105).
After looking at this explanation of the function of the ego and comparing it to Edmund, the reader should start to actualize that Edmund is the one being controlled by his personalities (James and Mary) throughout this entire play. If the reader were to examine closely Freud's argument that the ego (Edmund) is weak in comparison with the id (Mary), he would notice that this might be the reason that Edmund continues to be vexed throughout the whole play by his mother and her illness, even more so than his own.
In the end, though, Edmund is better organized and more logical in his thought process so he continues to maintain an upper hand, however slim it might be, over his id. This is crucial to Edmund's survival from his own disease because, were he to wear down from vexation, his immune system would as well, thus he would die even faster from his ailment.
When everything is all said and done, it is important to realize that each character has his own psychological propensities, thus giving him his own unique flavor in a piece of work. With that said, it must be known that Freud cannot always be used to explain a character's tendencies—it really is all in the mind.
Works Cited
Psychology 101. AllPsych Online. AllPsych and Heffner Media Group, Inc, 1999-2003.
Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1975.
Snowden, Ruth. Freud. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2006.
Steiner, Rudolf. Freud, Jung, & Spiritual Psychology. Anthroposophic Press, Inc, 2001.
Wollheim, Richard. Sigmund Freud. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.
No comments:
Post a Comment