
 
 
 <%)J
 
 NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE MONOGRAPH SERIES No. 34 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE 
 
 DRAMA 
 
 BY 
 SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, M.D. 
 
 AND 
 
 LOUISE BRINK, A.B. 
 
 OF NEW YORK 
 
 NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE 
 PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON 
 1922
 
 NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE 
 MONOGRAPH SERIES 
 
 , Edited by 
 
 Drs. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE and WM. A. WHITE 
 Numbers Issued 
 
 x. Outlines of Psychiatry. (8th Edition.) $4.00. By Dr. William A. White. 
 
 2. Studies in Paranoia. (Out of Print.) By Drs. N. Gierlich and M. Friedman. 
 
 3. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. (Out of Print.) By Dr. C. G. Jung. 
 
 4. Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses. (3d Edition.) $3.00. 
 
 Prof. Sigmund Freud. 
 
 5. The Wassermann Serum Diagnosis in Psychiatry. $2.00. By Dr. Felix Plaut. 
 
 6. Epidemic Poliomyelitis. New York, 1907. (Out of Print.) 
 
 7. Three Contributions to Sexual Theory. (2d Edition.) $2.00. By Prof. Sigmi 
 
 Freud. 
 
 8. Mental Mechanisms. (Out of Print.) By Dr. Wm. A. White. 
 
 9. Studies in Psychiatry. (Out of Print.) New York Psychiatrical Society. 
 
 10. Handbook of Mental Examination Methods. (Out of Print.) By Shepherd Iv 
 
 Franz. 
 
 11. The Theory of Schizophrenic Negativism. $1.00. By Prof essor E. Bleuler. 
 
 12. Cerebellar Functions. $3.00. By Dr. Andre-Thomas. 
 
 13. History of Prison Psychoses. $1.25. By Drs. P. Nitsche and K. Wilmanns. 
 
 14. General Paresis. $3.00. By Prof. E. Kraepelin. 
 
 15. Dreams and Myths. (Out of Print.) By Dr. Karl Abraham. 
 
 16. Poliomyelitis. $3.00. By Dr. I. Wickmann. 
 
 17. Freud's Theories of the Neuroses. (Out of Print.) By Dr. E. Hitschmann. 
 
 18. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero. $1.00. By Dr. Otto Rank. 
 
 19. The Theory of Psychoanalysis. (Out of Print.) By Dr. C. G. Jung. 
 
 20. Vagotonia. $1.00. (3d Edition.) By Drs. Eppinger and Hess. 
 
 21. Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales. $1.00. By Dr. Ricklin. 
 
 22. The Dream Problem. (Out of Print.). By Dr. A. E. Maeder. 
 
 23. The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences. $1.50. By Drs. 
 
 Rank and D. H. Sachs. 
 
 24. Organ Inferiority and its Psychical Compensation. $2.00. By Dr. Alfred Adlet. 
 
 25. The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. $1.00. By Prof. S. Freud. 
 
 26. Technique of Psychoanalysis. (26 Edition.) $2.50. By Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe. 
 
 27. Vegetative Neurology. $2.50. By Dr. H. Higier. 
 
 28. The Autonomic Functions and the Personality. $2.50. By Dr. Edward J. Kemp] 
 
 29. A Study of the Mental Life of the Child. $2.00. By Dr. H. Von Hug-Hellmuth. 
 
 30. Internal Secretions and the Nervous System. $1.00. By Dr. M. Laignel La vast i 
 
 31. Sleep Walking and Moon Walking. $2.00. By Dr. J. Sadger. 
 
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 34. Psychoanalysis and the Drama. By Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D., and Louise Bri; 
 
 Price $3.00. 
 
 Copyright, 1922, by 
 
 NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 3617 loth St. N. W., Washington, D. C.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The function of life is to live and to live more abundantly. 
 Every agency created by life should be a servant to this end. Lit- 
 erature is not the least of such agencies, providing as it does inter- 
 pretations of the hidden meanings of life and giving ever new 
 groupings of the forces of life for the carrying out of its great 
 function. The drama as a special form of literature strikingly 
 performs this double service. It penetrates with a particular di- 
 rectness into the meanings of life. It presents clearly objectified 
 situations in which the inner nature of man finds a reaction which 
 his emotional need may grasp and make its own. Man finds a 
 stimulus to a solution of conflicts which brings him to a new 
 adjustment of his unconscious forces. 
 
 This is not a matter primarily for intellect. It has equally to 
 do with the unconscious affective life. Situations which present 
 merely patterns or warnings to intellect are coldly rejected. Art 
 creates them with a deeper relationship, that of sympathetic identi- 
 fication with subjective needs. Thus the drama releases the feel- 
 ing into an intuitive freedom with itself far more profoundly effec- 
 tive than mere intellectual understanding of the dramatized situ- 
 ation. Then it enlists these released impulses in a new synthesis 
 for a higher sublimation. 
 
 Intellect is not entirely excluded, however, from this psycho- 
 therapeutic service of the drama. The release of the forces and 
 their more lasting synthesis into fuller opportunities are best at- 
 tained when intellect obtains a wider view of the factors involved, 
 of the difficulties which multiply themselves about the active life 
 forces, the conflicts into which they fall. It has its place in the 
 synthesis emotionally effected as guide to the ends which really 
 promote the great function of life. 
 
 Psychoanalysis seeks to enlarge the extent of intellectual knowl- 
 edge and control of the unconscious mental life. It therefore 
 welcomes the drama as an important means toward this end. It 
 
 iii
 
 IV INTRODUCTION 
 
 delights to cooperate with its more intuitively effected service by 
 searching into the revelations of the drama, into the means by 
 which it accomplishes its psychotherapeutic results. It attempts to 
 bring these functioning elements of the drama more clearly into 
 the field of intellect in order to render more definite and durable 
 the emotional effect. 
 
 The studies here presented are examinations of a few of the 
 dramas presented upon our stage in recent years. They are not 
 complete analyses of the plays. They are suggestions rather along 
 the line of the fuller service which the drama itself accomplishes. 
 They seek to put into the more precise form of conscious statement 
 the conflicts, the defeats, the solutions which constitute the uncon- 
 scious material out of which dramas are woven. It is hoped that 
 they will serve both to make these human problems clearer and to 
 stimulate interest in the drama as a representation and substitute 
 solution of such problems. 
 
 These studies were published from time to time in separate form. 
 This separate publication made necessary a certain amount of 
 explanation with each paper. This produces a certain amount of 
 repetition when the papers now appear together. It has seemed 
 advisable nevertheless to permit them to stand in their original 
 form. It is hoped that the repetition will not detract from the 
 interest in the group as a whole, while it will make of each chapter 
 a distinct study to be consulted if need be by itself. 
 
 The authors would express appreciation for cooperation on the 
 part of dramatist or producer in making available manuscripts of 
 the plays and for other courtesies shown. 
 
 SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, 
 LOUISE BRINK 
 NEW YORK, April, 1922
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION iii 
 
 CHAPTER I. The Drama and Psychotherapy I 
 
 CHAPTER II. " Magic," and the Unconscious 12 
 
 CHAPTER III. Visions of the Future. " Eyes of Youth " 25 
 CHAPTER IV. Phantasy Compensation through Dreams: 
 
 Peter Ibbetson 44 
 
 CHAPTER V. Alcoholism and the Phantasy Life. Tol- 
 stoi's Redemption 59 
 
 CHAPTER VI. The Meeting of Extremes. The Army 
 
 with Banners 78 
 
 CHAPTER VII. Compulsion and Freedom. The Willow 
 
 Tree 94 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. The Natural Path of Sublimation. The 
 
 Yellow Jacket 112 
 
 CHAPTER IX. The Healing Function of the Dream. 
 
 Dear Brutus 130 
 
 CHAPTER X. The Jest: The Destruction Wrought by 
 
 Hate 150
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE DRAMA AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 1 
 
 The drama has always been an important handmaid of culture, 
 and in every age of human history its development has kept 
 pace with that of culture. Its direct appeal to the senses, as 
 well as its growing intellectual and artistic value, have made it 
 always a leader of the thought of the race and of its form of 
 expression. It has stimulated the people, educated them, directed 
 their religious aspirations, and has served for their amusement 
 and recreation. So well has it done the latter that the danger 
 has increased of forgetting that these in themselves are con- 
 ventional terms for something deeper and more significant. This 
 is something that lies in the mental life below the surface and 
 gives to the drama in its very function of amusement and 
 recreation a far more serious purpose for which it intrinsically 
 stands. 
 
 The drama, through its artistic setting as well as through its 
 emotional character, its closeness to the actual events of life and 
 to the impulses which move beneath these, is particularly fitted 
 to serve humanity, whether it appears in its serious or its lighter 
 moods. It stands in all times and no less in these later more 
 sophisticated times for a safe and ready avenue of release of 
 otherwise overcharged emotions, the outlet for which is neg- 
 lected or too severely restrained. 
 
 It also permits a constructive representation of these emotions. 
 It may be called instructive because life cannot proceed healthily 
 and effectively without becoming once more better acquainted 
 with the sum of emotions which are too well concealed in their 
 real nature from the busy life in which intellect and reason 
 tend to confine themselves. The drama presents therefore a 
 
 * Printed in the Medical Record, Aug. 26, 1916, under the title The 
 Physician and Psychotherapy. 
 
 I
 
 2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 most needful, practical lesson. Such emotions are only repressed, 
 they are not annihilated, nor are they given sufficient outlet in 
 useful work in our hurried and strained activities. Conversely 
 also our attempts at work remain hurried and strained because of 
 the partly conscious suppression and the more largely unconscious 
 repression of all these emotions. The hours at the theater should 
 therefore greatly relieve the strain of repression and they should 
 moreover furnish food for further thoughtful speculation and 
 awaken the sense of recognition of these inner vital factors. 
 Through such hours there is possible better acquaintance with 
 the vast emotional life which lies beneath the far narrower ra- 
 tional life and is therefore largely master of it. Wiser, calmer 
 and more effective use and control of this underlying dynamic 
 life and its impulses for the purposes and ends of reason and 
 intellect result from becoming conversant with this emotional 
 or affective life and its conflicts, its striving for expression, the 
 successes or the disasters which may result and the methods by 
 which all this activity takes place. 
 
 The cultural value of the drama has been acknowledged in 
 the past in various well defined ways. It also receives fresh 
 acknowledgment in the aspirations today of educational and 
 other cultural spheres. Beneath all this however is a still broader 
 and deeper meaning in the drama and also in kindred forms of 
 expression. This may be defined as a psychologically applicable 
 value, one which deals directly with the emotion which constitutes 
 the greater part of the life of man, and through this with man's 
 interests and activities in every sphere in their most fundamental 
 and vital significance. The drama and other such forms of art 
 reach the dynamic force, the energy, the expression and activity 
 of which makes individual character, and thus they aid in its 
 understanding and better building and control. Psychological 
 approach to the drama is that which seeks to reach, through the 
 drama's special artistic pathway, into the energic nature of man- 
 kind and draw therefrom better understanding of human life in 
 its individual and social needs and activities, in order to aid in 
 the attainment of better use of the inner force of life for these 
 individual and social ends.
 
 THE DRAMA AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 3 
 
 The effort to understand the drama from such a point of view 
 and the inner meaning thus discovered ought to be of interest 
 to those who especially minister to the psychical needs of the 
 individual and society and are conscious of the problematic char- 
 acter of such needs. Perhaps the physician feels most keenly 
 the need of some such aid in grasping inner problems. At any 
 rate he would first acknowledge the value of any investigation 
 into the psychic factors represented in the drama or other work 
 of art, which throws clearness into the obscurity and maze of 
 mental disturbances. 
 
 Psychology and medicine are coming more and more to rec- 
 ognize that mental disturbance is a thing of degree and not 
 of kind in its separation from so-called normality, and that the 
 term disturbance may be applied relatively to the varying man- 
 ifestations known as poor adjustment, discontentment, ill success, 
 unhappiness, " nervousness " in short, to the mental attitude and 
 mental expression of all members of society at any place and 
 time as well as to the states of those who are markedly ill. If 
 this is a correct viewpoint, then the study of these disturbances 
 of varying degrees is one and the same and the representation 
 of mental problems in art should be found to stand in the service 
 of the whole of society. 
 
 The privilege of the drama is to represent in lighter or more 
 serious form the mental activities always at work forming the 
 little peculiarities of life or its greater disturbances, its smaller 
 triumphs and its more distinguished successes. The tragedies of 
 the drama are those of actual life, and the somber real tragedies 
 of mental disease may be given through the drama no less ac- 
 tuality or profundity of meaning because represented and 
 softened by the touch of an imaginative setting and an artistic 
 treatment. The very phantasy form in which such are presented 
 is the product of this same mental life and its content, its mech- 
 anism, its wide and deep, place in human psychical life are brought 
 more distinctly to light. A study like this therefore offers itself 
 to all who would understand more fully their own mental life 
 or that of others through a medium which clothes itself in a 
 form which gives recreation and pleasure and delight. It is
 
 4 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 desired that the consideration of these works of art from this 
 point of view should more especially arouse the physician to a 
 fuller realization of his responsibility toward the mental life 
 of his patients as he meets them day by day with their minor 
 or their major psychic difficulties. 'It would rouse him especially 
 to an appreciation of the aid of the drama and kindred works 
 of art not only in clarifying his understanding of the mental life, 
 but also to a recognition of these artistic products as direct aids to 
 the patient or others whose psychic burdens he must help to bear. 
 
 The appeal is the more urgent because of the long-accustomed 
 ignorance or lack of recognition of the working within the human 
 being of the dynamic force which makes life a thing of vitality 
 and success and from which also its disturbances necessarily 
 arise. All too familiar is the complaint from sufferers or from 
 those who have the welfare of such at heart, the complaint on 
 every hand and the alarm of " tired nerves," increase of " nerv- 
 ousness," mental strain and mental breakdown, but these are 
 only names which vainly seek to express the demand for output 
 of the energy within. The terms are misnomers which seek 
 to deny the energy, serving to call for rest when in reality ac- 
 tivity and freer expression is what the race needs. Psycho- 
 therapy, honestly and fearlessly searching into the disturbances 
 which come for healing and finding the conflicts which under- 
 lie these, discovers the abundance of unused or badly applied 
 energy, which is merely, and often in vain, awaiting discovery 
 and conviction on the part of the individual that its very es- 
 sential right is the activity which has seemed denied it. The 
 psychotherapist comes to realize that the pressing need is an 
 understanding of this and a re-education in the value of the 
 individual's own mental life and a redirection of its elements 
 into such paths of well directed utilization. And he finds con- 
 vincingly that the revelations of the drama tend toward these 
 ends. 
 
 To such a physician, who seeks to understand, come letters 
 like this from those who are in need or see others in need:
 
 THE DRAMA AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 
 
 Dr. X : 
 
 Dear Sir The fact that you are one of the translators of has led 
 
 me to address this letter to you. 
 
 My husband suffered a complete nervous collapse in July, 1909. He was 
 pronounced a victim of neurasthenia by local physicians, which opinion 
 
 was confirmed later by Dr. Y of B Hospital. The patient 
 
 took medicine under direction of Dr. Y for two years. Rest and 
 
 change of scene have greatly improved but have failed to cure. He is 
 possessed by worry, indecision, nervousness, etc. I desire to find a phy- 
 sician who uses psychoanalysis in the treatment of nerves. Our local phy- 
 sicians seem either afraid or ignorant of that method, and I have failed 
 utterly in gaining any help in looking up the proper person to consult. 
 My means are limited, but nevertheless I am prepared to make great sacri- 
 fices for sake of treatment. 
 
 Will you recommend someone that uses this treatment? Our need is 
 very great, and that is my only excuse for asking this favor from a 
 stranger. 
 
 Thanking you in advance for the courtesy of a reply, I am, 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 Mrs. A. 
 
 The people are waiting for help but are ignorant where to 
 turn and just what it is that will help them. Nor does the 
 physician, however truly desirous to render aid, recognize that 
 the help lies within the patient or the needy individual himself. 
 Both fail to realize the vital source and character of the diffi- 
 culty and the fact that both it and its remedy exist in the very 
 mental capacity and vigor which make up human life and all 
 its possibilities. Definite analysis and investigation into this, as 
 it lies by far mostly below the surface of ordinarily evident 
 things, is just becoming an accepted fact. And here we do 
 well to invoke the rich service of the drama in awaking interest 
 in this deep underlying emotional territory, where our mentality 
 is founded, and in revealing its hidden meanings and the yearn- 
 ing and strivings which arise out of these, for moreover igno- 
 rance and lack of control of these is the cause of psychic dis- 
 turbance. 
 
 The hardened heart of ignorance can ill dispense with the 
 warmer arousing which comes through the dramatized appeal 
 of human factors and of these deepest needs which lie within 
 the human life. Long ago a dramatic prophet cried aloud amid
 
 6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 the natural amphitheatres of Judaea. " Is there no balm in 
 Gilead? Why, then, is not the health of the daughter of my 
 people recovered ? " 
 
 The culture wrested from the centuries which have intervened 
 since this cry went up, from the ancient prophet of mankind 
 has brought us much of advantage. Science has put into our 
 hands countless tools by which we can further comfort and 
 health. We should be masters of the art and practice of com- 
 plete health. And still the cry is heard. " The wise men are 
 ashamed, they are dismayed and taken. . . . They have healed 
 the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, 
 peace; when there is no peace." 
 
 It is not a mere appeal of sentimentality to bring back this 
 ancient outcry against the failure of those in high places to 
 minister to the profoundest human needs. Our physicians oc- 
 cupy today this exalted station, and still an incessant and in- 
 creasing call for help falls vainly upon our ears. It is not 
 desire and purpose to help that are wanting. It is, nevertheless, 
 lack of sympathy in the truest sense of the word, sympathy 
 which is understanding. The physician has compassion in that 
 the sufferings are too often likewise his own, but the deeper 
 understanding which could bring relief is somehow not his. 
 Perhaps a little research will reveal some of the causes for this 
 darkening of our understanding, and therefore our failure just 
 where the need is most pressing. 
 
 What is the reality of this human cry in its modern form? 
 No prophet stands upon the mountain top to voice the burden 
 of a suffering people. The complaint, however, is no less in- 
 sistent. Its force is the noiseless current, often, of the mind 
 weighted by its own inner conflict or of the helpless witness 
 of such an outspoken conflict in a cherished relative or friend. 
 
 Here in this letter a wife writes for advice in choosing medical 
 assistance for her husband. He has been a nervous wreck for 
 a number of years. He has seen twenty doctors and more. 
 Medicine was prescribed for him for two years, the result of 
 which the letter does not mention. It however goes on to say 
 that " rest, change of scene have greatly improved but have
 
 failed to cure. He is possessed by the worry, indecision, etc., 
 of nervousness." The same familiar story. The profound bur- 
 den of these words falls only upon those who have borne it 
 themselves, or upon those whose vision has been directed by 
 psychical aid and clarified by the courage of self-analysis to 
 penetrate beneath the surface of the conscious life into the im- 
 measurable territory of the unconscious, where the deeper life 
 of man is hidden, and where the mighty racial forces which 
 have made civilization, and those that would hinder it for the 
 sake of primary individual freedom, strive in titanic conflict. 
 The stifled cry, checked by the impulses we call pride, humility, 
 self distrust, regard for our fellow men, reveals only in partial 
 glimpses the existing struggle. 
 
 The letter here referred to represents the condition of many. 
 The world is full of this sort of resigned, hopeless struggle, 
 or of determined but futile efforts to rid oneself of such un- 
 social, unproductive forms of behavior, or again of those who 
 have found a false refuge even more useless and vain and piti- 
 able. The entire strength of Christian Science, of New Thought, 
 and of the thousand and one cults, lies in the fact that the reg- 
 ular medical profession is too busy with things material to 
 interest itself in the mental or spiritual life of the multitudes. 
 
 Is it not high time that we awaken to the meaning of such 
 phenomena? That we look about us to see if there is any way 
 by which we can understand their intrinsic, their actual meaning, 
 in order to find and utilize the remedy? Physicians have not 
 been wholly idle nor indifferent. Yet ignorance and lack of 
 understanding have led to an apparent indifference, to a condition 
 of mental sloth fulness and moral cowardice which was expressed 
 recently by a physician, who said, half humorously, wholly seri- 
 ously : " Oh, I never have anything to do with neurotics. I 
 send them out at once." Others have manifested the helpless- 
 ness that paralyzes even sincere effort to relieve suffering, and 
 have prescribed rest, travel, amusement, aimless occupation, all 
 the accessories of therapy which fail because they ignorantly 
 condemn a patient to palliative measures which only perhaps 
 condemn the sufferer to a little further attempt to repress an
 
 8 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 irrepressible conflict, while in reality the secret struggle accom- 
 panies him on his journeys, thrusts itself upon all his occu- 
 pation, stalks like an unwelcome, ghostly guest at every festive 
 scene, making a mockery of the measures prescribed by the 
 physician or urged by solicitous friends. Too often, also, enor- 
 mous expense is incurred and prolonged in the fruitless efforts 
 of escape, and the very hopelessness of cure is even notoriously 
 capitalized. The intense reality of the individual struggle rec- 
 ognizes all too clearly the ineffectualness of such means. They 
 palliate the " hurt " and cover it " slightly, " but such measures 
 have too long cried " Peace, peace, when there is no peace." 
 
 There is one, and only one, way to remedy this state of affairs. 
 That way is to set to work to understand why men and women 
 and children are suffering from nervous and mental disturbances 
 and the tremendous significance of these maladies in regard to 
 their cause and as to what must be done about it. Or more 
 universally stated it is high time that all members of society 
 awaken to an understanding of all this inner individual force 
 of instinct and emotion which works so disastrously for ill but 
 which might and can create the health and happiness of a pur- 
 poseful life. 
 
 Toward such an understanding, it will be said, physicians have 
 labored. But they have not succeeded in the unraveling of the 
 psychoneurosis, of which all humanity has a trace. The school 
 of psychoanalysis has tried to press nearer to the essential facts 
 of the mental life. Freud, through careful experimental work 
 and with a sublime courage, discovered a method of penetrating 
 the deeper and vaster portion of a man's life than that with which 
 we are accustomed to reckon, a territory hardly suspected, and 
 surely not understood. There lie all the forces of the past which 
 have made the race and the individual, and these forces are still 
 active, still striving for mastery the one over the other. The 
 recognition of this is more revolutionary than appears at first 
 thought. The comprehension of the fact demands further pro- 
 found consideration of the widely diverse character of these 
 forces and their antagonism and incompatibility. This necessi- 
 tates a knowledge and understanding of biological evolution and
 
 THE DRAMA AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 9 
 
 of anthropology in order to know the instinctive forces in their 
 intrinsic nature and the gradually advancing modes of expression 
 through spiritualization or sublimation of the same. Only thus 
 can we realize why they are factors today in the normal outflow 
 of energy, or for that blocking of energy which causes maladap- 
 tation to social requirements and the concealed internal struggle, 
 which breaks forth to consciousness in the disguise of all sorts 
 of painful or unproductive symbolic symptoms. 
 
 The courageous investigations of Freud and his followers into 
 this darkened portion of man's nature disclosed this immeasur- 
 able stream of energy or libido, a force that cannot be abated, 
 only diverted, dammed, and introverted through the inertia which 
 is a psychological feature of infantile and primitive feeling, which 
 produces and fosters the overwhelming desire to return to in- 
 fantile and primitive conditions and modes of reaction. And 
 these reality sternly forbids. Hence the strong repression of 
 this antisocial attitude and those lawless individual tendencies 
 which mark it; hence also the failure of repression, the yielding 
 to the infantile pull which occasions the conflict, or the complete 
 yielding which shuts the individual away into a thoroughly un- 
 social world of his own. 
 
 All this, of course, precludes a distinction in kind between the 
 mental life of the sick and the well. Only a difference of degree 
 of adjustment to reality and of freedom from infantile dominion 
 exists. Therefore our acceptance of the theory demands an 
 acknowledgment of inacceptable impulses existing within each 
 one of us in all their primitive and infantile egotistic force. It 
 demands, also, that we search out and understand these impulses, 
 and see whether they master us or are our servants. They court 
 disguise, so that this involves a thoughtful psychological attitude 
 and unwearied searching into all the history of mankind in order 
 to discover his modes of expression and the means of disguise 
 universally employed; to discover, also, the mistakes into which 
 the infantile mode of thought and action have led man away 
 from the pathway of achievement and advance, as well as his 
 victory over the inertia and self-seeking, which has brought the 
 race onward.
 
 I0 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 All this is necessary equipment with which to approach the 
 problem of individual mental and nervous disease. For the in- 
 dividual repeats the history of the race. A knowledge of one 
 acquaints us with the real nature of the other, and gives the 
 only means of intelligently and effectively handling the complex 
 entanglements into which the fundamental struggle of impulses, 
 rendered keener and more insistent by the increasing demands 
 for repression which follow advancing culture, has plunged vast 
 numbers of our population. And into all these mental phenomena 
 the drama takes its audiences. 
 
 Such principles as these stated have to be borne in mind in 
 the study of the drama as they serve to deepen its meaning and 
 enhance its value in its relation to the deeper meanings of life. 
 Whatever means may aid thought and therapy to penetrate the 
 unconscious realm, the harboring place of all the mysteries and ter- 
 rors of mankind, and to recognize this unconscious as the heri- 
 tage of every one, of the physician as well as the patient before 
 him, and of all society, by all means let us use them. In such 
 a light the work of art can never be neglected. 
 
 In order to discover the psychic needs of mankind and to meet 
 them no effective tool may be passed by with indifference nor 
 may there be timorous shrinking from unknown forces. Each 
 instrument is rightly valued only through its use and in this 
 alone it may be perfected where it is incomplete. One which 
 enters, as does psychoanalysis, into the vitality of human life 
 grants much to those who employ it carefully and conscientiously, 
 in increasing knowledge, understanding, genuine sympathy and 
 one's own increasing self control and effectiveness. So the op- 
 portunity for a clearer and more profound knowledge of the 
 inner psychic nature, such as art and psychoanalysis together 
 should afford, lays upon the physician or any other social worker 
 and upon the individual members of society themselves a special 
 responsibility for accepting and employing such a combination 
 to reach the distraught mind in its particular type of suffering 
 and incapacity for life, to restore such a mind by patient un- 
 remitting effort. This imperfect attempt to arouse interest in 
 such an approach to human problems offers itself in such a spirit 
 of responsibility.
 
 THE DRAMA AND PSYCHOTHERAPY II 
 
 It is necessarily a slow process which deals with the delicate 
 intricacies of the human psyche and rouses it to a new confidence 
 in itself in independence and freedom from infantile forces. It 
 makes every participant in it in part at least the conductor of 
 the newborn soul into a freedom which is racially productive and 
 creative. Each needy individual himself also learns the first 
 principles of independence as he enters into the interest of an 
 analysis and understanding of his psychical life. There is a 
 discovery of the undiminished energy, the immortal libido which 
 becomes free from its bonds. There is a glimpse or a vision 
 even of the great and satisfying task of directing this libido 
 into progressive, constructive paths and to setting it to flow free, 
 satisfied and in harmony with any demands reality may make 
 upon it, because now it pours outward. Such a psychic task, 
 which belongs to the special worker, or to each individual him- 
 self demands every aid and counts the artistic an important one. 
 
 Knowledge of the inner psychic life opens up limitless pos- 
 sibilities and opportunities because it deals with human life as it 
 sweeps back into the past, as it extends in breadth and intensity 
 into the future and because it considers it not merely as a whole 
 but in relation to individual complexities and individual relation- 
 ships and adjustments to the whole, and to individual share in 
 the racial task. All these things the drama represents, setting 
 forth these psychical elements and factors in individual realistic 
 situations where these forces of life are at work.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 " MAGIC : " AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 1 
 
 The spectator need not be consciously aware of the close 
 relation to himself of the problems presented in the drama. 
 His intense interest in their progress, their solution or the dis- 
 aster that follows in their train lies chiefly in the unconscious 
 where his own problems largely lie hidden. The mission of the 
 drama is to apply healing, sometimes through the solution ob- 
 jectively presented or perhaps only through the laying of these 
 open for a certain amount of psychic ventilation. This may 
 occur through a tragic exposure of the problems and their results. 
 The existence of the problems may even be quite unguessed, the 
 need of healing may be the least acknowledged reason for seek- 
 ing pleasure in an evening's performance. 
 
 Psychic problems would by no means form the conscious mo- 
 tives for attendance upon the play produced under the name of 
 " Magic." Nevertheless, the place of the artistic psychologist 
 might well be claimed for the author. For his hand reaches 
 into depths which ordinarily pass unknown and there touches 
 matters no less real and potent in the psychic nature of every 
 man and woman because unseen. This is no less true because 
 he formulates them under some other name than that which psy- 
 choanalysis would choose. A touch of revelation strikes the rock, 
 to use the author's own symbolism, and at least tiny streams 
 trickle out giving relief to pent-up floods of emotion which 
 otherwise, without such grateful though unrecognized forms of 
 relief, would fret and break at last in their fury beneath the 
 surface and cause disruption in many lives. For thus it is too 
 often, since man hides within himself a dynamism so little known 
 
 1 Printed in Transactions of the Charaka Club, Vol. IV. 1919, under 
 title Magic Above and Below. G. K. Chesterton : Magic. Brentano, N. Y. 
 
 12
 
 " MAGIC : AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 13 
 
 that nothing is farther removed from his ordinary recognized 
 thought. 
 
 This little play brings a modern audience, lighthearted or not, 
 often superficially alert to escape some of the serious conscious 
 burdens of the day, to confront them after all under the guise 
 of recreation and in their unconscious deeper aspects. This is 
 done in words which are made to return out of the magic of 
 the remote past, when the conscious thought of the world was 
 less exact even than it is today. " A child," the author says, 
 " is someone you can play with," so he takes the grown children 
 of the hour and gracefully reminds them of the child alive 
 within each one, 2 which would always play. He lays the child's 
 hand into that of the adult who then pinches at reality so hard 
 that the phantasms move away < and a sigh of relief is heard. 
 
 But what is the reality? Which is the child and the child's 
 play, and where is the adult left to stand? It may be that there 
 is not here mere play but the healing touch of adjustment for 
 the most real and persistent human problems, a suggestion of 
 the deeper complexities of these problems that confront the hu- 
 man race as generations and individuals pass over the stage 
 of life. 
 
 Patricia has brought from Ireland to her adoptive English 
 home a belief in fairies. She is singing in the wood on a misty 
 rainy evening when she meets a fairy " in the shape and size 
 of a man." Her child faith is rudely torn asunder when this fairy, 
 who for a while successfully fills the role and pleases her, dis- 
 covers himself as the conjurer hired by her uncle the duke to 
 show them some commonplace juggling. The duke hopes in 
 this way to compromise satisfactorily with Patricia's somewhat 
 dangerous mystic tendencies for he always believes in giving 
 equal credence to both sides of a question, although he may 
 arrive nowhere by so doing. So he thinks in this way to satisfy 
 both the dreamer Patricia and her most practical brother who 
 is to arrive from America this very evening. " Now the Duke 
 
 2 "In our inmost souls we are and remain children our whole life long. 
 Scratch the adult and you will find the child." S. Ferenczi: Introjektion 
 und Ubertragung. Psa. Jahrbuch, Vol. I, p. 444.
 
 j, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 thinks a conjurer would just meet the case. I suppose he 
 vaguely thinks it would brighten things up, and somehow satisfy 
 the believer's interest in supernatural things and the unbeliever's 
 interest in smart things. As a matter of fact the unbeliever thinks 
 the conjurer's a fraud, and the believer thinks he's a fraud, too. 
 The conjurer satisfies nobody. That is why he satisfies the 
 Duke." 
 
 The doctor, who is also at hand, deals practically and calmly 
 with matters medical and social, and particularly applies him- 
 self with a special sympathy to the interests of his friends. He 
 is an agnostic professedly, whose constant practical service to 
 his fellow men keeps him safely on the level of reality. He is 
 so imbued with practical common sense in the interests of his 
 clients' health that he is almost open to a little more than the 
 methodical consideration of ailments and their formulistic treat- 
 ment. He is so human that he is slightly tolerant at least of 
 something outside of the limit of rigid medical definitions. At 
 any rate he cannot dismiss all of Patricia's faith by the sum- 
 mary thou shalt not of her brother's ultrapracticality and ultra- 
 science. He can " consider " even that a " family superstition " 
 might be "better for the health than a family quarrel." And 
 he walks over casually to Patricia : " Dream for us who can 
 dream no longer. But do not quite forget the difference. . . . 
 The difference between the things that are beautiful and the things 
 that are there." The clergyman Smith has his own conviction 
 of the fixity of the stars of which Patricia dreams. He is very 
 willing to admit there is something of more value beyond the 
 tangible things at hand and the success such as the brother's which 
 is built apparently on them alone. He is not quite willing to 
 admit the dream stars as floating freely about somehow de- 
 pendent on the choice or the chance of men. But after all he 
 adheres to his fixed conceptions only as they serve mankind and 
 have served him, as they hold for him certain values which the 
 worldly unbelief of Morris the brother has yet convincingly to 
 supplant. Morris's overbearing rationalism tries to hit hard at 
 all beliefs which seem to take account of anything more hidden 
 and mystical than the power of hard cash which he can handle
 
 " MAGIC: ' AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 15 
 
 and see or of the literal machinery by which he can lift petrol 
 from the wells in Arizona. That there might have been any 
 other kind of apparatus at work in human lives through the 
 ages than this most material kind, he tries stoutly to deny. " I 
 don't believe in " seems to establish for him beyond challenge the 
 limit against conceiving any truth at work beyond that which 
 his eyes can see. 
 
 The clergyman's larger faith is more reverent and more pa- 
 tient toward farther possibilities of knowledge and of action. 
 He has this advantage over Morris's materialistic narrowness. 
 When the latter impatiently and with patronizing supercilious- 
 ness objects, " Well, well, they didn't know everything in those 
 old times," Smith replies, " No, and in those old times they 
 knew they didn't. [Dreamily.] Where shall wisdom be found, 
 and what is the place of understanding ? " 
 
 To this group the conjurer is to exhibit some of his tricks. 
 This is the duke's indecisive way of meeting the puzzling sit- 
 uation of Patricia's absorbed wanderings in her dreams and 
 out in the damp twilight, which the doctor fears is no better 
 for her health than the mystic tendencies she manifests. It 
 proves to be the conjurer who has played the part of fairy to 
 Patricia, making her dreams for a brief time come true. She 
 has caught him in the woods or he has caught her unawares 
 and with his long cloak and peaked hood, aided by the shadows, 
 has been able to impersonate " the fairy as he truly is ... his 
 head above all the stars and his feet amid the floors of the sea. 
 Old women," he continues to Patricia, " have taught you that 
 the fairies are too small to be seen. But I tell you they are 
 too mighty to be seen. For they are the elder gods befoie 
 whom the giants were like pigmies. They are the Elemental 
 Spirits, and any one of them is larger than the world." 
 
 Such an atmosphere surrounding the conjurer, even after he 
 has thrown off his innocently assumed disguise, ill comports 
 with the scornful materialism of the brother Morris. The lat- 
 ter is not slow to express his scorn of the conjurer and loudly 
 to assert his complete understanding and explanation of every one 
 of the conjurer's tricks. He does not hesitate to fall repeatedly
 
 j PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 into an angry contempt of the latter, who is a sincere thought- 
 ful person and evidently imbued with a deeper and truer real- 
 ization of some greater power about the ordinary manifesta- 
 tions of life than he for one moment claims can reside in the 
 simplicity of his hired tricks. These he can afford to set aside 
 with as little hesitation as that with which Morris manifests 
 his disbelief, but while Morris storms and all present are in 
 doubt, he permits himself a few manifestations of the greater 
 secret power in which he believes and shakes the matter of fact 
 complacency of all the company, except perhaps that of Patricia. 
 Morris actually becomes seriously ill, mentally unbalanced, so 
 that the doctor has to implore the conjurer at the last to give some 
 material explanation of his doings to save the young man's 
 reason from permanent collapse. And the conjurer does devise 
 some natural explanation and with a lie to his own convictions 
 trumps up this explanation to restore the young man again to 
 faith in his own rationalism. No one but Patricia receives a 
 full explanation of the conjurer's connection with the unseen 
 forces of Magic but so complete is her appreciative sympathy 
 that she is allowed to symbolize it in a conventional ending to 
 the play by walking with him out of the house to throw in her 
 life henceforth with his. 
 
 Suppose that it is granted that the author of the play has taken 
 the liberty to set his conjurer forth in the light of a " spirit- 
 ualist " and to permit the playgoers thus much of an explanation 
 for the trick man's behavior. The writer has even introduced 
 certain events which he has left otherwise inexplicable, and the 
 human intellect can think only in explicable terms. It demands 
 some rationalization, some explanation or staggers and falls be- 
 fore it. Therefore for the dramatic effect the spiritualism may be 
 let pass. A more important question exists in regard to the 
 human truth touched upon, the actual facts of the human mind, 
 of its affective side, which far exceeds this limited but imperious 
 intellect. Is there some justification in human psychic experience 
 and content for the developments of the play and some reason 
 here which would even permit that we should leave the spirit- 
 ualistic stand as a convenient hitching post for the fleeting mat-
 
 ' MAGIC: ' AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 17 
 
 ters of this deeper affective life, while we examine the deeper 
 meaning of the play in the light of this? Can it be possible 
 that here also a healing touch of understanding is possible in 
 regard to some of the most real and persistent problems con- 
 fronting the human race at all times? For some reason practical 
 achievement and the science with which it works have consti- 
 tuted only pitfalls for the young man and turned him violently 
 and insistently away from any semblance of belief outside his 
 petrol well and the material success he there attains. Past ex- 
 perience has been too rich and deep, the clergyman at least 
 would say, to make it possible that it could all be crammed into 
 such values or explained only in the light of the measurements 
 that pertain strictly to these externalities. Yet the young business 
 man ruthlessly seizes any outstanding belief in such past ex- 
 perience and reduces its content quickly to such cramping di- 
 mensions, or he tries to imagine that he does. He breaks out 
 " Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into 
 snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water 
 out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it." 
 
 The conjurer's interpretation ascribes a mysterious and in- 
 explicable power to a man through converse with spirits, devils 
 as well as fairies, which the conjurer thinks he has brought 
 out of former experiences when he had " mixed with many 
 queer sets of people." He soon found that these spirits " tried 
 to be my masters ... I found they were not fairies. I found 
 the spirits with whom I at least had come into contact were 
 evil . . . awfully, unnaturally evil," while before, " as long as 
 these things were my servants they seemed to me like fairies." 
 Modern psychology has attempted by sympathetic and most sim- 
 ple research into the activities of the mind to find some ex- 
 planation which lies more closely actually in the experiences of 
 that mind itself and which can thus dispense with such extrane- 
 ous source of explanation. The study of the content of dreams 
 and the active wishes of the human mind, unknown to ordinary 
 consciousness but admissible to consciousness when the dreams 
 are laid bare through the aid of association, finds ample ground 
 in the wish of man for all the strangeness and variety of
 
 jg PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 mystery that has otherwise been attributed to outside agency. 
 Men have not yet shaken themselves from the shackles of such 
 interpretation by which the savage still explains even his dreams 
 of the night as the work of whispering spirits from without or 
 the excursions into strange regions of his own spirit leaving 
 the body during his sleep. 
 
 Now psychology is coming to believe that the wish or more 
 fundamentally the inner drive which is the very urge of life, 
 its preservation and its reproduction in the most extensive sense, 
 is productive of such a variety and complexity of wishes and 
 impulses that the strange variety of manifestation in thought 
 and dream and feeling may have its source only there. Then 
 at the same time psychological investigation, especially that anal- 
 ysis which patiently reduces the more complex and obscure mani- 
 festations to their simpler origin, discovers that the human mind, 
 mystified at itself, has always resorted to a " projection " of its 
 inner content over upon external objects in order to satisfy the 
 reasoning intellect with an obvious objective explanation. There- 
 fore psychoanalysis dispenses with the necessity of juggling with 
 spirits. It is sufficiently easy for one's own overwrought mind, 
 working mostly in unconscious emotional activity, to people a room 
 with strange presences so that even the level headed doctor says 
 the " room is simply horrible " and the clergyman cries out in 
 the dark " In God's name, go " And the duke with his char- 
 acteristic conciliatory attitude even toward spirits says " Room 
 horrible? Room horrible? No, no, no. Only a little crowded. 
 A little crowded. And I don't seem to know all the people. 
 We can't like everybody. These large at-homes. . . ." 
 
 The conjurer is sincere, he is not playing a cowardly trick of 
 self deceit for he is as well convinced as the others, and through 
 his varied experience with life he is full of outer and inner 
 conflict. " My mother was a lady and she married a dying fiddler 
 who tramped the roads," gives the key to much that might be 
 vexing and distracting him in inner struggle and outward ad- 
 justment, and which demands the interposition of the spiritual- 
 istic definition to posit and name the conflicts that ensue. There- 
 fore he is equally in need of the current self deceiving explanation
 
 " MAGIC: " AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 19 
 
 with which the world has been now perhaps too long content, 
 with which at any rate it vexes its own credulity and peace of 
 mind. The mechanism of the play permits the picture on the 
 wall to sway, the chair to fall and the doctor's lamp outside, 
 which has served as an object of reality to hold them all sane, 
 to turn its color in a quite inexplicable way. It is feeble to 
 say that all this is due to the superficial bewiderment of the 
 overwrought minds of the conjurer's audience. The author of 
 the play has, at least, for the entertainment and mystification of 
 his audience laid more serious weight upon these things than 
 that. Perhaps however having admitted so much it is still per- 
 mitted a clear eyed psychology to grant this as a dramatist's 
 privilege to give a tangible expression of the actual psychic 
 factors. These again are to be found alone in the deeply aroused 
 impulses and affects in the hearer's minds, doctor, clergyman, 
 duke, even the correct secretary Hastings, who have been sub- 
 jected to a rousing of their inner feelings, a questioning of 
 their grounds of action and belief, an unrecognized approach 
 to those things that lie deepest in all men at all times. The 
 structure of the drama permits the result to be projected into 
 an objective representation of these mysteries, while psychology 
 reduces them to these internal subjective activities. 
 
 This is a deeper science than that of the brother who believed 
 that his science " will find out that cause, and sooner or later 
 your old miracle will look mighty mean." It is rather the science 
 of the clergyman, who can believe in greater things than those 
 the merely physiological eye can see. He would admit with 
 the conjurer that the fairy's head is " above all the stars and 
 his feet amid the floors of the sea . . . the fairies are too mighty 
 to be seen. . . . They are the Elemental Spirits, and any one 
 of them is larger than the world." For he believes, though 
 he cannot yet define this precisely to himself, that there is some- 
 thing in the human mind, or rather some great product of its 
 emotions and its cogitations upon them, which has produced 
 the need for belief. It has also produced out of itself its ob- 
 jects of belief, its steadying explanations which serve for a time 
 at least for the management and rational control of this same
 
 2O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 irrepressible and otherwise uncontrollable mental affective life. 
 He has at least a pragmatic sense of the truth of the useful- 
 ness of such beliefs because they are both fixed for a certain 
 time and yet transformable when progress demands it, to give 
 room for others. 
 
 So he too can realize a product of all this changing, fluctuating 
 but ever active mental life which furnished an " apparatus for 
 writing the book of Job." It forms all the bigger, wider life 
 around the small point of our rational conscious attention, and 
 makes us ask reverently with the clergyman, and with the writer 
 of Job, " Where shall wisdom be found, and what is the place 
 of understanding ? " At the same time he shows his practical 
 appreciation of the silent but no less forceful service which 
 belief renders in different ages and in different kinds to the 
 safeguarding of the sanity and to the practical effectiveness of 
 the spirit of the race. "And what harm came in believing in 
 Apollo? And what a mass of harm may have come from not 
 believing in Apollo ? . . . Why can't you leave the universe alone 
 and let it mean what it likes? Why shouldn't the thunder be 
 Jupiter? More men have made themselves silly by wondering 
 what the devil it was if it wasn't Jupiter. . . . The child 
 who doubts about Santa Claus has insomnia. The child who 
 believes has a good night's rest." 
 
 The brother is completely overthrown by the revelation of 
 such a vaster world than that he thought was his, while the 
 sister passes unscathed and undisturbed through the experiences 
 of the night. Her only grievance lies in the fact that her faith 
 was shaken by the disillusionment in regard to her dreams of 
 fairies through the appearance of a human man under the fairy 
 guise. Yet this grievance is wiped away when the mere man 
 has restored her faith in something dwelling in him, something 
 more than that which is closely visible. She can stand to one 
 side and be taught, for she already knows. She has entered in, 
 rather she has never forced herself without. She gradually slips 
 into reality from the child world so that to her there is no fear 
 and blind self defending struggle against the deeper realities of 
 the human nature which she shares. She only knows that slight
 
 ' MAGIC: " AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 21 
 
 transition which is barely a shock out of the fairy land of child- 
 hood into the possibility of the womanhood where fairy tales 
 " end only by coming true." The conjurer, who understands, 
 is at hand to lead her out, and he is allowed to do this through 
 the potent force of love. 
 
 The brother's situation is the sadder result of an inability to 
 recognize the inner psychic life and of a strong defense set up 
 against its wishes, which appear then only negatively and un- 
 pleasantly to him. He is hindered from entering the border 
 world of fairy land where his sister has walked and found the 
 way into womanhood. Material seeking and material success, 
 perhaps it will be said, stand in his way and harden his heart. 
 Such explanations are always given first and will continue to 
 be given just so long as we close our eyes to the real stream of 
 duration which is life and seek its meaning in the attempts that 
 have been made to escape to this side or that. Afraid of the 
 " forms that swim and the shapes that creep " man leaves this 
 deeper reality of emotion, where is his true home, and throws 
 up his static defenses behind which he stands safe but poorer, 
 scoffing at those who dare try the depths of the unconscious life 
 to know what is there; to know and gather from it that won- 
 drous inspiration which makes its fairy tales no longer child's 
 dreaming, ineffectual or even dangerous, but gives them reality 
 and brings them to pass in external satisfying love, activity. 
 
 The brother misses this and why? Because his dream life 
 is in the dark and he has to deny it and then like most men he 
 seeks an external rationalistic explanation, calling this science. 
 Back in that very far away child world of dreams brother and 
 sister probably meant much to each other. The small family 
 group, we know, fills the love circle so exclusively that there 
 is no room for an intruder. Here lies the key to the strong 
 taboo attached to wishes which concern the child soul. Since 
 child wishes, like all others, are imperishable, as time goes on 
 and one must fit into a larger world repression comes to take 
 the place of a destruction of these desires. But repression, as 
 has been seen, changes the character of pleasure to hideousness. 
 Patricia has been able to follow the course which is the lot of
 
 22 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 the healthy individual and gradually shift her childish intense 
 love through the kindly fairy world over upon her strange wiz- 
 ard and then, with but a slight resistance, on the man whose 
 size the magician has kindly assumed. The brother has fallen 
 into the fate of a large number of less fortunate souls, whose 
 original desires are perhaps more intense or their capacity for 
 this gradual shift, sublimation, is limited. Such are compelled, 
 then, to set up stern barriers, which manifest themselves in 
 hatred-colored reactions like those the brother displays toward 
 the conjurer. 
 
 The very emphatic flatness of their denial is, besides, a token 
 of the reality of the forces which work unseen within. A man 
 laughs loudest on the edge of the precipice. The ground trem- 
 bles underneath the brother's feet so he but stamps the harder 
 and rushes the more madly to prove to himself and all con- 
 cerned that unseen forces are non-existent, simply nothing what- 
 ever, perfectly explicable by his self defensive scientific per- 
 spicacity. 
 
 And then and then that cry from the darkened garden 
 when the conjurer has proved himself the master and asserted 
 the existence and power of the unconscious factors. Deny the 
 unconscious as one will, build up all the objective defenses of 
 which rationalism is capable, there is that within any one which 
 makes itself heard sooner or later, in one way or another. The 
 brother hears it now when science fails to give its explanation. 
 Two ways are open for him, that one which his sister has found 
 more easily and naturally, acceptance of the wish world within 
 and coming to terms with it in a wholesome re-adaptation of 
 it to adult life beyond the infantile confines, or, failing that, 
 its acceptance of him and drawing of him down into the depths 
 where it would have him in its power again, the victim of a 
 psychosis. A third way, however, makes a short cut to the end 
 of the play as it serves to short circuit the conflict for many 
 lives and thus often, to be sure, prevents a sublimation which 
 would greatly enrich life. This way the conjurer, who under- 
 stands, who stands between the two spheres of man's life and 
 looks both ways, gives back to the young man. He affords him
 
 ' MAGIC : ' AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 23 
 
 again the defense of his limitations and allows him a satisfactory 
 materialistic explanation for those things he is too narrowed 
 and undeveloped to understand. 
 
 The playwright has run his fingers over the keyboard and 
 touched the note that one or another sounds in this life conflict 
 with unseen powers, priest and doctor, the duke and his self ef- 
 facing secretary, brother and sister, but the conjurer stands 
 frankly on the border line and in reality in the fuller meaning 
 of his character sweeps the whole range of the harmony. He 
 knows the demons and where they lurk even as he knows, like- 
 wise, the sphere above our limited conscious outlook. He can 
 take the stature of a man because " his head reaches beyond 
 the stars." The clergyman has looked into the remote beyond 
 and has seen in part what lay before and thus the relation of 
 that land beyond to the childhood of man. Without this com- 
 pleter knowledge we miss the relation of this sphere of the 
 " fixed stars " immeasurably above effort and inspiration, to the 
 present height of man. 
 
 With the whole in view it is possible to find and value that 
 from which man springs. Man knows the unconscious as the 
 world that harbors creatures that prove to be only his wishes 
 or oftentimes those wishes distorted by necessity of denial. He 
 harbors them because the value of their inspirational power, the 
 impulse they contain, must not be lost though their form is 
 changed. Then, because their form must be altered while yet 
 this their power must be kept and used, he projects them through 
 a mighty arc to the space above, exalting them to the skies. 
 There also he no longer recognizes them as his but they become 
 a more authoritative inspiration, spiritualized, transcendent, a 
 goal of limitless striving and aspiration. 
 
 There is magic. Man is surrounded by it. Out of it he arises, 
 toward it he tends. It is the greater reality in which the small 
 point of his conscious moment glimmers like the doctor's warm 
 red light in the greater blackness of the night. This blackness 
 now and then blazes forth in the lightning that overwhelms the 
 poorer, limited, material ray, and at times inexplicably changes 
 the color of the latter to its own capricious hues. It is an un-
 
 24 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 deniable necessity that man shall break away from the child 
 world of fairy dreams if he will find the world of man's activity 
 and constructive life. It is no less a necessity for this very 
 creativeness, that he project and keep ever advancing and re- 
 ceding before him this larger world of the complete reality in 
 which he lives and moves and has his being.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 1 
 
 A mystic drapery is given also to " Eyes of Youth " but only 
 as a curtain which is drawn aside with each succeeding act or 
 " episode " to let the actual factors appear in their working. 
 The girl Gina Ashley, daughter in a modest American home, 
 firm in its traditions, is confronted with the various possibilities 
 which life seems able to afford her. She may not choose them 
 all however and she stands halting among their desirabilities. 
 She possesses a voice of no uncertain promise and the oppor- 
 tunity is at hand to go abroad under the direction and care of 
 her Italian teacher to perfect this voice and acquire wealth and 
 fame. Yet near at hand are the duties to a widowed father 
 and a somewhat dependent brother. They need her care and 
 even her pecuniary aid, for the one is still hardly more than 
 a schoolboy, the other is on the downhill road of business loss 
 and failure. Still further, remaining at home might mean the 
 gratification of the father's wishes and aid to the brother through 
 a life of ease for herself, for her father desires her marriage 
 to a wealthy but older suitor, whose claim to her hand has 
 nothing of sincere romantic love. Beyond all these is the 
 younger man of her own liking but who is only at the uncertain 
 threshold of his career and whose offer of love does not yet 
 weigh heavily enough in the balance against greater wealth and 
 surer success on the one hand, or the call of duty on the other. 
 In her perplexity she longs, as many have done, for some sudden 
 and complete revelation of the future, something clear and far- 
 sighted by which her decision might be reached. This wish is 
 almost anticipated by an Indian Yogi who has just arrived to 
 
 1 Printed in the Medical Record, March 2, 1918, under title " Eyes of 
 Youth " : A Drama of Past Influences and Future Possibilities. Carlton 
 Gliddens with collaboration of Max Marcin : Eyes of Youth. 
 
 25
 
 2 6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 offer some strange wares. He permits her three opportunities 
 to gaze into the crystal ball, only three, after which she may 
 be free to choose according to the visions which have met her 
 there. Three possible careers are thus opened to her contem- 
 plation, the visions of them appearing as if given her from 
 without, from one holding something of the mystery of the fu- 
 ture in his power. The steady gazing into their depths reveals, 
 however, such defeat and disappointment, such play of passion 
 and such disillusionment that her terror of these possibilities 
 brings her to the real center of herself and she is glad in the 
 end to choose most simply the path of the true sincere love of 
 her heart. With it she is able to enter into a life as free from 
 artificiality and false selfishness as it is free to follow the better 
 and more honest dictates of this most inner self seeking its own 
 best welfare. 
 
 In this drama as in the preceding one, the mystic element, as 
 embodied in the Indian sage, the Yogi, and his crystal ball, may 
 be reduced to human dimensions or rather, it should be said, 
 extended to include those. For their depth and breadth exceeds 
 any single concentration upon the crystal and all that this can 
 reveal. 
 
 Few are bold or brave enough, nor are they sufficiently skilled 
 in a fearless self mastery to recognize mysterious possibilities 
 of action and events that do take place, as prepared and 
 determined only within themselves, and finally given forth with 
 all the color and vitality of the unconscious secret wish. This 
 indeed it is which has set man to calling in the aid of demons 
 first, kinder, wiser spirits, later on devils and gods, then all the 
 continued mysticism of hallucination to satisfy his demand for 
 cause even while it enabled him to fling away all personal re- 
 sponsibility. At the best it has kept him humbly loyal and trust- 
 ing toward a beneficent divine Spirit of good. But he has 
 shrunk from a more resolute self control through knowledge 
 that his possibilities and the so-called accidents of his fate lay 
 largely in himself. He has shunned the acknowledgment of 
 such a reality, one beset with dangers to his own spirit but best 
 met and attacked by a knowledge of these things as they exist
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 27 
 
 in the heart of man, or as the very inner man, his inherent 
 energy, his creative self, acts and reacts upon this reality. 
 
 Certain phenomena, mysteriously called " psychic," as if the 
 psychic were a thing apart or unusual to life, seem to some to 
 give him access to a special form of mysticism in which his 
 projections take shape and appearance out of his dominant 
 wishes, hallucinations half in the dark, whisperings as of a world 
 of spirits visible to some privileged or specially qualified ones, 
 under peculiar conditions and special circumstances and states 
 of mind. 
 
 Others have seen in hypnotic phenomena, automatic writing, 
 crystal gazing, strange revelations which were not of the or- 
 dinary clear light of day. Wonder and fear have arisen as if 
 again there were something outside the self playing upon it, or 
 something which certain gifted selves could appropriate peculi- 
 arly for themselves and for others. For any or all of these things 
 the Indian Yogi, with his soft air of mystery, his cautious, 
 gentle manner steeped in the ancient introspective philosophy of 
 the Orient, has constituted a most suitable agent. Even the 
 uniform grayness of his garments is suggestive of the calm of 
 death and complete repose, where questions and problems of re- 
 ality and its perplexing need for choice are stilled in release from 
 all personal endeavor. The background his presence gives is 
 strangely suited for dark mystery. His own brooding acquain- 
 tance with the inner subjective things, though he too has still 
 his external terms for them, makes him the bearer of messages 
 from the mystic and ascribes to him the power to penetrate the 
 hidden things of the future. His exaltation of sentiment at 
 the same time both stimulates to a truly spiritual purpose and 
 leads to an idealization of the mystical powers which then appear 
 as external. For man has projected his progressive ideals through 
 the powers upon which he thought he leaned, in this way throw- 
 ing upon them the responsibility and need for endeavor which 
 should have been his own. Thus he has both made progress and 
 limited that progress at the same time, making his way a slow 
 and tortuous one. 
 
 " There is no past or future in time as in space. Each 
 stretches to eternity." So far the Indian sage, the Yogi of the
 
 2 8 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 drama, has pointed out the littleness of the present moment 
 of action amid the resistlessness of the entire onward move- 
 ment which is life. A great quiet sea, yet heaving beneath 
 the calm surface with the whole of gathered experience, such 
 is the past behind each individual. Before loom the impenetrable 
 mists of the unbounded future. The affairs of each moment 
 are no more than a tiny point of rock emerging where the ever- 
 increasing ocean of the past pours its influence over into the 
 instant that breaks at once toward the eluding future. The 
 moment has already joined the past, the unknown future is still 
 ahead, the effort to reach it is continued. Our feet touch the 
 point which is the present moment and it is gone ; we are beyond, 
 leaping to the next point of time and experience. Vivid, clear, 
 effulgent with an unknown glow, each momentary halting place 
 is such a small and yet concentrated instant of experience that 
 we are driven bounding to the next poising place, and still we 
 recoil before the thick mist stretching away before. 
 
 Yet there is in the mental life a glow that warms and delights 
 and inspires this moment so richly filled even as it takes flight. 
 It streams ahead also until the heavy fogs of the future grow 
 warm and radiant with hope and promise or lurid with a deeper, 
 darker play of color within the gloom. It is not strange that 
 man has reached out in every conceivable way to understand 
 the mystery before him, and though he has paid less conscious 
 attention to that behind, nevertheless has sought vaguely to de- 
 fine the influence which pressed upon him from this immeasur- 
 able past. He is ceaselessly impelled onward, ruthlessly hurled 
 forward to know only when his path has been taken that it was 
 not of the light. Why then should each instant of choice be 
 so laden with richness of color and tone that present and future 
 alike reveal themselves only to conceal themselves the more? 
 What is the mystery that dissolves itself into so many elements 
 of pleasure and pain, desire and effort, only to perplex and 
 bewilder? 
 
 Man's first impulse, as has been said, was to explain it as of 
 some power outside himself, mostly malicious, which came and 
 went upon him according to its own caprice. Or as he felt the
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 29 
 
 force of his own desire and his feeble reasoned opposition to 
 all this pressure of his own unconscious life, he conceived a 
 sense of sin toward which the external powers assumed an 
 attitude of punishment. This has not satisfied man, it does not 
 today, as a sufficient interpretation of cause and effect in regard 
 to the mysterious interdependence of present power and past 
 influence and future possibilities of immeasurable good or ill. 
 
 Science has searched until it found cause and effect in the 
 external world, and thus released man from his burden of 
 haunting powers in that realm. The world within remains 
 however to most unfathomable, inexplicable, and still holds 
 thought and vision bound. It is not even called the world 
 within. The effort of the human mind to master the spell of 
 its overwhelming power has always led man to attempt to get 
 around to the outside of it, where he could view it objectively. 
 His ignorance however and the helplessness which this incurs 
 have prevented a clear scientific objectifying of the phenomena 
 as they really are, and have led man to juggle with these things, 
 deceive himself and misconstrue them still as forces and events 
 without himself. He has externally projected his own inner 
 life, unknown to himself, in order to get a better view of it, 
 and thus has only continued to misinterpret and fail of the 
 truth. Partly he has saved himself the keener but perhaps more 
 actually effective agony of self recognition and self knowledge, 
 which would have given him a better and more earnest control 
 of inner as well as outer conditions. 
 
 This projection of the subjective beyond himself has neverthe- 
 less been necessary to his weakness and his slow mode of evolu- 
 tion, growth and the mastery of self and environment, toward 
 which he has been able to make in this way gradual progress. 
 On the other hand he has, by this method of blinding and defend- 
 ing himself, also made the way a slower and more ineffectual one. 
 Moreover in the curious way that satisfies the contradictions of 
 human feeling or affectivity, he has enjoyed the company of 
 the specters he has conjured forth as responsible for these 
 things of his destiny. His innate indolence has likewise taken 
 refuge in them from the straightforward endeavor with which
 
 3O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 otherwise he must have attacked reality, to win from it his own 
 progress and to utilize it for the progress of the race to which 
 he belongs. 
 
 All this misinterpretation, ignorance in the face of the forces 
 playing within and through man, has set his energies so at cross 
 purposes and produced so much social confusion as well as in- 
 dividual pain and suffering, that many have grown impatient 
 with this ancient attitude. Some in sickness and despair, others 
 with a vision cleared and quickened by sympathetic touch with 
 this need of the world, have dared to peer into the mysteries 
 which well up around the human individual and to seek dis- 
 entanglement of the elements playing there. They would bring 
 them into a light of explanation and interpretation that some 
 control may result. The sickness and despair, and the sympa- 
 thetic aid too, lie, to be sure, even behind the effort to project 
 them without and seek to understand them thus. This however 
 only removes each factor from the ocean of intermingled ele- 
 ments to which it belongs, and therefore it is neither recognized 
 for what it really is nor brought into a harmonious control. 
 It explains neither the boundless roll of influence which sweeps 
 into each life, nor does it throw any light within the thick veil 
 of the future. 
 
 The scientist, however, who would also understand this internal 
 work and turn an analytical light upon the profound reality of 
 all this mystery, or the helpless victim who craves a fearless 
 knowledge, has been preceded by the artist whose intuition 
 carries him into the heart of. these things. Often his conscious 
 intellectual thought has been hardly aware of the things that 
 he saw and yet his power of intuition and his skill were such 
 that he could present them acceptably to the same intuitive 
 appreciation and thus the help of other struggling souls. The 
 dramatist with his ready appeal to a public mind, which un- 
 consciously or consciously seeks behind its amusement some 
 deeper and more lasting help, has been one of the chief artistic 
 servants here. Yet he too, in his own partial intellectual blind- 
 ness and also to meet the long obscured understanding of the 
 people, has resort to the current forms of thought and expres-
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 3! 
 
 sion. That which perhaps he sees much more truly must still 
 make its appeal couched in objective phrases and in persons and 
 events which still represent the projecting tendency of the sub- 
 jective mind. He must speak in terms of the external world. 
 Such indeed is the limitation of the means of communication 
 from one individual to another, the intellectual limitation through 
 which greater subjective fluid things must be expressed. 
 
 He nevertheless points the way fearlessly into the profound 
 underlying truths. His truer meanings are those which in another 
 way become clear to the psychoanalyst, who through close ap- 
 plication to the inner thoughts and feelings of the emotional 
 life, of the subjective personality, has come to know the reality 
 and the strength of such subjective life, which has filled the 
 ocean of past experience with the influences out of which mys- 
 teries arise. These become known largely through clinical ex- 
 perience where the souls made sick by the struggle and the un- 
 certainty and the buffeting of the sea of mystery and power 
 come to bring their inner experiences and seek for analysis and 
 adjustment. Such close intercourse with this subjective world 
 gives knowledge of it and understanding of it. It makes one 
 clear visioned also to understand in the artist's presentation 
 certain indications and expressions of the actual truth under 
 his artistic and superficially objective setting forth of these inner 
 realities. 
 
 The analyst therefore recognizes in the artistic production 
 something which will touch, even half unaware, the difficulties 
 of those who labor to know themselves in the power of the 
 mysteries. For those who in fear or desire would know the 
 future before them, there is to his insight a better way pointed 
 out to them. More effectual than a knowledge of just what the 
 future may be is a mastery of it through themselves and through 
 the meeting of it fearlessly and efficiently, whatever it may be. 
 There is an opportunity for the awakening also through the 
 artistic appeal of those who walk calmly or evasively content 
 to leave things as they are and deaf to the call for help in uni- 
 versal struggle with these powers.
 
 32 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 " Eyes of Youth " is one of those dramas which speaks a 
 deeper language than that which appeals first to the conventional 
 moralist. The serious-minded theatre-goer or the lighter-hearted 
 pleasure-seeker may draw certain very obvious lessons for 
 thought from the cleverly presented " episodes." They present 
 such various possibilities as might offer themselves to the opening 
 life of a talented girl. Yet each contains its bitter, very bitter 
 draught, and their contemplation wins every one to the value 
 of the simple choice of the path of simplicity of desire. Any 
 number of platitudes might crowd about the suggested possi- 
 bilities and the satisfactory outcome which wipes clean the slate 
 in the end. 
 
 The drama is however far more profound than this. In the 
 reality of life the visions are not so easily expunged. The sim- 
 plicity of the ending is only one of those balancing moments 
 of the present, behind which lies all the influence of the past 
 and before which still looms the thick obscurity of the future. 
 Here stands the heroine at the beginning upon one of the glitter- 
 ing points of the Now, yearning before this great future and 
 longing to know whither she shall walk to fulfill its best purpose 
 for her. She can only flutteringly guess at the meaning to her 
 young life of the commendation and the promise of her music 
 master. She is however equally stanch to a sense of duty im- 
 pressed upon her soul by years of training and discipline. Before 
 her open out still other ways of seeming advantage, opulence 
 and comfort on the one hand, the freedom of young love on the 
 other. 
 
 No one of these paths nor any other is however free for 
 her, because something in her inmost self determines events 
 upon any of these pathways. This it is which confuses choice 
 and makes the uncertainty in knowing what is best to seek. 
 Unaware of this, yet feeling her helplessness, she takes refuge 
 where human thought has always found escape from the burden 
 and terror of recognizing and acknowledging the forces which 
 lie within to determine each life and its course. The dark 
 quiet form of the Hindu throws out in objective relief her 
 groping within herself after the determined course which shall
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 33 
 
 lead her. There is the mystery and remoteness of his world 
 as well as the strangeness of his philosophy of another land and 
 time to link him with the unfathomable mysteries within. Be- 
 sides she can actually hold in her hands the crystal ball that 
 burns with mystic splendor. Touching it, grasping it she is 
 close, in her concentration upon it, to the ocean of unknown 
 forces streaming up in fact through her own life forces which 
 shape themselves into wish and throw themselves forward into 
 the future course. Yet clasping the unyielding glass she can 
 sufficiently objectify the intangible strength of all this mystery 
 to look upon it as if apart from herself and examine the ways 
 she would take. 
 
 For after all what is it but her wish which stirs itself, which 
 presents such a complexity of events upon her pathway, even 
 those which produce confusion among themselves ? " How could 
 I/' she questions in one of the pauses among these pictured 
 events, " have seen it otherwise ? Could I have wished it ? " 
 
 The confusion of impulse and desire within her, the multiplicity 
 of form and possibility in which her inner wish presents itself 
 to her limited conscious vision, demand some objectifying aid. 
 She is ready, as man has always been, to seize such external 
 forms which circumstance throws into her way. Yet this proc- 
 ess, the very cunning of the unconscious wish thus to gain 
 access to her reasoning thought, deceives her that it may thus 
 relieve her of any overwhelming sense of responsibility for the 
 creation of such pathways of events as are outlined there. 
 
 Gina Ashling, vibrant in her inmost soul with the possibilities 
 and the wish impulses which were harbored within her, could not 
 have tolerated the sudden naked revelation of these before herself. 
 She is overwhelmed when, through concentration upon the seem- 
 ingly mystic object in her hands and a shutting away of the 
 distractions of the external world, her gaze penetrates deeper and 
 deeper into the abysses that lie concealed. To her they are only 
 the dizzying, bounding or despairing possibilities of the future. 
 And as such they seem only to come from without, whatever 
 may be her share of conscious choice in following them. Also 
 they are handed to her as visions through the medium of the
 
 34 
 
 kindly sympathetic and seemingly wise and noble Yogi. Thus 
 alone has she courage to face them not only, but to acknowledge 
 them as within the scope of her life and range of her experience. 
 
 For hers is the immediate inheritance and cultural training 
 of a parentage and social environment which expected and had 
 prepared a careful pathway of circumspection, unselfish service, 
 a devotion, even though a too narrowed one, to the superficial 
 well being of others. Duty loomed large and smote with a note 
 of the New England conscience upon the girl sensitive by nature 
 and training. Yet even duty had become very befogging because 
 it was based upon the limited selfishness of those who sur- 
 rounded her, and was hedged in by their more immediate needs. 
 Duty at the sacrifice of the healthy impulses and functions of 
 life, she has to learn, cannot bring real values to herself or her 
 family. 
 
 Behind all this nevertheless lay a deeper inheritance, which 
 reached much further back into the slow development of the 
 girl's full and rich young nature. The elements within it made 
 demands which swept far beyond these narrowed ones which 
 her devoted and dependent family, or her numerous lovers pre- 
 sented to her. Even the prospect of self realization through 
 the career which thrust its likelihood before her was infused 
 with a power and complexity of impulses and desires which 
 had been gathering strength throughout all the preparation of 
 this individual psychical life. 
 
 This heritage had slowly accrued to her through the long 
 line of women stretching away far beyond her immediate an- 
 cestors. This ocean of the past which rolls unceasingly behind 
 the present moment of each life contains a record of all the 
 past. " All that we have felt, thought, and willed is there lean- 
 ing over the present." So has said one of our modern thinkers. 
 This explains the measurelessness of the past behind the present. 
 It affirms the source of the glow which spreads through this pres- 
 ent and passes over to color the future for good or for ill. 
 " All we have felt, thought, and willed " and feeling has kept 
 its full value. Sometimes we have learned a new and better 
 discharge for it, but in its discharge it stores up yet richer affect,
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 35 
 
 the result again of the new experience. Much of it has been 
 denied discharge and has not found transformation into the 
 more cultural ways of expression that the race has learned, 
 so that beaten down, it is rebelliously active there in the un- 
 conscious life. There are also traces of its passage over into 
 action, the further emotional response which resulted when such 
 action took place. Some remaining desire, imprisoned, denied, 
 and the pleasure of phantasy which easily surrounds this, all 
 are there to produce and maintain an affective glow which burns 
 into the present and future and also to keep alive and stimulate 
 to new and higher effort wishes which belong to the long history 
 and prehistory which antedate modern life. 
 
 This it is which explains the great outpouring of possibilities 
 in the three visions which Gina obtains into the future. No 
 more than the world acknowledges the content of its dreams 
 as arising out of wishes, which come in such strange, grotesque, 
 inexplicable form, could her conscious thought recognize these 
 startling apparitions of the future possibility in all their diversity, 
 as expressions of her own desire. Yet the wish is within her 
 inmost nature, the long train of unsatisfied or half satisfied 
 desires stealing upon her individual life out of the far depths 
 of the past. She with each individual has much in common 
 with such a line of ancestors reaching back through the ages 
 when wishes were taking to themselves progressing ways of 
 expression and gratification, which gradually built up life's com- 
 plexity and entangled its interactions. 
 
 These wishes could not always be granted or fulfilled in their 
 direct form because that was crude, too self seeking and asocial 
 as society grew to a greater culture involving the higher devel- 
 opment of the greater number. Elemental desire, informed with 
 [the energy of life, was no less active and forceful but it had 
 to seek less egoistic ways of fulfilment, losing therefore often 
 the immediate pleasure for the sake of a more remote cultural 
 gain and satisfaction. These primitive wishes and their suc- 
 icessors, which have however also gradually yielded to cultural 
 demands, remain deep within the heart of every man and woman, 
 ey remain to irradiate the later higher attainments of life,
 
 36 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 spiritualizations, intellectualizations, with an earthy glow that 
 keeps the life true to the nourishing soil at the bottom from 
 which it sprang. Yet in the light of higher attainments and the 
 restrictions these put upon each individual life they dare not 
 stand in the clear light of conscious recognition except in a 
 disguising symbolism or hiding behind some rationalizing expla- 
 nation of them, such as this of the play. 
 
 They appear therefore as the buffetings of the future from 
 the outside world. From certain of them there seems no escape 
 on any of the paths that may be chosen. 
 
 This inner self, where such wishes are stimulated and out 
 of which they seek such indirect exit, is not like the rational 
 self which we know in our intercourse with one another. Be- 
 cause of the asocial nature of its wishes, the direct self gratifi- 
 cations which they seek to obtain, they are obliged to hide 
 themselves or express their power in such obscure and devious 
 ways. Their unconscious harborage is notwithstanding intensely 
 emotional and the manner of thought which surrounds them is 
 that of phantasy, different from the clear, logical, purposeful 
 thinking of consciousness. Their logic and purpose lie only in 
 the direct emotional impression of themselves into some man- 
 ner of fulfilment, and this in the face of reality must be largely 
 only phantasy and pure wish. Do they escape, thus governed 
 by phantasy, they distort reality to themselves and produce the 
 disorder and distraction, the disappointment, suffering and pain, 
 in which the various " episodes " end. They have a service to 
 perform if they silently, unconsciously contribute their influence 
 to the clearer rational way of life, but escaping its control, they 
 work unrestrained havoc in individual and society. 
 
 Such the wishes paint the future before Gina. The poet 
 Hebbel has said of dreams, they "glide like shadows through 
 the soul, preparing, warning, comforting," but the comfort here 
 turns to fear and pain when she awakens, as do the dreams 
 of the night when at the point of waking they pass over to 
 the inspection of consciousness and the wishes of which they 
 are made must become unrecognized as such in order to pass 
 this exacting censor. Gina's vision comes too close to the wishes
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 37 
 
 as realities for her recognition of them as in any sense her 
 desires. They must be clothed with fear, shrinking, condemna- 
 tion, and, with the same familiar mechanism of shifting respon- 
 sibility, as due to environment, the work of those who sur- 
 rounded her. 
 
 Perhaps it might be hardest to admit that the first " episode " 
 contained a pictured wish fulfilment. Surely in the somber and 
 despairing close of the five years of humdrum service for her 
 family, in all the loss and bitterness which are her lot, there 
 seems nothing that could claim the roseate title of wish. This 
 episode ends in lonely sorrow for herself, an insignificant school 
 teacher, who has failed in attaining her own happiness and the 
 attempt to serve her family. The wishes which hide in the 
 unconscious are nevertheless frequently strange to ordinarily 
 recognized ways of thought. They do indeed hide a certain 
 strange pleasure upon which the ego feeds, a negative form of 
 pleasure which extracts nourishment for the pleasure sense from 
 suffering, a self pity and a self immolation which in the depths 
 satisfy the ego sense. This therefore is only a strange disguise 
 for the more positive seeking which desire primarily knows. 
 
 Beneath this pathway of Duty, behind even Gina's perplexity, 
 which is the cause of her peering thus into her own unconscious 
 depths, is a race old problem. It is the difficulty and inner re- 
 luctance with which the child separates from an innately in- 
 dolent dependence upon parental love and care. Examination 
 of the effort of both parent and child to make this necessary 
 separation, whether it is observed throughout the history of 
 man's racial development or through investigation into the dif- 
 ficulties of individual life, reveals that this bond is a stronger 
 i one than has carelessly been supposed. It is founded in an 
 i intense love and desire of the child toward those upon whom 
 i it has leaned for earliest absolute comfort, support, care and 
 affection. The parent is the object of childish desire and of that 
 more active aggressive seeking of a love object, which is early 
 awakened, and directed first of all toward those upon whom 
 ', the child thus leans. Toward these, in its narrowed environ- 
 ment, its feelings take on an intensity which is not always
 
 38 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 sufficiently displaced in later life upon more external objects, 
 be they persons or other objects for endeavor. 
 
 Moreover, since the child is already a sexual being, this love 
 has a tendency to go out more positively toward a parent of 
 the opposite sex. Therefore a certain fixation upon such a 
 parent may manifest itself in later life, or at least it will color 
 and determine later events and later object choice. This too 
 forms a guide for the maturing child, only it also forms a 
 source of danger as the use of this early tendency is exceeded 
 and too great demands are made therefore upon maturity to 
 conform to the child's early pattern of wishes. 
 
 The parent is often no more free than the child in this matter. 
 Thus Gina's father with his almost whining dependence upon 
 her domestic care and affection, as well as his grosser desire 
 to sell his daughter's hand for his own comfort and release 
 from care, blocks the way to his daughter's path of independent 
 self expression. He complicates the problem which is vexing 
 not only her conscious sense of duty, but more deeply the un- 
 conscious struggle she is making to be free from her own in- 
 clination toward him. The unconscious impulse to prostitute 
 herself, which fairly shrieks aloud in the second vision which 
 she has of herself, is more quietly and so more distractingly 
 at work even now. It too has precipitated the perplexity and 
 the desire to gain help for her choice. 
 
 Prostitution is a trailing into present society of certain ancient 
 elements in a woman's love or sex complex which once in a 
 far more primitive society and on through advancing periods 
 of its history had definite social service to perform. Woman 
 as a weaker party before male aggressiveness could only demand 
 certain rights for her protection and reward. In the earliest 
 forms of society of which even unwritten record can be found, 
 she was curiously protected in the demand for these rights and 
 in the exercise of them by some male member of her own family, 
 usually her elder brother. She maintained under his protection 
 an exalted right in the tribe over her children, and sometimes 
 their property and succession. Even in ancient civilizations as 
 well as in the more barbarous conditions of many savage tribes,
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 39 
 
 it was her duty and privilege to become the property of a 
 stranger or group of strangers, either before marriage or even, 
 perhaps with a religious sanction, during marriage. Thus was 
 her promiscuity a part of her past history, an affective element 
 which takes its place in the preserved past of emotional ex- 
 perience and uncultural desire, once cultural now no longer so. 
 This is doubtless closely intertwined, since it was her exercised 
 right, function and duty, not only with her mere desire, as a 
 past source of exercise and therefore a pleasure for her, but 
 through it she found her source of power, when power avenues 
 were largely closed to her otherwise. She is even known in 
 earliest times to have contributed to the brother's prestige by 
 bearing children by her husband or other lover to count as the 
 brother's own. Her own power and prestige lay therefore for 
 ages in the use of her body. Through it alone she was exalted 
 above man, dominated him. This was not one man, but many 
 men, and yet in most ancient periods at least, for the service 
 of male members of her own family who were thus particularly 
 in her power. 
 
 Such light from the remotest depths of the past into which 
 we can peer, shines forth with almost uncanny brilliancy in the 
 light of Gina's possibilities revealed in her visions. They are 
 the result of these anciently inherited impulses based on an- 
 cestral experiences in the past. She strives to break away from 
 father and brother, but even when freedom seems to have 
 been gained, she too utilizes her power over other men, to bring 
 through her rewards both father and brother into the dominance 
 by which she makes them dependent upon her. Unconsciously 
 she plunders other men while they destroy her, and hurls her 
 plunder at the feet of the father and brother whom she would 
 thus dominate and enslave. 
 
 Therefore even in the first vision, clothed in the garment of 
 self immolation, abandoned to tears of self torture, she has 
 sacrificed herself to keep them still in her power. Duty is the 
 word with which she covers it all, most securely from herself. 
 Duty is the word impressed upon her by the weak and faithless 
 Louis, a third suitor for her hand who proves faithless through-
 
 40 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 out all the three visions of the possibilities of her future. She 
 has adopted his cravenly used word duty only to find herself 
 in the end its dupe and victim. Her father is dead, beyond 
 her power of support and comfort, the brother Kenneth has 
 grown pitiably weak and inefficient in his dependence upon her. 
 Her sister has been flung into the arms of the unfaithful lover 
 who once prated of duty to her. 
 
 She has realized upon herself, and upon those whom she 
 should rather have set free to wrestle with reality for them- 
 selves, an unconscious wish to be all to them, to exercise the 
 peculiar power which only a woman has. Unable to escape to 
 an external love, that which for the modern woman can truly 
 lie only in mutual service and mutual freedom, she has remained 
 in the father's house, close to the brother too, and has met only 
 loss and disaster for them all. Still the unconscious is able to 
 extract something for self, the revery of bitter grief and freely 
 shed tears. She awakens however from such an insight into 
 possibilities within herself, repulsed, but assured that here is 
 not the reality of her true path. She will look again. 
 
 This is the vision in which her prostitution runs riot. The 
 gleam of power through her voice had led her, but had soon 
 been exchanged for the false brilliancy of love's basest conquest 
 over men. It had been the influence of the man first who had 
 stood in a fatherly relation to the unprotected girl, but who failed 
 in his protective power, rather initiating her into the life which 
 was the expression of the fundamental sexual father complex. 
 She had escaped the unconscious incest bondage at home only to 
 find it confronting her in the mocking disguise of a sexual ex- 
 perience with this older man, which was the beginning of the 
 riotous course of prostitution and domination, up to the last 
 silly exhibition of her power to defy her operatic engagement 
 and fling herself more completely to the infantile form of 
 pleasure and power. It is the final culmination of the dom- 
 inance, gathered in the brother, for whose sake and the father's 
 this state of affairs largely existed, which breaks the destructive 
 spell. When she has goaded the brother to a sudden resolve 
 to murder this man, that is to destroy the father representative
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 4! 
 
 who had been her ruin, which perhaps will end in the brother's 
 own final destruction, then the vision breaks. The girl can bear 
 no more. As in the dream such wish must be brought through 
 waking to the light of consciousness for denial, rejection, for 
 choice of some other better way to power. 
 
 One more vision however must clear the unconscious atmos- 
 phere and give her final freedom to use in a wiser way these 
 powers hidden within her soul. This time she will yield more 
 distinctively, more consciously to the father's wish. As it streams 
 before her out of her own psychical possibilities, it must be 
 her own wish also. Prostitution is decently clothed here in 
 society's sanction, the father's material comfort and freedom 
 from care, with beside the added element of the attention and 
 consideration of a grave gentleman, apparently desirous of her 
 self as well as to make her comfortable and well provided for. 
 
 The unconscious slavery, which is that inner fixation upon 
 the father, in the infantile form of demanding the father's love, 
 provision, whatever makes up the child relation to the father 
 in the intense self seeking of the father, this breaks forth in 
 61ackest shadow in this episode. The dominance which she has 
 unconsciously sought, providing again through herself for her 
 father and family, turns upon herself. She is the worse than 
 slave. She is scorned and spurned, flung aside without the 
 slightest consideration. Her value as the man's social and sex- 
 ual bauble is utterly at an end. Her downfall is brought about 
 by a most false and despicable accusation on the part of the hus- 
 band who has tired of her. In fact this situation too arises in her 
 own subjective vision, as again a picture of the possibilities 
 which her own wish was able to project into the pathway of 
 the future. So again it is with the fact of her own inner pos- 
 sibilities and therefore her sense of guilt with which she wrestles. 
 No wonder then that morphine becomes a refuge after she 
 has been cast off legally by her husband. No wonder also 
 that even in the dream, the vision, she struggles in the weak- 
 ened drugged condition against complete downfall again and 
 though poor, in need, friendless, lost to her social world, yet 
 keeps herself here true to the pure ideals of her girlhood home.
 
 42 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 And this one of the three " episodes " ends through its sorrow 
 in hope and promise of joy and life as she is discovered and 
 rescued by her one true lover. 
 
 She is prepared for the waking. This is like the so-called 
 " preparing function " of the dream of the night, which after 
 long struggle, yielding to primitive, uncultural wishes, and slow 
 conquest of them, seems at last to take the path out into light 
 and victory. One who has been submerged in the power of 
 the baser unconscious wishes and the conflict with them, as 
 in a long neurosis, comes after a more decisive and clearer 
 wrestle with these through analysis of them to a new form of 
 wish. The way out into a new adaptation to reality comes at 
 last through an understanding of what the more primitive wishes 
 are and where their ancient value and their still present power 
 lies. A pathway is found to bring that power and value out 
 into a higher cultural life, which is the sublimation of them. 
 To this the dream itself finally points the way. 
 
 So has Gina won victory for herself and for those whom she 
 would have made thus blindly dependent upon her, absorbed in 
 her dominating power. Once more in waking reality, with all the 
 dream possibilities unfulfilled, only dreams, she kindly but as- 
 suredly refuses this last wish of her father, as she has already 
 refused the other two courses which had presented themselves 
 to her. This time her father seems likewise to have attained 
 a new freedom. This comes about through no mystic subtle 
 influence. It results from Gina's simple matter of fact grasp 
 of reality for him and for the brother. Her sublimation is 
 very real and very complete. A few clear suggestions to the 
 father that he shall simply utilize the reality which is at his 
 hand and take up his own problems, take them up with the 
 cooperation of the active young son, to the advantage and for 
 the opportunity of self expression for both, breaks the spell of 
 domination and dependence. Then she herself is at last free 
 to turn to the one lover with whom she can meet on free and 
 equal terms of mutual endeavor and enterprise. Eyes of Youth 
 are at last cleared to see their way beyond the confines of inner 
 fixation out into the privilege and possibility of a maturity freed
 
 VISIONS OF THE FUTURE 43 
 
 from the bonds of infancy skulking under false names and de- 
 luding pretences. 
 
 There is no boundary to the past undulating behind us. The 
 future remains dark and impenetrable before. Life's activity 
 finds itself however upon the clear moment that looms up in- 
 stantaneously between past and future. All, like this play of 
 the theater, which reveals to us more of the actual content and 
 power of that past, releases us from its bondage and gives us 
 a freedom to receive its influence and fit it successfully and 
 constructively into this quickly fleeting present moment. In 
 this way and this alone the future becomes ours. We do not 
 penetrate it. We have no definite visions as to where we shall 
 walk and how. But its possibilities come within the range of 
 our understanding, and we have a better, nobler task than walk- 
 ing a clearly defined path. It is ours to grasp the influence 
 of the past, apply it to reality, to opportunity, so that we make, 
 create the future and mold it to progressively constructive ends.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS x 
 
 As the dream may forecast the future through revelation 
 of the wish trend which in the unconscious guides the course 
 of action, so also it performs a less progressive function. It 
 brings to view in this the compensatory nature of the wishes 
 and the phantasies they produce to soften the hardness of reality 
 and to substitute a phantastic unreality for the sterner things 
 of the world outside. This is not an altogether harmful function 
 since first it keeps an idealism about external actualities which is 
 in turn an inspiration to progress, an incentive to make the 
 dreams come true in contact with reality and through its means. 
 Besides this it forms an aid and support for the psychic ten- 
 derness and sensitiveness of a race which is not yet able to 
 meet openly and fully the jolts and jars of the real world of 
 endeavor. Here however the danger line is discerned and this 
 sensitive side of human nature too soon throws the weight of 
 its attention and interest so thoroughly over upon phantasy that 
 connection with reality becomes to a greater or less extent dulled 
 and confused and may even reach a complete separation from 
 external realities. 
 
 Even the failure to make of life something of beauty and 
 value, which has been called illness, has always had its com- 
 pensations. They serve to make life and the conflict between 
 weakness and the craving for success bearable, even if they must 
 in part also prevent the better solution and victory. Further- 
 more in the case of more complete failure they substitute a 
 complete phantasy gratification for the lost reality. The failure 
 is due to the retreat of the creative energy into paths which are 
 out of touch with social activity, and in a greater or less degree, 
 
 1 Printed in the New York Medical Journal, Sept. 3, 1917, under title 
 Psychotherapy and the Drama. Drama by John N. Raphael from George 
 Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson. 
 
 44
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 45 
 
 is the energy has retreated, there is weakness, pain, or in- 
 jffectuality. Pain is sometimes spared, weakness and ineffec- 
 :uality disguised by this secondary art of compensation, which 
 ;erves reality only indirectly, if at all. If severance with 
 reality is complete an utterly helpless psychosis is the result. 
 Fhe break with reality is, however, rarely so entire. Human 
 lature is too plastic not to allow of some sort of compromise 
 3y which art patches up, conceals, and even magnificently justi- 
 ies its failures. 
 
 The mechanisms are many by which individuals in all degrees 
 }f success and failure hide from themselves and largely from 
 the world the measure and the nature of the latter. This serves 
 the useful purpose of preserving one's own sense of existence 
 md self importance, the foundation on which alone all effort 
 and effectualness are possible, relieving man of that overwhelm- 
 ing sense of his own shortcomings and disabilities which would 
 seriously hinder true progress by keeping him bowed under an 
 impossible burden. He is yet too ignorant of all the impulses 
 and emotional content which make up his history to be granted 
 a clear scientific control over these difficulties. Therefore a 
 certain amount of animistic projection is still permissible to 
 maintain this sense of security. Civilized man does not drop 
 his weariness, as does the savage, 1 along with a stick or a 
 stone as he ascends a hill, but he still kicks the table which he 
 has banged and thus saves his decorum and dignity in the face 
 of the defenseless furniture. He has, however, far higher and 
 greater refinements whereby he casts from himself the inner 
 burdens and conflicts and the tragic failures which have resulted 
 from these. They constitute sometimes mental disturbances 
 which cause society endless pain and trouble; at other times 
 they pass over into exquisite dreams both of pleasure and of pain. 
 
 Ordinary man attempts unwittingly these matters of artistic 
 substitution and projection. His success is ugly or beautiful in 
 varying degrees. Here, however, is the place of the true creative 
 artist who can take this material also from the mill of human 
 
 1 See Frazer : The Golden Bough, Part VI, The Scapegoat, p. i ff. 
 Third edition. Macmi!!an and Co. 1913.
 
 46 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 experience, which is both individual and common experience, 
 and so deal with it and reconstruct it that it becomes of saving 
 health to the multitude. His art as has been seen takes these 
 elements which lie deepest in the human psyche and offers some 
 solution of universal problems which will help also the indi- 
 vidual soul in its unconscious struggle with them. It may solve 
 problems by some happy optimistic ideal and thus transport 
 unsatisfied humanity to a world of wish gratification. Again, 
 it may express in tragic form the struggle as it rationalizes and 
 disguises itself under the inevitableness of fate or a wiser Prov- 
 idence. Art accomplishes all this through its beauty and its 
 intuitive insight into the buried life of the unconscious. Its 
 beauty and success, moreover, are actual only because it is 
 based upon the truth which is universal, truth of the inner 
 conflict and of the essentially human means of solution. This 
 truth may lie even in the artistic portrayal of a solution which 
 fails to meet reality or it may point a better ideal, a more 
 effectual solution. In either case it is because art is able to 
 bridge the chasm between successful or unsuccessful solution 
 that it grants the unconscious libido an avenue of safety and 
 release. 
 
 Its beauty and intuition carry its message into the heart of 
 the human conflict and afford that contact with dreams with 
 which the psyche cannot entirely dispense, but it does not remain 
 there. It subtly touches the unconscious by the reality of the 
 problem presented, but it also with equal subtlety and skill leads 
 the way back to the reality of conscious thinking and the eval- 
 uation of the problems in the light of this. Thus it both reveals 
 the way out from a false and dangerous phantasy absorption 
 in the inner struggle and reveals and illumines the falsely pro- 
 jected defense. It so utilizes the latter, moreover, that it safely 
 bridges the gap between dreaming false and dreaming true. 
 
 The story of Peter Ibbetson, whether as first presented by 
 Du Maurier in his romance, or as it has been placed in the dram- 
 atized form before the public, has committed itself, more or less 
 unwittingly on the part of the author and the dramatist, but 
 none the less truly, to the study of the development of a definite 
 form of defense reaction out of a tragic inner struggle.
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 47 
 
 It is its truly artistic character that has made possible this 
 reaching down into the crushing prospect of a lifelong im- 
 prisonment to draw from it the marvelous phantasy formation 
 which changed Peter's despair and loneliness into a veritable 
 heaven of love and bliss, childhood joy, and lovers' constant 
 meeting. 
 
 Peter Ibbetson spent his boyhood at Passy, a charming village 
 retreat near Paris. Here, better known as the boy Gogo Pasquier, 
 he passed his childhood days with his father and mother and 
 his small friend Mimsey, who with her mother was a constant 
 visitor in the garden. Here she and Peter learned their lessons 
 and played the happy play of childhood. The death of Peter's 
 parents brought him into the care of a so-called uncle, really 
 a cousin of Peter's mother in England, Colonel Ibbetson, a hard 
 and unjust as well as a sensual man. Peter, bearing his rel- 
 ative's family name, grew to manhood here separated from all 
 those he had known in the happy days in France and with his 
 heart full of love and longing for them and of bitterness toward 
 the contemptuous and contemptible cruelty of his uncle's manner 
 toward him. He enters the profession of an architect but has 
 little confidence in his own success although his prospects are 
 good as others measure his ability. He himself dreams and longs 
 for the old happy days. At the ball with which the play opens 
 he meets the Duchess of Towers whose beauty and goodness 
 are on every tongue and he and she are stirred to a vague re- 
 membrance which later becomes a distinct recognition of each 
 other as the long separated friends of the happy Passy days. 
 The recognition takes place at Passy where at last Peter has 
 escaped for a brief holiday. He returns heartened for a new 
 and more forgiving relationship with the uncle, but his good 
 intentions are rudely frustrated by being confronted by the 
 evidence of his uncle's infamy. The latter had plainly and ma- 
 liciously intimated that Peter was his own son and adds 
 to his perfidy by producing a letter in which he practically but 
 still evasively states that Peter's mother, held by her son in 
 sainted memory, was before her marriage the mistress of this 
 cousin, Colonel Ibbetson. Peter cannot restrain himself. Fired
 
 48 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 by hideous doubt he rushes to the house of his so-called uncle 
 and demands of him the truth. The cowardly wretch still 
 fences from the truth, only goaded at the last to utter an equiv- 
 ocal avowal, when Peter tortured by doubt of the truth or falsity 
 of the avowal rushes upon him and slays him at once with the 
 heavy stick in his hand. 
 
 Peter is at once apprehended and in the jail meekly prepares 
 to die. At the moment of his being led from his cell however 
 a reprieve is brought to him obtained by the Duchess of Towers, 
 who also sends him a message by a mutual friend, that although 
 her own marriage an unhappy one must then keep her from him 
 she will be with him in his dreams, and she instructs him how 
 he shall " dream true. " 
 
 There follow then forty long years of imprisonment during 
 which the gentleness and industry of the prisoner are remarked 
 by all about him. The days of privation and toil pass for him 
 in a light that his keepers know not of. He lives actually only 
 in the anticipation of the dreams of the night, when true to her 
 word the duchess moves with him through the childhood haunts 
 and through all the dreamed of but on his part unseen wonders 
 of the world. The story elaborates these, the drama confines 
 itself to the wanderings in the old garden of Passy among the 
 parents and dear friends long departed. The dreams continue 
 even until Mary passes out of them in one dream of death and 
 until Peter's life of atonement in its narrow prison is over and 
 the dream melts into his passing. 
 
 The drama has a specialized technical interest in that it takes 
 its audience into the inner phantasy of a Prison Psychosis and 
 illuminates the content of such a pathological formation. This 
 is a psychotic formation which is frequent enough among those 
 inmates of penal institutions or the hospitals which care for 
 their sick, and much labor and time have been expended upon 
 its possible cause and meaning. These remained, however, ob- 
 scure and inexplicable until this principle of defense reaction 
 against an inner conflict shed its interpretative light. This ex- 
 plains also the reason for its frequency and its common oc- 
 currence in the early period of imprisonment. This has already
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 49 
 
 been noted also as a universal mechanism, guarding humanity 
 from that self depreciation and discouragement which would 
 surely condition further failure. It assumes, however, all too 
 often, pathological proportions as it separates the individual 
 more and more from the reality which he would gladly deny in 
 the face of his inadequacy. In the prison, further separated 
 from the corrective influences of active life and social com- 
 parisons, the pathology becomes uppermost. And still there is 
 the refuge and the beauty of it which not only bring back the 
 lost peace and happiness, but make of the otherwise depressed 
 prisoner the cheerful worker, whose keepers marvel at the wil- 
 ling accomplishment of his tasks. Such a faithful inmate Du 
 Maurier has pictured Peter. The drama has apparently utilized 
 as its chief theme such happy aspects of the dreaming. Yet 
 we believe that unconsciously the novelist and dramatist have 
 touched also the deeper theme which is a universal one, and by 
 thus bridging the way from the tragic inner conflict to this its 
 compromise solution, have shown us how much or how little 
 we may trust such a solution, how far it holds one to one's 
 place in the real world, and how far it forms the dangerous 
 cutting loose. It touches the inner conflict with just enough 
 intuitive understanding to quicken each auditor's unconscious 
 appreciation of it; it grants him then both warning and relief 
 through this artistic channel. We can never get away from the 
 fact that human life with its trial and error consists of so 
 much compromise adjustment that we can ask for nothing more 
 than a constantly but only gradually increasing light upon the 
 usefulness or danger of the mechanisms we employ. No one 
 can set himself apart in a class of complete success, for all 
 share the disabilities, all make use of the same means either 
 to evade or overcome them. We all seek by dream to com- 
 pensate for reality. Therefore these artistic creations find their 
 greatest value in teaching us how to dream true rather than to 
 dream false. They help us to that clearer knowledge of what it 
 is we really are about in these defense reactions and so deliver 
 us from the bondage to them which makes of them an end 
 in themselves and thus a more complete disguise of reality. It
 
 5O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 leads on, therefore, to that clearer knowledge of our inner selves 
 and the outer projections of that self, which means more per- 
 fect health in actual working adjustment to the things of the 
 real external world. 
 
 What, therefore, is the kernel of Peter's problem, the con- 
 flict and the phantastic construction which finally solved his prob- 
 lem for him in this compromise fashion? For the prison psy- 
 chosis can probably no more be separated from the whole of 
 the patient's life than Peter's later dreams with their pleasure 
 giving outcome are apart from the earlier dreams and doubts 
 which intermingled themselves to his undoing. The conflict 
 seems indeed to have been that fundamental one which lies be- 
 neath each life fabric. Long, long ago when the world was 
 still very young man apparently groped in the dark with the 
 same problem, He had not made this problem. Evolution 
 teaches that it had come to him from the long slow ages of 
 building before man arose, when life was learning to emerge, 
 here, there, everywhere, now at this flashing moment, now that, 
 to start upon an individual career. Plant and animal life ex- 
 perienced the sudden thrill of something new whenever an 
 individual was making a fresh start out from the parental 
 stream of immortality which had felt the impetus to grant 
 a new birth. 
 
 The parent hold of this greater immortal stream, strengthen- 
 ing and intensifying itself as time went on, continued to exert 
 a powerful influence upon the life it had brought forth. Its 
 fullness, the security and peace of its greater stream, glowed 
 with an attraction from which the individual, with its own 
 forward purpose to pursue, only reluctantly and partially broke 
 away. And still his incompleteness of separation afforded the 
 individual life a rich share of the greater, fuller life behind, of 
 which it was a part, even while it pursued its solitary way of 
 achievement of something higher. The dawning of intellect and 
 consciousness marked the rise of a new being into this mystery 
 of ancient dream on the one hand and individual struggle to 
 rise out of it on the other. His ability to thinfc and reason 
 gave man a responsibility toward the problem, the keenness
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 5! 
 
 of which had no place when only feeling and impulse were 
 involved. Man first began to face the problem with the power 
 of interpretation and control. It was the problem of individual 
 responsibility and effort against the inertia of racial security and 
 completeness. 
 
 The racial child of long ago is still the individual child of 
 today. His perplexity, deeply grounded in the feeling and im- 
 pulse which reach far behind his span of history, is still con- 
 sciously, intellectually unsolved. Each individual man and 
 woman and the whole race together are still in a life and death 
 grapple with the things that embrace desire, love of comfort 
 and ease, and the outer world of opportunity which summons 
 the creative impulse. The parent complex those psychiatrists 
 call it who have sought to understand and guide the progressive 
 urge in its conflict with the regressive instinct within. Early 
 man in his simple totemic clan set himself rigid laws for its 
 control. Society of today contemplates with the greatest horror 
 any flagrant breach of the biological barrier between parent and 
 child, the marked overstepping of the separation which has 
 grown up to save the child from complete return to the parent 
 love. Yet rigid taboo and cultural repression have not wiped 
 away the old problem nor solved the conflict. They have served 
 rather to push it deeper and ever deeper into the soul of man. 
 There it broods as an unconscious disturbance constantly active 
 and therefore demanding of the cultural forces of consciousness 
 ceaseless vigilance and control. Sometimes the solution is at- 
 tained by that successful adaptation of hidden energy to these 
 same cultural purposes which is designated useful sublimation. 
 Then a healthy balance is maintained and life is free. Often, 
 more often than we know, the darkness and obscurity of the 
 problem form a menacing influence which overthrows the peace 
 and effecttialness of the life and the cause is not understood. 
 Crime itself results, as with the hero of our play, and further 
 drifting into the power of the unconscious follows upon this 
 in the added struggle to get away from the consequences of 
 the misdeed. 4 * 
 
 Whole nations have cried out under the burden of this life 
 old conflict, and such tragedies as that of CEdipus the King
 
 52 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 have become the national tragic theme. Hamlet vacillated under 
 it until he destroyed himself and all his house. Brutus slew 
 Caesar, his probable father. It established the " Ordeal " through 
 which Richard Feverel wrecked his life and Lucy's happiness. 
 It inspired Du Maurier in turn to set Peter Ibbetson to write 
 his autobiography in the light of his own projected defense, 
 and led finally to the dramatization of this story of ill success, 
 tragic failure, and refuge in dreams. The crowding of the 
 theater night after night with an audience tense in its interest 
 testified to the appeal of this play, which strikes deep in the 
 heart of man. Probably few are aware of the real note of 
 unison with which this hero's story awakens response in each 
 spectator. No one in fact can see deeply enough and clearly 
 enough into this ancient darkness to understand what it is that 
 has stirred him so. That hesitating restraint which has marked 
 comment and discussion of the play bears witness that the most 
 profound problem has been touched. The complexity of the 
 machinery of presentation, with the skill and strength and sym- 
 pathy that one has felt in the acting, has given suitable setting 
 and expression to the ultimate reality of the drama and en- 
 hances its profound mystery and truth. 
 
 Ophelia's cry over Hamlet might find echo in the ruin of a 
 character so innately noble as that of Peter. Gogo, the boy, 
 grown to manhood in Peter Ibbetson, gives promise of all that 
 is ideal, lovable, and admirable. One thing, however, and that 
 the one thing needful, is lacking to save this man from himself 
 and for the world. The great purpose of life which surmounts 
 all difficulties, because its glance is free beyond them all, is 
 conspicuously absent. Social diffidence, business mediocrity, full 
 employment of none of his faculties were all the manifestations 
 of a spirit in bondage. Ability even to tower over the uncle's 
 foppery and cowardly licentiousness reserves itself for that last 
 supreme act of passion, which cuts him off finally from the 
 world of real men and women. How little even this is an act 
 of freedom from inner doubt and conflict is evidenced by the 
 cry in the face of the uncle's craven lie, " Oh, God ! what shall 
 I believe ! My mother ! "
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 53 
 
 Where is the promise of the lad Gogo at play with Mimsey 
 and their friends, bending over Gray's Elegy or spouting for 
 Mimsey their favorite poem: 
 
 " All day thy wings have fanned, 
 
 At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere, 
 Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, 
 Though the dark night be near." 
 
 Why did he, young man that he was, rich with the heritage 
 of his birth and confronted with a future of opportunity, so 
 soon stop, weary, seeking in vain for the " summer home " of 
 rest? The message which as a happy child he had taken from 
 the poem had failed to lead him " through . . . rosy depths " 
 to pursue the solitary way of progressive achievement where 
 the creative soul must often soar alone. He had not read aright. 
 His solitary way led rather back into the dreams of the past 
 where " glow the heavens with the last steps of day." 
 
 Du Maurier makes Peter himself say, " Thus did I pursue 
 my solitary way like Bryant's Waterfowl, only with a less def- 
 inite purpose before me." And again Peter says of the wearying 
 mental uncertainty which causes the indecision and purpose- 
 lessness of life, " Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits ! 
 It is a disease and, what is most distressing, it is no real change ; 
 it is more sickeningly monotonous than absolute stagnation it- 
 self. And from that dreary seesaw I could never escape, except 
 through the gates of dreamless sleep, the death in life. . . ." 
 Even the dreams at that time, before the deed of murder, he 
 dared not admit, but they must lie in that apparent " dream- 
 lessness," where the unconscious phantasies are enacted far be- 
 low the regard of consciousness. It is no wonder that he dares 
 know that he dreams only when the stronger woman has taught 
 him some service of the dream. 
 
 Frail little Mimsey's life force had found a better way for 
 her. She as Mary the Duchess of Towers, the successful, strong 
 woman, unlimited in her service to her fellowmen, must needs 
 be the support and guide of her one time protector and willing 
 slave. Thus say the dreams, recognizing in her the success 
 and strength which the dreamer himself had missed. She had
 
 54 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 grown free of the garden loveliness and peace. Only at the 
 end of a busy day in the brief time she could steal from waking 
 life's active duties could she return to the heart's desire. In 
 this she knew 1 the secret of " dreaming true." Poor Peter 
 emerged from the garden home in a bondage more fettering 
 than poverty, absence of friends, or the unsympathetic scorn 
 of a heartless uncle could ever impose upon him. 
 
 The invisible web which has entangled so many a life in 
 the unsuspecting years of childhood had bound him fast. The 
 very shelter and sweetness of the idyllic home, the tender love 
 of father and mother and admiring friends imprinted upon these 
 early impressionable years the weakness from which he was 
 never afterward to escape. It strengthened that fixation in the 
 old problematic strife between the love which finds all its satis- 
 faction in dependence upon the past and that freedom which 
 finds its salvation out in the world. The very precipitation of 
 that unconscious struggle into such a fixed snare to the libido 
 reveals its cause in the dream which in the drama just precedes 
 Peter's projection of the whole struggle out into the murder of 
 the uncle. It occurs at Passy on the occasion when he and the 
 Duchess become fully known to each other, while he sleeps just 
 before her entrance. Long before this Peter had confided to 
 Mrs. Deane that the first drop of hatred had been distilled into 
 him from the way in which the uncle had spoken of the Major, 
 an old friend of boyhood, when the uncle came to fetch the boy 
 Gogo away. " I hate him ; I think he hates me/' Peter had 
 sought to justify himself at that interview with Mrs. Deane. 
 The dream at Passy on the hot Sunday aftenoon tells a different 
 tale. It reveals a rising something in the child's mind much 
 earlier than that which crystallized then into the bitter poison 
 of suspicion. The boy Gogo sits at his translation under the 
 trees. He appears utterly absorbed in childish struggle with 
 the difficulties of his task. He must finish putting into French, 
 " And leaves the world to darkness and to me." Just here 
 the uncle enters and holds interview with the mother. Gogo, 
 flushed and engrossed with the arduousness of the translation, 
 apparently does not hear. Suddenly he looks up more than
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 55 
 
 startled. He seems to have an unconscious intuition or per- 
 ception of the turn the conversation is taking. It has not yet 
 needed the uncle's sneering reference to the possible jealousy on 
 the part of the husband or his mother's sudden cry to Gogo to 
 go find his father, to attract the boy's frightened attention. He 
 is up and alert before the fatal word " jealousy " is uttered. 
 That only fixes the doubt which has arisen from a flash of 
 self revelation that has entered his soul. 
 
 Those familiar with the vagaries of the unconscious phantasies, 
 as they group themselves about the central complex with an 
 absolute disregard for the sequence of conscious logic or time, 
 will be ready to accede to this phantasy picture its possible 
 place merely in the later psychosis erected by Peter both before 
 and after the deed and transferred in his defense to this earlier 
 period to account for the closely following murder. The pic- 
 turing of the play makes this dream vision a curious turning 
 point upon which Peter decides to return to the uncle, lay 
 aside his long animosity, and enter upon relations of friendship 
 and peace. Is this a palliative resolve against the suspicion at 
 work in the dream? 
 
 The resolve is rudely shattered, however, by the uncle him- 
 self. The letter which comes into Peter's hands and his uncle's 
 subsequent conduct precipitate instead the violent murder, never- 
 theless not without cry of doubt and despair before the blow 
 finally is given. Once the deed is committed, Peter seems to 
 have attained a new sense of freedom. There are throughout 
 the psychotic dreams which present themselves through the long 
 term of years no longer such scenes as those in which the boy 
 Gogo participated in the previous dream. All is sweet and 
 fair and desirable. There is even the separation of the child 
 from the mother through the woman in the dreams, who now 
 becomes leader and guide and sympathetic friend. After the 
 first call of loneliness and need toward the mother who does not 
 hear, Peter wanders satisfied with the woman Mary, the normal, 
 adult object of love, who at last, though only in the dream, 
 has rightfully taken the mother's place. Even at death the 
 greeting with the mother turns quickly to a revival of the dream 
 existence with Mary.
 
 56 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 It is as if Peter attained freedom at last when the murder 
 had been committed, the freedom he had never in his unim- 
 prisoned days been able to find. But, alas, it is now only in 
 the dream, the psychosis, when he can no longer make it of 
 service to the world in which he should have lived. He has 
 bought his inner freedom at the price of his place out there; 
 nevertheless he has killed the dark thing within himself. This 
 not unusual dramatic issue has its correspondence in the dreams 
 of the neurotic patient. Here it is often discovered there will 
 be a number of attempts to slay the fixation in terms of the 
 death of the unconsciously loved object. Freedom from the 
 neurotic fixation is marked by the final accomplishment of this 
 in the dream. The yielding of even the child to the inner un- 
 conscious attraction of dependence upon the mother, and grati- 
 fication within that love, had led Peter all these years in the 
 opposite direction from life. It had held him hesitating, timid, 
 afraid, pursuing his solitary way in dreams of his own making. 
 It led him finally into the agony of doubt and horror and pain 
 to the point where he actually faced the darker side of this 
 mother worship, the side which is death to the creative life and 
 against which all nature and nature's laws have set their flaming 
 sword. 
 
 The unbearableness of this darker side to conscious recog- 
 nition must fling it outside himself. As with Hamlet, there 
 is an uncle at hand. Let the guilt and shame be upon him 
 through his shameless torture of the young man as through 
 his cowardly accusations of the woman involved. Hamlet, too 
 distraught with his own doubts and fears, could not bring 
 himself to the deed of retribution. Peter, slaying his uncle in 
 a storm of contempt and anger, frees himself from the horror 
 within himself. Now he can laugh in the face of death. There 
 is no repentance for the thing he has done. Freedom to go and 
 come is lost, but peace within himself is attained. Henceforth 
 he will live only in his dreams, but he has learned how to " dream 
 true." He calls it dreaming true, because the conflict is now 
 wiped out of his life. It grants him forty years of peace 
 and happiness in which he faithfully fulfills the limited 
 prison tasks. That is all. He has paid a price for this, the
 
 PHANTASY COMPENSATION THROUGH DREAMS 57 
 
 price of complete withdrawal from the greater sphere of ac- 
 tivity, where creative achievement had awaited him. It is in 
 reality the price of his childish fixation for w i hich he had 
 given in part his earlier ineffectual years but which has now 
 demanded full payment. Was this price first set upon him by 
 the too loving parents who made of the garden home so dream- 
 like an existence that the child could never break away? Had 
 a too sheltering tenderness established the fixation upon the 
 mother so strong that it formed an indissoluble bond which 
 had fettered his whole life? It is dissolved by this act, which 
 was the culmination of the " bitter drop " instilled within the 
 mother love. It barred him forever from that happiness which 
 lies in the world, where one attains it by freedom both to love 
 and to work. It substitutes for this only the goal of dreams 
 and finally " the abyss of heaven," the " zone to zone " of the 
 " boundless sky," to which the dreams finally converge. 
 
 Herein lies the lesson of understanding for all who witness 
 this play. Here also is the value for a therapeutic understanding 
 of the reason for the form and content of the psychosis of 
 self defense and substitution. This offers not only a way of 
 approach into the clinical appreciation and treatment of such 
 individuals who have thus separated themselves from actual 
 affairs. It brings also a new measure of prophylaxis which 
 must have the widest social bearings upon the underlying mean- 
 ing and hidden purpose of crime. It must work, moreover, 
 through each individual life as society comes more clearly to 
 appreciate the source and reason for such a result of the inner 
 conflict, which in some finds expression in criminal conduct. 
 These are known through the mechanisms also which grow up 
 later, as in the psychosis, as a means of defense against the un- 
 bearable recognition of the inner conscious content and the 
 conflict which this conditions. The prophylaxis, however, reaches 
 still further, touching the lives of the children. It calls sharply 
 to those who have the task of thrusting them out to face 
 the sterner things, hard enough; for the adult himself, still 
 harder for him to choose for the .child. 
 
 Dream is not denied us by the reality in which we live. The 
 latter realizes its own true worth, builds and strives toward
 
 58 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 its ideal because the never failing glow of the dream life can- 
 not be obliterated. Dream life nevertheless spends itself to 
 its own enjoyment and reaches bewilderment when it turns its 
 attention only upon itself. It gropes confused in insatiable 
 desire, unsatisfied yet cloying with the satiety of its end- 
 less phantasies. Really it is only through healthful action 
 that one learns to " dream true." The constant alternation 
 between wholesome, useful activity which delights in the diffi- 
 culties as well as the rewards of the outside world, and the deep, 
 silent life of pleasure within, gives life its precious worth. This 
 makes it deep and true in the heart of things, but keeps it at 
 the same time always rebounding toward the height of achieve- 
 ment, even shifting this height with the growing outlook which 
 action must continually prepare for itself. Such dreaming true 
 fans indeed "that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere," but 
 this is not coldly and harshly to reject " the summer home where 
 reeds shall bend, soon o'er thy sheltered nest." It merely sets 
 the true limited value on the havens of rest and pleasure, lim- 
 ited so that they shall not prove a snare. That solitary way 
 loses itself neither in heaven nor on earth, but knows them 
 both in the true dreams that live. 
 
 It is such dreaming which lies in the very art of the playhouse. 
 To such a spirit of dreams it leads its audience, so that they 
 find veiled beneath its artistic forms the reality of human strug- 
 gle, its source, and the success or failure of its solution. There is 
 a clear intellectual gain in the presentation of these human re- 
 actions and efforts at adjustment and a fresh insight into certain 
 definite social problems. For these are interpreted in the lan- 
 guage of the energy which strives beneath the tragedies of life 
 and the emotion which gives life its individual value and setting. 
 Actual psychoses are set in a new and truer light through this 
 rich and varied coloring. They take their place in the one great 
 drama of human effort and compromise success. All problems 
 of health and disease find also a new significance in such a 
 conception. For practical clinical affairs find their place also 
 among human dreams. The art of the drama finds and points 
 the way between the false dreams and the true.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LiFE 1 
 
 The pathway into the attainment of dream satisfaction as 
 a substitute for reality may not depend, as it did with Peter 
 Ibbetson, on a suddenly complete severance of the right to re- 
 main among men. The unconscious may choose less violent and 
 more protracted ways to release the individual from adjustment 
 and responsibility. Alcohol may prove in its particular effects 
 upon the individual such a means and the pathway of alcoholic 
 indulgence be chosen and followed in order to obtain the same 
 unconscious ends. 
 
 There are two things which mark the complete success of 
 man: his capacity for adapting himself to the demands of ex- 
 ternal life and that for living out satisfactorily his own inner self. 
 In these is to be found the measure of health within himself, 
 individually, and without himself, that is in his full moral re- 
 lationship to society. 
 
 Whether he is aware of this or not, he is continually ex- 
 pressing his ability or disability to live out healthily his own 
 personal relationships, such as those of love and friendship, 
 and in expressing himself in the social ways of activity, which 
 are equally, but more broadly, creative. These are the advance 
 posts which he must reach as he attains the high tide of success 
 and health, or they only mark the degree of his failure and 
 sickness. He naturally presses these boundaries forward with 
 his growth and prepares for himself in this way a fuller ex- 
 ercise of his powers, thus providing for the increasing demands 
 which alone can express his enlarging capacities and his ever 
 increasing need for this self expansion and self expression. 
 This must be so in his more personal relationships, and then 
 
 1 Printed in the New York Medical Journal, Jan. 18, 1919. Leo Tol- 
 stoi ; Redemption. Boni and Liveright, New York, 1919. 
 
 59
 
 6O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 also as his individual relationships stimulate him toward a more 
 complete socialized creative life, in which his individual capaci- 
 ties find this wider exercise. 
 
 More briefly stated, each individual in order to be satisfied and 
 well must be adult, that is full grown up to each fresh point 
 of departure into experience and continually passing on through 
 full use of the capacities he has into wider ones. Anything 
 less than this is temptation to idleness and ease. It is failure 
 to gather all the force to each point of development and use it 
 there and it results only in deterioration and continuous loss 
 rather than gain and satisfaction. Yet at the same time such 
 is the pleasure reward which acts as a premium upon every 
 effort toward attainment, and upon every forward step in prog- 
 ress and use, that each one of these pleasures forms too easily 
 a satisfaction in itself and the individual is tempted to remain 
 at any stage in the path of progress, sexual or social. Then 
 the phantasied enjoyment easily weaves its spell around him 
 and reality recedes and fails in its stimulating attractiveness, 
 while the unreal, the phantasy surrounded, partial attainment 
 appears sufficient in itself and for the time altogether entrancing. 
 Because it is unreal, therefore not enduring, it must frequently 
 show its unreliability and finally end in bitter dissatisfaction. 
 But phantasy in defense multiplies itself and also resorts more 
 and more hectically to artificial means to stimulate itself and 
 cover over more and more thickly and completely its empty 
 nothingness. It has itself magnified the difficulties of reality 
 by distorting them through a wrongful interpretation of itself 
 no less than of the reality it opposes and so it makes the way 
 out of dangerous phantasy continually harder, and the way 
 deeper into its meshes continually easier. It luxuriously paves 
 the broad road to destruction. 
 
 It is not, however, a wilful and depraved determination which 
 starts one upon this road. Weakness and failure are not so 
 abruptly nor so simply conditioned. Rather such a course dis- 
 covered as it is by the world, even, by the physician, only when 
 already far along, has its determinants more or less all along 
 the way where phantasy has succeeded in wresting the attention
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 6l 
 
 from reality and building up its own power instead. It is a 
 lifelong story beginning regularly in childhood, when the way 
 of progress and complete mental health has not been found, 
 but instead these deviations from that road have been discov- 
 ered and one by one their attractions have been allowed subtly 
 to multiply and fasten themselves upon the victim. 
 
 It must still be remembered that these bypaths are not how- 
 ever through foreign country into which some exceptionally un- 
 fortunate persons wander. They are those in which all linger 
 for a time in the process of growth, but some also soon pass be- 
 yond in development toward the full and healthy adult life. It is 
 here in such natural territory that phantasy does its work, dis- 
 torting the prospective look and preventing the free stepping 
 forth on the forward path. 
 
 " Redemption," the dramatization of Tolstoi's story, has also 
 its own peculiar fitness for drawing the veil gently from this 
 j darker side of the losing inner conflict. It leads the spectators 
 on from a mere legitimate return to the inner life of phantasy 
 to its abuse and exaggeration of influence upon the individual. 
 It enables them to enter at first sympathetically into the fairer 
 glow of the phantasy which forms too effectual a bar to the 
 hero's return to the world of real deeds and achievement, and 
 holds him there until the roseate mirage has proved itself sordid, 
 unsatisfying, deathly. Meanwhile by a keen penetration it has 
 ! laid bare some of the falsifying mechanism of the phantasy 
 and revealed the deeper causes of the failure and psychic sick- 
 ness and degradation. 
 
 Fedya has deserted a wife who loves him though the desertion 
 has no apparent external motives. The attempt of her family 
 to explain it upon the attraction of the gypsy character with 
 whom he is often found or in the lure of the low surroundings 
 in which he indulges appears at once quite unconvincing. Deep- 
 er reasons lie within the man's own conflict as he himself ac- 
 knowledges to the one or two truly sympathetic listeners who 
 ; can understand him. These conflicts and the losing struggle 
 with them which marks Fedya's career form the theme of the 
 play. No entreaties on the part of the wife prevail to lead
 
 62 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 him to return to her, his life with her being because of his 
 inner difficulties impossible to him. Yet his respect and sincere 
 regard for her happiness create the desire to remove the hin- 
 drance of his presence so that she shall be free to marry another 
 man who loves her and can make her life a happy one. 
 
 Fedya has not the courage to shoot himself and he has too 
 much high feeling to drag himself through the degradation 
 necessary to give her grounds for divorce. So he accepts the 
 clever scheme of the gypsy girl who loves him and befriends 
 him to pretend that he has been drowned and therefore can no 
 longer prove an obstacle because of his wife's scruples. This 
 plan is successfully carried out but after his former wife has 
 passed some years of happy married life with her second hus- 
 band, Fedya unwittingly reveals himself and the marriage is 
 subjected to the rigors of legal trial and condemnation. Then 
 at last the courage of the man, though now to all external ap- 
 pearance utterly ruined and degraded, asserts itself and he does 
 actually remove himself by taking his own life. 
 
 After the first scene, in which the hero's defection from the 
 paths of rectitude has been briefly stated for the audience, the 
 real play opens upon this phantasy world. Even before this 
 second rise of the curtain the simple beauty and charm of 
 phantasy makes its appeal. This is first to the sense of 
 hearing, that sense through which, as Wagner has said, the 
 artist reveals most deeply and most truly the inner nature of 
 things. The simple strains of the orchestra with the subdued 
 voices of the singers upon the stage prepares us for the added 
 fascination of the low gypsy room with its strange dark figures, 
 their wild spontaneous yet suppressed breaking forth into song 
 or dance or whatever is suited to please the mood of the hour. 
 The red glow of the fire upon the picturesque figures with the 
 occasional brightness of garment or ornament upon the women 
 fill in the enchantment of the picture. The central figure of 
 the play reclines in the more mellowed glow of the spot light 
 under the full spell of pleasure and indolent enjoyment of all 
 this sensuous and phantastic setting. It is he in whom is to 
 be witnessed the effect upon a human soul of such a complete
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 63 
 
 weaving and thralldom of the spell of unreality as he descends 
 into its power more completely. 
 
 The music grows more abandoned but plaintively appealing 
 as it takes possession of the entire scene which seems to have 
 attracted and lured him from his home. It is not however 
 strictly that. It is not the spell of this gypsy room sunken 
 below the street or the cold blue light which shines from without 
 against the window panes at the top of the room. It is not 
 the warm sensuous brightness, which contrasts even more hu- 
 manly with the outside coldness, in the warmer radiance of 
 the fond creature hovering passionately near him, her bright colors 
 and cheap flashing ornament more in evidence in the brighter 
 light where Fedya, the sunken man, lies drinking and smoking 
 and dreaming. It is here that his friend, the devoted messenger 
 from his wife, seeks him and implores him for her sake to 
 return to her and the realities of life. The appeal is vain. 
 It is met only by mocking indifference with a certain insolent 
 disdain which is partly bravado, partly drunken helplessness 
 to break the chains of fascination which hold him in this other, 
 this unreal world. 
 
 For this is what he, this drunkard, has chosen. Rather this 
 is what it is to be a drunkard. For some reason he has drifted 
 from the path which would have proved him a man with a 
 man's power to win and enjoy life in all the fullness with which 
 earlier opportunities presented themselves to him. For some 
 strange and hidden reason he has been caught in this outer 
 fringe of pleasure which looks so fair if not gazed upon too 
 long or too closely, but which even here ends only in the luxury 
 of dream and selfish phantasy with no access to anything lasting 
 and substantial. 
 
 This is the drunkard's paradise, the refuge which alcohol 
 gives from something in reality which fails for some reason 
 to maintain its better and higher claims upon him. He has 
 chosen the route of alcohol, not because of its taste, not by 
 the craving for the thing in itself, the basis on which the world 
 has blindly sought to explain and counteract its influence, but 
 as a means of easy entry into the world of phantasy, and has
 
 64 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 allowed it to release the higher conscious control of reason and 
 grant admittance to the easier retrogressive paths. Fedya later 
 explains this to the wise and thoughtful prince, who alone holds 
 out a hand of understanding sympathy, of comprehension of 
 the fact that to the drunkard's life there is an inner history 
 of conflict, who perceives that there is a reason for his con- 
 duct and the state into which he has fallen which deserves 
 attention and consideration as an actual psychical fact. " I've 
 led this sort of life for ten years and you're the first real person 
 to show me sympathy. . . . Ah, yes, my ruin. Well, first 
 drink, not because it tasted well, but because everything I did 
 disappointed me so, made me so ashamed of myself. I feel 
 ashamed now, while I talk to you. Whenever I drank, shame 
 was drowned in the first glass, and sadness. Then music, not 
 opera or Beethoven, but gypsy music; the passion of it poured 
 energy into me, while those dark bewitching eyes looked into 
 the bottom of my soul. And the more alluring it all was, the 
 more shame I felt afterwards." 
 
 So far however this is still looking upon the more external 
 revelation of his conflict. This is no deeper than a superficial 
 realization of its existence as a psychic struggle. Its inner mean- 
 ing and the elements which have first initiated it and have given 
 it its peculiar trend, the dark things beneath it, from which 
 temporary refuge is found in these particular paths of self 
 indulgence, are yet matters of deeper study. At first the authors 
 and the actors allow to play upon their audience the same spell 
 of attraction which proves the phantasy world a delight to all, 
 and not at first an unnatural evil in itself. Then by artistic 
 gradations those who witness the drama are introduced into 
 the exaggeration of its hold upon the human psyche, its wrong- 
 ful use to pull away from the paths of salvation in reality to 
 the ultimate ruin, which is its regressive goal. 
 
 It is indeed soon to be seen even through the first glamour 
 of the play that already there is at work an unreality substi- 
 tuting itself for ability wholesomely to receive and enjoy. There 
 is something thus unnatural and incomplete even in the response 
 which Fedya makes or fails to make to the advances of the gypsy 

 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 65 
 
 girl, who as time goes on reveals herself sincere and genuine 
 in her devotion to him. He is unable to return her love in 
 kind. Here once more it is not the moral aversion he admits 
 to sullying the purity of this girl's love for him which makes 
 him so half responsive to her love. This is no doubt a factor 
 in his behavior to her, particularly later, as he explains in the 
 last scene when he is describing their happy hours together 
 after she has saved him from the suicide he had planned. 
 
 At that time, as the play proceeds, he had planned to take 
 his life in order to release his wife, so that she might be free 
 to marry a man more worthy of her, the same friend who 
 appeared in the gypsy resort to lead him home. He had chosen 
 this course rather than that of a divorce because of the sordid 
 and filthy lying details of the ordinary legal course of procedure. 
 There was too much good, too much real nobility of character 
 striving against weakness to permit that. Yet characteristically 
 too his courage had failed him. Then when he was in despair 
 the gypsy girl had appeared and in the strength of her love 
 and power to control affairs she had proposed a feigned death 
 that he might free his wife and friend from the barrier of 
 their moral scruples, leaving them to their happiness as he 
 would be free to follow his own course. This he rehearses 
 in the last act, when, some years later and many stages lower 
 in his degradation, he relates his strange life to a sympathetic 
 companion at a drinking den in the city slums. 
 
 Even then he admits that not alone was it a moral ideality 
 and unselfishness that had kept him from debasing the gypsy 
 girl sexually, this girl who had so pleaded for his love and 
 thrown herself upon him. He had in fact revived his original 
 sense of honor and highmindedness, that higher standard of 
 character which is so at variance with the weaknesses and self- 
 ish tendencies which are revealed in the search into unconscious 
 motives and causes for sickness and failure. It is this double 
 character that is in one sense the cause of any neurotic com- 
 promise. The strife between the two attitudes and trends causes 
 the conflict and suffering which are felt as illness and mental 
 distress and weakness with its attendant shame. On the one
 
 66 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 hand it reveals that the better nature will not fall easily into 
 the paths of sheer self indulgence and base gratification, on the 
 other that the better nature has not obtained sufficient control 
 of the unconscious with its buried impulses to direct them to 
 ways of health and strength. Such evidences of conflict, of 
 the presence and force of two sets of desire and tendency, are 
 evident all along the way in the character of Fedya. It is this 
 which excites interest and sympathy. Through this there is 
 here such a true representation of the average human life that 
 the spectator is compelled to a fellow feeling, whether he ac- 
 knowledges it or not. The special pathological form therefore 
 in which it appears in the character of Fedya is only an ex- 
 aggeration of such a struggle in degrees which make it path- 
 ological and which also drive the sufferer to the aid of alcohol 
 to make the conflict easier, to efface it for the time by inhibiting 
 the higher control which sets one side of the struggle. 
 
 Fedya knows something of these two sides of his nature. His 
 friends are not unacquainted with the higher cultural side with 
 its ideals and semblances of restraint. They have seen it in 
 the better days and when he first slipped along his regressive 
 path. The other side, in which lie the reasons for weakness 
 and failure, they do not know, but he himself feels them and 
 can in part lay them bare. We hear this as he tells the story 
 first of his treatment of the gypsy girl. " I felt it wasn't right 
 to go on taking, taking where I couldn't give. I told her we'd 
 have to say goodbye. My heart was so wrung all the time 
 that I could hardly help crying." 
 
 " The single good act of my soul was not ruining that girl. 
 Was it from pity? I sorry for her? Oh, never. And I'veS 
 been attracted often, you know. Once I was in love with a 
 grande dame, bestially in love, doglike. Well, she gave me a 
 rendezvous, and I didn't, couldn't keep it, because suddenly Ij 
 thought of her husband and it made me feel sick. And you 
 know, it's queer, that now when I look back, instead of being 
 glad that I was decent I am as sorry as if I had sinned. But 
 with Masha ( the gypsy girl ) it's so different ; I'm filled up 
 with joy that I've never soiled the brightness of my feeling 
 for. her."
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 67 
 
 Something plays beneath the surface of these revelations. 
 There are elements underlying these experiences which sug- 
 gest a deeper flood of unrest, of strange doubts and phantasies 
 and fears, which must belong only to the inner life of the man 
 himself rather than to any outward circumstance, which prevent 
 normal definite reactions either in such situations or in the way 
 of escape from them. The adult form of reaction is direct, 
 decisive either directly toward a certain goal or determinately 
 away from it, while the infantile, uncertain form is wavering, 
 vacillating, inefficient and inadequate toward the event and un- 
 certain in its attempt to flee from it. Such very plainly is 
 the nature of the baser affair, such was the inability either 
 to give or to respond to the fulness of the gypsy's love for 
 him or to find in it more than a dream of autoerotic phantasy 
 satisfaction. Only there was the saving strength to make one 
 final effort of separation even from this, and then the plunge 
 into deeper autoerotic drinking. 
 
 But already in the early scene in the gypsy resort and in 
 the reminiscence of it a little later in Fedya's own poor room, 
 there is the ecstasy of the unreal dream, made up of music, 
 mysterious semidarkness and wine, the appeal of a simple al- 
 most primitive sensuousness but which, like Masha herself, 
 " unlocks the gates of heaven," that is the gates of the region 
 of sheer self indulgent phantasy. To watch his indolent, un- 
 responsive attitude as he lies in the gypsy room steeped in 
 alcohol, drunk even with the excess of phantasy, is to realize 
 the depth of sheer autoerotic ecstasy of dreaming into which 
 the alcohol permits him to enter. It is a complete substitu- 
 tion of the unreality of phantasy for the tortures which arise 
 from the reality toward which he is able to offer only an un- 
 satisfying inadequacy and inefficiency. It is doubtless some- 
 thing of the nobleness which he still retains which leads him 
 to refuse to return to his wife at the request of the messenger 
 she sends. It is, furthermore, as can be judged by the weak- 
 ness later displayed, the inherent inability to arise and master 
 reality by seizing it as it offers itself. 
 
 But why this weakness which besets him at every hand and 
 which has first driven him upon the path of dangerous self
 
 68 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 indulgence? Why are such things so in the psychic world? 
 If the choice of a course of action lay only in outside cir- 
 cumstances most of us would have reason enough to choose 
 at one turn and another the useful and safe and prosperous 
 way of action. We are, however, governed by stronger im- 
 pulses, the force of which and even the existence of which 
 is hidden from conscious recognition. Only, as Bergson 
 says, through a few messengers from the unconscious, which 
 succeed in smuggling themselves through the half open door, 
 do we have any inkling of the past of desire and the feeling 
 associated with it which we are dragging behind us at all 
 times. To some these recollections and the affects attached 
 to them are scarcely perceptible or troublesome. They form 
 some of the slight distractions, peculiarities, negligible super- 
 stitions, half admitted fears, unguarded slips of the tongue, 
 any one of the trivial factors which barely disturb the even 
 tenor of the conscious course of action. With many, others 
 these smugglers are of greater power to disturb. They indi- 
 cate less serenity and satisfaction in the unconscious sphere 
 and they appear perhaps in horrid form or they serve to drive 
 the individual to some such artificial and harmful relief as 
 that which Fedya sought. 
 
 Fedya too confesses to certain of these unbidden messen- 
 gers, and they point to some nucleus in his past life, probably 
 as in most individuals belonging first to the remote period of 
 childish desire. For here at that early time desire rules su- 
 preme, there is not yet the later correction through both reason 
 and experience with an external world. The child's desires 
 are intense and selfish and can in themselves at first brook 
 no interference. Yet the interference of reality with phantasy 
 cannot be avoided and certain children, less easily able in their 
 natures to adjust to such outside influence, repress into the 
 unconscious these desires in all their intensity. These desires 
 by their very overstrong repression tend to lose contact with 
 reality and thus to develop into an exaggeration of phantasy, 
 both the unreal substitute pleasures which phantasy, even in the 
 unconscious, may offer, and the opposite feelings of revenge,
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 69 
 
 anger, and jealousy. Then only later when life offers perhaps 
 some special difficulty and even adult interest recedes from 
 the real world to join such phantasies, do they attain strength 
 enough to appear in some covert or disguised form to disturb 
 the external life. Or it may be that a conscious adult joy 
 can be after all only looked upon by the individual through 
 the eyes of such infantile phantasy, self centered unsocialized 
 pleasures and angry injured feelings, and the conscious adult 
 joy which presents itself turns to dust and ashes. The child 
 situation is brought up against the adult circumstances and 
 fails to fit; instead the whole adult situation is distorted and 
 spoiled. 
 
 Something of this sort seems to have been the case with 
 Fedya. At least he admits that his life has failed in the face 
 of all that was fair and prosperous in outlook. Before he 
 began to drink " everything I did," he says, " disappointed me 
 so, made me so ashamed of myself." He had education, finan- 
 cial position, a charming and loving wife, but peace he had not. 
 Something within himself beyond outward circumstances dis- 
 turbed all this. It had come, as we hear in that confession 
 of his later life in the drinking slum, to poison all the love 
 and happiness of his married life. The other relation, the 
 bestial relation with the grande dame, seems to have been in- 
 terfered with not so much by a moral scruple but by the same 
 sort of feeling applied in a different direction. It was the 
 thought of the husband which had made him sick and deter- 
 mined him so suddenly to flee the rendezvous. The same thing 
 working in another direction drives him from his wife to find 
 forgetfulness in degradation and chiefly in drink. 
 
 We have not here the details of an analysis but we may 
 perhaps draw by analogy from the many such instances that 
 have passed before the review of the psychoanalyst. These have 
 discovered such psychic difficulty arising in infancy in the re- 
 action of the child in its strong wishes directed positively, pri- 
 marily, toward the parent of the opposite sex and negatively, 
 that is fearsomely and hostilely, toward the one of the same 
 sex as the rival. The long dormancy of these wishes as they
 
 7O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 lie waiting in the unconscious for a suitable occasion for dis- 
 charge explains their seeming unreasonableness and their abrupt 
 compulsive as well as hallucinatory character when they finally 
 gain access to consciousness, but even then only in a somewhat 
 changed and redirected form. In fact it is one frequent manner 
 of defense to throw them in conscious accusation upon some 
 one else or upon outward circumstances. 
 
 In this manner Fedya had come to doubt the sincerity and 
 wholeheartedness of his wife, Lisa's love. To her he attributes 
 the unconscious division of the affections which probably exists 
 in his own heart. The faithful friend, Victor, who had loved 
 her earlier unsuccessfully stands to his mind as a ready and 
 natural vehicle for this disloyalty on her part. Yet con- 
 sciously he can not justly accuse either of them, so it is only 
 in the hallucinatory phantasy of the night when she lies in- 
 nocently asleep by his side that these thoughts rise within him 
 and force him from his bed and finally drive him permanently 
 from his home. The old child phantasy regarding the father 
 and the mother is apparently at work. The doubt is there of 
 the mother's purity and loyalty because his own wish, unex- 
 pressed, is in conflict with the knowledge, however indefinite, 
 of her relation to the father. Because the child is excluded 
 from this he reacts unconsciously also with consequent hatred 
 and hostility to the father. 
 
 Fedya had felt from the first that he had to share the love 
 that he wanted with some other man. That at least was his 
 rationalizing conscious way of putting the deeply unconscious 
 gnawing, yet forbidden desire from the childhood. It was the 
 outward expression of the jealousy, the craving for the love that 
 belonged to another before it belonged to him. He attributes 
 to the wife then the unconscious love which he does not know 
 how to admit in himself. " Yes, I think she's always loved 
 him, far, far down beneath what she could admit to herself, 
 and this feeling of mine has been a black shadow across our 
 married life." " Yes, no brightness could suck up that shadow. 
 And so I suppose I never was satisfied with what my wife gave 
 me, and I looked for every kind of distraction, sick at heart
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 
 
 7! 
 
 because I did so." These words are an admission rather of 
 inner conflict than of disappointment and grief from merely the 
 possible external factor of his wife's lack of love to him. The 
 psychopathologist knows that such sickness of heart is not a 
 reaction to outside difficulties and losses even of the most serious 
 kind. Reality calls for a more healthy, healing reaction. Inner 
 conflicts, one's own self involvement through unconscious im- 
 pulses and distraught phantasies, are rather the source of such 
 distress. 
 
 Then out of these inner phantasies, the strange hidden con- 
 tent of them, which has its coloring from the unreasoning jeal- 
 ousy of infancy, arises his maddening hallucination. " Do you 
 know when she lay there asleep beside me," he says with a 
 shrill laugh, as he lays bare his heart to the sympathetic com- 
 panion in the drinking den, " I would hear him, pushing open 
 the door, crawling into the room, coming to me on his hands 
 and knees, grovelling, whining, begging me " and by this time 
 Fedya is almost shouting in a suppressed way " for her, for 
 her; imagine it! And I, I had to get up and give my place to 
 him. Phew! then I'd come to myself." 
 
 There is a conflict in such a soul deeper than any outer cir- 
 cumstance is able to occasion. It expresses horrible contortions 
 of phantasy built out of the exaggerated occupation with the 
 thoughts first innocently conceived in infancy, very vaguely 
 conscious or entirely unconscious even then. But lacking thor- 
 ough healthy reaction with reality they have nowhere to go but 
 back upon the inner self. They have prevented a wholesome 
 joyous attitude toward the love object who had willingly chosen 
 him in preference to the other man, and who held her love to 
 him long after he had cast aside all sembance of a forced 
 outward devotion to her. He was true in his intention and 
 wish toward her and yet the fiercer grip of the unconscious 
 drove him upon his way of equally forced disloyalty and un- 
 faithfulness toward her. Other features of the inner conflict, 
 other forms of phantasy and struggle, which it develops or 
 through which it passes in the unconscious in order to drive 
 into the particular form which leads down the road of alcoholic
 
 72 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 indulgence, have not been indicated or suggested as these have. 
 It is simply shown that alcohol dulled the pain of conflict 
 and of defeat. It also marked the path of defeat, for it proved 
 a quick and unhindered way into the phantasy which appeared 
 so hideous so long as conscious struggle against the unknown 
 force had to be maintained. For it and the surroundings in which 
 it was first indulged opened wide the gates of sheer indulgent 
 phantasy where the conscious monitor was stilled. One can 
 easily believe also, in the face of the high ideals which Fedya 
 yet preserved within himself and in his relations to these other 
 characters, that the better, higher nature, the unquenchable yet 
 losing side in the struggle was demanding as a sort of com- 
 promise a penance of degradation and self abasement for the 
 darker nature of the phantasies which were being striven against. 
 In such strange compromises, half yieldings, half indulgences, 
 losses and sufferings, there is after all an egotistic satisfaction 
 and pleasure in self abasement and self inflictions. 
 
 What after all is the purpose of such a play, even though 
 an unspoken, an unconsciously presented one? Is there real 
 value in thus portraying human weakness and downfall? What, 
 it may be asked, is it that so claims the attention and sympathy 
 in the representation of this losing conflict? It is not alone 
 that the physician may find in it some definite object lesson with 
 which to arm himself for his work of understanding and help. 
 The appeal is a far more universal one. It is necessary, and 
 each spectator's undefined reception of such a play testifies to 
 this, that we should look more deeply into the conflict with 
 which each life is beset, which solves itself for each in his own 
 best way or which transforms itself into something which is 
 no solution but only a distortion, a failure, a defeat which in 
 one form or another has arisen out of it. It is necessary 
 furthermore that our objective attitude toward failure, defeat, 
 degradation, as seen in the world all about, should be more 
 definitely and more profoundly understood. This means that 
 they should be known in their causation and in the mechanism 
 of transformation. This entails knowledge of the causation 
 by which they arise from deeply laid unconscious impulses and
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 73 
 
 of the struggle which these necessarily have with the higher 
 conscious and social impulses and desires. It necessitates un- 
 derstanding the mechanism whereby they appear in such indirect 
 and little comprehended manifestations as alcoholic indulgence 
 and precipitate or seemingly deliberate choice of degradation 
 and ruin. 
 
 That they are not in real fact such, Fedya's own heartbroken 
 explanations testify. So also do the ringing words with which 
 he makes his vain appeal to the befogged understanding of the 
 magistrate in the court of so-called justice. This man's under- 
 standing is under the control of formal conventions. These 
 are too rigid defenses against the admittance into conscious 
 thought of the force and power of the inner impulses, a fear 
 and indolence under which society hides itself from the arduous 
 task of really understanding and wisely, helpfully dealing with 
 men's mistakes and crimes, which are impelled from within by 
 these forces. The material with which they have to do is real 
 and vital, it is human life itself in all its possibility of good 
 or evil. This they forget because they want to defend them- 
 selves from the further implication of this fact, that this ma- 
 terial, because it is human, vital, is the great explosive force 
 of the world, just as it is the great creative force, and so can 
 work utter destruction. Therefore the latter possibility creates 
 the fear that formally hides both itself and the creative and 
 recreative possibility under the hard and self protective forma- 
 lism, which is perhaps more conspicuous in the legal circles 
 than in any other branch of society. 
 
 Fedya is brought at last into court, a wretched, shambling 
 figure. He is physically repulsive, he is mentally abject. There 
 is however still in him enough of the divine spark of the better 
 endeavor to be roused once more into hot protest and burning 
 pronouncement of the truth. He is not here for his own mis- 
 demeanors. The irony of misnamed justice is bitterly in evi- 
 dence. His act of self effacement for the happiness of others 
 and the ridding of them of his presence, the one disturbing 
 factor to their happy usefulness together, has been vilely dragged
 
 74 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 into the light for material gain. Some blackmailer who had 
 overheard his life's confession to the drinking companion has 
 made capital of it by hauling the one time wife and her present 
 husband into court on a charge of bigamy. The righteousness 
 of the law would reunite her to the base counterpart of a man 
 which is all that is left of her former husband, and exile the 
 man whom she has come to love and honor most sincerely and 
 with whom she was living a life of upright sincerity and peace. 
 
 The self righteous zeal of the law would simply hurl the 
 whole psychic conflict in all its lurid impurity and untruth back 
 upon their heads. Fedya, however, in the final clear nobility 
 of thought and appreciation flashing through his abjectness, 
 catches at last also the clear pathway of courage, as clear a 
 one perhaps as can be left for one so long straying from def- 
 inite mental purpose and direction. At last he has the courage 
 to do that which he could not do years before and he solves 
 the impenetrable problem by taking his own life. This is not, 
 however, before he has uttered a last ringing arraignment of 
 the falseness of' the conventions under which the law and 
 society hide all attempt to comprehend the profound psychic 
 truths of which he has the full measure of experience. His 
 plea is that which the play must make to every one. It must 
 also come with peculiar force to those special guardians and 
 manipulators of the welfare of society and of the individuals 
 which compose it, as represented in our legal bodies, or our 
 medical workers, or any other profession or group which pre- 
 sumes to hold the reins of social government and individual 
 regulation. 
 
 " The truth, O God, what do you know about the truth ? 
 Your business is crawling up into a little power, that you may 
 use it by tantalizing, morally not physically, people a thousand 
 times better than you. . . . I'll speak as I feel and you 
 write it down. So for once some human words will get into 
 a deposition. . . .'' And the besotted voice goes on, once 
 more convincing and manly in the truth it speaks : " We 
 were all in a spiritual struggle beyond your comprehension ; the
 
 ALCOHOLISM AND THE PHANTASY LIFE 75 
 
 struggle between anguish and peace; between falsehood and 
 truth. You, the defender of public justice, the appointed guar- 
 dian of morality . . . receive on the 2Oth of each month a few 
 kopeks' gratuity for your wretched business, you get into 
 your uniform, and in good spirits proceed to torture bully 
 people who wouldn't admit you across their doorstep. Then 
 when you've had your fill of showing off your wretched 
 power, oh then you are satisfied, and sit and smile there in 
 your damned complacent dignity. How can you punish me," 
 he asks, beating his breast, " who am suffering the worst there 
 is. ... How absurd you would be if you weren't so vile." 
 And then, when his plea falls fruitless, as of course it could 
 not alter the rigidly determined events of the law, he takes 
 the one remaining way to circumvent the artificiality of the 
 law and ends his life. By overcoming his fear at the end he 
 grants freedom to those whom his impotence and self indul- 
 gence, or the complexes which had lain behind these, had bound 
 with himself. His own freedom is won, too, but with loss as 
 he ends the useless life and sinks at last into the complete 
 unreality, which with his last breath he calls " Happiness." 
 It is a drama that attempts to draw no solution out of its 
 presented features of character and action. It is Ibsenian 
 rather in that it teaches or convicts in its representation of life 
 as it is, as it exists deep in the mental life beneath the external 
 conflicts and failures in which it is clothed. It seeks to elab- 
 orate no explanation, to point no moral. It does, however, 
 lay human psychic life before its audience, first appealingly, 
 that it may rouse our sympathetic appreciation, introduce us 
 as it were into the reality of the psychic problems. Then in 
 a faithful manner it pictures and develops these to their in- 
 evitable outcome, with many a sidelight also on the petty com- 
 plications of emotion and feeling which blind judgment and 
 distort reality while they separate thus the self righteous from 
 those who make the more signal failures. Its impressive les- 
 son is that those who witness the drama should not be among 
 the self righteous in the appraisal and condemnation of such
 
 76 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 weaknesses, but should rather understand them as conditioned 
 by psychic occurrences. They should be regarded as attitudes 
 of deepest and remotest origin revealing themselves in real life 
 in these unsuccessful forms. Thus there is given greater in- 
 sight into these as disease conditions to be psychically and so- 
 cially met and understood and helped as such.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES x 
 
 A still more analytical search into the unconscious than this 
 frank and open revelation which has just been considered would 
 reveal the great variety of wishes and strivings that are there 
 at work. This would give explanation to externally expressed 
 peculiarities of character which would help toward a better 
 adjustment of these in relation to other men and women. The 
 pattern of thinking and feeling in the unconscious is very differ- 
 ent from the carefully guarded and selected one of consciousness, 
 yet this careful selection so distorts and warps the inner im- 
 pulses that the unpleasant characteristics show how conscious- 
 ness bungles its task. The larger relation to a variety of factors 
 of the mental life as well as the better possibility of relationship 
 in the use of the impulses from which they arise are not under- 
 stood by viewing conscious appearance alone. 
 
 The sordid and the gay, earthly love and heavenly joy, merry 
 making and religious festival, and even the gentle kindness of 
 ministration and the darker things of envy and greed, all these 
 lie closer in the unconscious than we are accustomed to think. 
 Conscious thought rudely separates them from one another, 
 this is the imperfect attempt to dissolve the mystery of the 
 ever shifting confluence of the varying elements of life. Or- 
 dinary thought is so careful in real life to separate one interest 
 out from another that one gains its value only at the expense 
 of the other. The latter then only comes to shrivel or to turn 
 sour upon happiness and cheerfulness of disposition or it pre- 
 cipitates hopeless conflict in which health of mind is impossible. 
 The resulting misunderstanding, hatred, envy, jealousy, self seek- 
 ing, the mental sickness of any sort, even often the bodily ailment 
 
 1 Charles Rann Kennedy: The Army with Banners. B. W. Huebsch, 
 New York, 1919. 
 
 77
 
 78 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 are distortion and marring of that which should have been sweet- 
 ness and light. The petty and partial interests with which we 
 occupy ourselves fail themselves to draw a real sustenance, 
 and progress and constructiveness are also absent. For there 
 is lacking that fundamental unity where sordid and spiritual, 
 earthly and heavenly have their common source and receive 
 their mutual power and value. The quick daring flash of the 
 dream reveals not only the manifold aspects of truth in such 
 varied phases but the greater truth as well which comprises 
 these in one great vital fact, which is life itself. 
 
 " The Army with Banners " attempts to bring some of these 
 apparently incongruous elements into the setting of their mutual 
 relation. It does so by utilizing the ordinary conscious attitude 
 of misunderstanding and ignorance of this relationship, thus 
 through it to reveal gradually the deeper interrelationship and 
 the fellowship, which this really entails. It has to call to its 
 service of revelation also the manifest forms of hatred which 
 arise. The playwright calls it rightfully a " Divine Comedy " 
 for it bears a message of the humor with which life's incon- 
 gruities interplay as well as the minor tragedy with which the 
 incarnated devils of hatred, envy and all the selfish partialities 
 of life tear aside life's unity and harmony each for its own 
 ends. Thus are the soundness and wholeness of mutual living 
 and thinking sadly disturbed. 
 
 The playing of such a comedy is allowed place in an old thir- 
 teenth century nunnery, now an orphanage under the care of 
 Mary Bliss. There is a spontaneous freedom in her outlook 
 upon life but this is somewhat hindered and its brightness en- 
 feebled by a too childish trustfulness and lack of alertness 
 in regard to its full meaning. The possibilities which lie in 
 the contact of her home with a vital active modern world are 
 somewhat dimmed by the too idealistic peace which hovers 
 over it. For this reason it is only too ready for the entrance 
 into the happy scene of certain dividing elements which mar 
 the perfection themselves revealing ignominious and shameful 
 depths of the human mind. But out of this there comes a 
 clearer knowledge of all the truth and life is lifted from its
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 79 
 
 childishly meaningless roseate dreams to a more vivid and hearty 
 interest in reality. 
 
 Certain friends of Mary Bliss, more worldly than she, con- 
 stitute themselves presumably her guardians though their hard 
 self interest comes openly to the fore. Because in her wider 
 appreciation of inner realities, she gives freer vent to these in 
 her beliefs and actions, they label her with a static disease 
 term so that this may satisfy their usual rational tendency 
 always formally to define what is too wide for the common 
 understanding and also to justify to themselves and others their 
 interference by making it appear necessary. So they call her 
 a victim of dementia precox, apparently because she brings 
 somewhat nearer the conscious surface some of the older ways 
 of thinking and acting which have been relegated to the un- 
 conscious. She conforms not only her conscious activity largely 
 to the lines of religious symbolism and gives that a more con- 
 stant place in her daily life than is ordinarily accorded today, 
 but she reveals much of its actual inner meaning, closer to 
 the unity of life in the sphere of love than it also is ordinarily 
 accepted to lie. And it must be admitted that her behavior 
 belongs to an earlier period of history. 
 
 Therefore the professed friends have come to take charge 
 of her behavior and exert restraint upon her on the very day 
 when she is expecting the return of the Lord from heaven. 
 For this she has prepared in the most matter of fact way, uti- 
 lizing all the interests of her daily life, the activities of the 
 children in the school, their play even more than their work, 
 and adorning herself as a bride awaiting her bridegroom. In- 
 to this scene of expectation the assembled friends launch their 
 plans for convincing her of the unreality of her ways. Their 
 finally executed plan is to offset her dreams with the rude 
 introduction of a representative of the crude and crass practical 
 religion which merely seeks to haul souls out of perdition to 
 salvation with but scant appreciation of the full and slowly 
 developing possibilities of these souls and the life which they 
 convey. Tommy Trail is the embodiment of all that is offensive 
 and harsh in a religion which has blatantly offset itself against
 
 8O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 the inner realities in their relation to the actual desires and 
 pleasures of life. He it is who comes intruding upon Mary 
 Bliss and her gentle and happy readiness for her Lord. She 
 is puzzled and disturbed but so complete is her trustful obedi- 
 ence to His word that she believes at first that it is only her 
 blindness and lack of perfect development which makes His 
 manner of coming seem harsh. Her eyes are opened at last 
 however to the revolting character of the intrusion and to the 
 duplicity of her friends. This serves not to stun her however 
 and cast her down, but it does bring about the desirable union 
 of her gentler withdrawal into the blissful happy things which 
 are largely of dreams and that outer ruder but more real life 
 with which her contact had not been sufficient. It is then her 
 time of triumph or rather that of her greater knowledge and 
 faith, when the narrowness of her would be friends withers 
 before the denunciations of her faithful servitor Dafty. They 
 pale also before the vision of Mary Bliss as she represents 
 the full victory and glory of a church which appears as " clear 
 as the sun, fair as the moon and terrible as an army with 
 banners." 
 
 Dafty has stood on the side of truth throughout the trans- 
 formations that have taken place. He seems to be always on 
 hand, slyly appearing when the plots are thickest, bringing to 
 light the simple joyousness of the more natural life with the 
 children when the false complaints of the others are darkest. 
 At the last he is thunderous in his proclamation of the mys- 
 teries of death and life, the depths of darkness and sin, which 
 he says he has traversed, and the union of all these in a life 
 which is full and free indeed and before which the pettinesses 
 have, as he threateningly repeats, only six, five, four, yes, only 
 one minute yet to live. 
 
 In this general plot of the play each character deserves a 
 special examination since each one represents his or her part 
 in this separateness of impulses, the factors which apart work 
 so destructively and disastrously and together are capable of the 
 complete harmony of a life both serviceable and happy. 
 
 The viewpoint of Mary Bliss, charming as it is in contrast 
 to the darker ones of her advisers and spies, is only one of
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 8l 
 
 those partial ones in which men and women seek so success- 
 fully to enfold themselves that a broader practical compre- 
 hension of life in its duties and opportunities slips out of 
 sight. The latter view requires a high courage of thought and 
 incessant, often difficult constructive labor upon the matters of 
 reality. So these are set aside for a beauty and attractiveness 
 in retirement. The roughness and the uncouth shapes in which 
 the crude unfinished reality of the world presents itself to the 
 creative hand for further making are thereby avoided. To 
 such dreamers and idealists the beauty of past achievement, 
 the esthetic result of that already accomplished is enough, or 
 this failing to fill out all desire and emptiness the rest is 
 rendered even more sumptuously complete by the infinity of 
 dreams. 
 
 Such dreams are not necessarily altogether incompatible with 
 a life of beautiful and helpful service to one's fellows. Some- 
 times they are especially serviceable to the weary or the old 
 and worn, or even in a guarded measure to the play time of 
 little children and the beginning of their entrance into life's 
 sterner lessons. Man cannot live by bread alone. His dreams 
 remain somehow with him because they are indispensable. 
 Nevertheless there is a danger, if he relies too much upon 
 them or turns too frequently to their attractions, that there 
 will steadily result more and more a severance with reality and 
 with the harder tasks and the harder truths which it presents. 
 
 Such is the danger, the unreality that on the one hand lies 
 in the gentleness, the joyousness, the merry happiness of Mary 
 Bliss. And yet these descriptive words which arise to char- 
 acterize her and her life in the nunnery remind one again 
 that this was not all vain; far from it. But she needed an 
 awakening, to add, as she learns to say, to the harmlessness 
 of the dove the wisdom of the serpent, something that awak- 
 ens to real life as it is and as it thrusts itself even within 
 her retreat. Her hypocritical friends are pleased to stigmatize 
 her with the term dementia precox, as if the last word needed 
 for understanding and sympathy and fellow feeling were thus 
 uttered, or indeed were no longer needed, as if one such whole-
 
 82 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 sale characterization should sum up the situation and dismiss 
 her once for all from any ordinary consideration of justice 
 and fairness. It is an unctuous term which these schemers after 
 their own ends roll from their tongues in a pseudoscientific 
 justification of the policy of espionage and interference which 
 they plan to carry on. In this way they have this nominal 
 backing of scientific terms, in which also they include the more 
 crafty, less easily duped Daf ty, the devoted servant and friend 
 of the gentle lady not only, but of truth in its real essence. 
 His ways are obscure to the watchful plotters and different 
 from their conventional thought and manner of speech. There- 
 fore he is as easily set aside as the " paranoiac." No, not so 
 easily put away as the more helpless woman for there is some- 
 thing about Dafty's inner eye for the truth, his complacent 
 acquaintance with mysteries which they have not had his cour- 
 age to pass through, which makes them quail. They disguise 
 this though from themselves in their attempted technical dis- 
 missal of him as far as they may beyond the pale of ordinary 
 reckoning and consideration of the affairs in hand. 
 
 There is certainly more than a smack here of an uncon- 
 sciously hypocritical attitude in society toward that which it 
 fears and yet is either too indolent or too timorous boldly 
 and conscientiously to come to know and to treat on terms of 
 understanding and mutual adjustment. This is society's atti- 
 tude even yet toward the mentally sick. This may exist toward 
 the more pronounced forms which completely separate the sick 
 ones from the world of activity or toward those forms which 
 get but a cold shrug of pity and blame. There is a sort of 
 fearful discharge of the whole burden of really understanding 
 them by slipping their ailments under , certain long familiar 
 names, such as "nervousness" or craziness or insanity, by 
 members of society. Thus is not exactly all duty done, but like 
 the mischief makers of the play, they take to themselves a special 
 unctuousness of condemnation of the sufferers and consider 
 themselves as moving in an atmosphere of " I am holier than 
 thou," or at least saner and wiser than thou. In the same 
 manner the attitude toward those whose maladjustment to so-
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 83 
 
 ciety and its demands is so marked as to constitute them the 
 socially sick, those who commit crime, shows the same blinded 
 nature. Here too the name, the long familiar and well sound- 
 ing term is enough to remove the self righteous robes of a 
 nonunderstanding social world from contamination with this 
 class, and from the trouble to find out the causes and the cures 
 for their social illness. 
 
 This is only apparently a digression from the narrative of 
 the play. In fact it lies in the very spirit and message of 
 the play to point out this falseness of attitude, this blindness 
 to the actual effort and striving of human life. Such effort, 
 to be sure, fails here, succeeds there, hides failure under a 
 spurious guise of success, appears to succeed only because the 
 guage of either is false and falsely applied. This blindness to 
 life as it really moves in the upward currents from the depth 
 of every human psyche, as it often shows turbid and confused, 
 misses the oneness of human life. The blindness is entrenched 
 in natural timorousness and indolence, which makes it easier 
 to remain in its own false and petty interpretations. Its own 
 small motes are magnified to beams, whereby all perspective 
 and relative value are lost. 
 
 Such then are the personages assembled in Mary Bliss's sanc- 
 tuary, the hall of her orphanage. They are the spirit of modern 
 shallow criticism and empty self-seeking which can interpret 
 and speculate upon none but the most superficial and restricted 
 plane. Each has his or her private pet end in view not only, 
 its very narrowness making them conflict with each other, but 
 each has centered upon one particular symbolic symptom of his 
 or her own. Such symptom in each one speaks louder than 
 the words in which they constantly bring it to the attention 
 of each other, of the hatred and envy and narrowness and mu- 
 tual enmity, the intense egoism and self interest of their hostile, 
 critical attitude. This they direct to the gentle unselfish soul 
 under whose roof they have gathered, and to all that is 
 hers. Not so deeply envious are they in reality of the worldly 
 goods with which she is endowed, which is the envy they can 
 almost acknowledge to one another, as they are of the sunshine
 
 84 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 of kindliness, gladness, pure enjoyment of the good things of 
 life, of the positive things of living, with which she has sur- 
 rounded herself. She is not so far withdrawn in her dreams 
 that they have ceased to become outwardly radiant, but she 
 has kept a wholesome vitality even in her return to medieval 
 surroundings and symbolism. All this is contrary to their self 
 centered mode of living and thinking. Their peculiar troubles 
 and sufferings are the reactions in which the human psyche is 
 accustomed to conceal its own ineffectualness even from itself, 
 crystallize as it were such imperfection and impotence into 
 some particular negative psychic emotion directed toward the 
 outer world, which can then unconsciously create for itself 
 some physical disability, or otherwise project it upon the ex- 
 ternal environment. 
 
 It is hardest for the " man of the past," Job Limp, to drag 
 himself into the interests of things about him, even as they 
 concern the matter which has ostensibly brought them together. 
 This matter is the conversion of Mary Bliss from her dreams 
 or else the establishment of a guardianship over her which 
 will give control of her substance into the hands of these 
 worthily inspired friends. The ostensible desire for her con- 
 version is too plainly but a mask for the second desire. This 
 most clearly betrays itself in the very symptomatic ailments 
 with which the creator of the drama has endowed these figures, 
 no less than in every revelation in voice, manner, excessive 
 manifestation of zeal in the cause in hand, the over protestation 
 on every side of each individual egoistically directed point of 
 view. Self betrayal truly oozes from every pore of these char- 
 acters, the self betrayal that subtly portrays what manner of 
 self deception in human nature it is the purpose of the play to 
 set forth. 
 
 It is not strange then that the man of the past severs him- 
 self from all that might make for the joy of living, which is 
 essentially active, creative, progressive, and must sit by the fire 
 nursing the feeling of hatred. Hatred is the opposite of all this 
 and it works on a lower plane of metabolism. In truth it 
 checks that healthy metabolism on which the joy of living is
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 85 
 
 dependent for its means of expression, for its ability to pour 
 itself out into constructive activity. The liver well serves as 
 the seat of his soured attitude toward all things alive. The 
 derangement, coincident with that of the liver, of so many other 
 organs and functions dependent to a greater or less degree upon 
 its action, is all indicative of the apt symbolism of this organ 
 to represent the withdrawal into himself of this acrid man of 
 the past, who selfishly enjoys even his particular discomfort 
 and whose only response to his companions is a selfish, dis- 
 turbed growl. Medicine is coming to know, how frequently, 
 how almost invariably this form of introversion, self absorption 
 in one's own past, causes and maintains just this sort of de- 
 rangement on the bottom layer of nervous activity, that of the 
 physico-vC'hemical metabolic organs and functions of the body, 
 and how symbolic in turn these are of the very psychic factor- 
 which become the motivation of these physical disturbances. 
 
 The man with the plethoric heart is no less symbolically af- 
 flicted. Here again whatever the organic reaction back upon his 
 psychic condition there is apparent a symbolic causal con- 
 nection between his frequent suffocating dyspneic attacks and 
 the overreaching schemes and practices he is busied with, 
 whether robbing the children's penny boxes in the chapel or 
 plotting the sweeping of Mary Bliss's property into his control. 
 Account must be taken of the tremendous activity which the 
 libido or energy output through psychic interest arouses through 
 the vast unconscious " automatic " as well as voluntary con- 
 scious control of the functions of the body. Therefore it is 
 not strange that his cardiac and respiratory functions too 
 should have learned an over response to a double disturbance 
 conditioned by the continual double stimulation which must be 
 somehow adjusted. Since it cannot run smoothly, the stimuli 
 having to do with two opposite paths of behavior, an imperfect 
 compromise, as so often happens, is the result. Some organ or 
 certain organs have to bear the brunt of a continually precipitated 
 conflict between the grossest self seeking on the one hand 
 and on the other the preserving of a sanctimonious mien and 
 religious fervor, even though this manifests itself for the most
 
 86 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 part in carping advocacy of the narrowest and most lifeless 
 principles behind which religion could possibly mask itself. 
 Even the pious emotions are so evidently a fraud that the or- 
 ganic cardiac response must be unconsciously called in to give 
 support to the emotional deception and the plethora forms a 
 sufficient symbol for the fulness of pious faith and ardor and 
 desire. Like most such justified compromises it conceals at the 
 same time that other fulness of the pockets, the greedy stuf- 
 fing with worldly wealth, which stops not even at the children's 
 poor boxes nor at the saving of pins in the lapel of his coat. 
 
 Another of the three coplotters is the man of the present. 
 His interests are too widely and flutteringly dispersed for us 
 to expect any great things of him, those things which are 
 accomplished by sincere effective endeavor. He too has his mis- 
 placed reactions. He belongs in " almost any time " and is 
 engaged in almost any enterprise. Just now true to nothing 
 better than a hysterical busybody impulse, the war and the 
 flag are his concern. Perhaps it is his ability to keep his eye 
 a little more upon the outer world, though in such helter skel- 
 ter fashion, which at least gives him his symptomatic disturb- 
 ance on a somewhat different plane though it fails to bring 
 the ease and satisfaction of well placed toil. So it is his spine 
 that finally protests. Something in his sensorimotor apparatus 
 would surely have to go wrong with such a misguided, ill di- 
 rected zeal. 
 
 Mary Bliss, enveloped in the expectancy of dreams coming 
 true, engages herself above stairs in her devotions, unsuspecting 
 of the plotting against her among these hypocritical friends 
 who grumblingly enjoy her hospitality. She is not completely 
 unsuspecting, however, but in her self effacement and unworld- 
 liness tries to attribute what she might make ground for sus- 
 picion only to the excess of zeal and kindliness toward her. 
 She looks down, while at her devotions in the small oratory 
 above, upon Julia, the final accomplice of the friends below 
 stairs. Julia has to strain even at the ready rationalism of pious 
 and disinterested motives to justify to the assembled group, 
 when she joins them, the reading of Mary Bliss's private diary.
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 87 
 
 There in pages of loving devotion expressed to the Lord, for 
 whose coming Mary Bliss awaits, Julia has found with ready 
 eagerness food for scandal and ground for drastic action. Such 
 action is given the thinnest veneer of pious concern for the 
 aged friend's soul. It is in reality a scandalously overt scheme 
 to obtain from her through her religious susceptibility the 
 worldly and mercenary advantage for which the others are 
 more covertly working. Julia's envy, hatred, narrowminded 
 uncleanness of soul scarcely find a semblance of concealment. 
 She conspicuously projects upon another, here the most simply 
 pure and innocent, the dark imaginings and strugglings of her 
 own nature. These she is too petty to bring to any victorious 
 adjustment within herself, and so she becomes the type of a 
 cavilling world, of the men and women who are too self 
 blinded, too indolent, too safe in their own conceits to value 
 either themselves or their neighbors in their actual strength and 
 weakness, in the light of sincere purpose. Instead Julia, like 
 them, falls quickly and easily into conventional verbal con- 
 demnation, and suggests a false and insincere remedy of the 
 same sort. 
 
 Therefore she is most ready with her highly developed 
 scheme for the saving of Mary Bliss's soul, and incidentally 
 securing control of her wealth. Here enters an element of 
 the crudest and crassest attempt to define and handle human 
 nature without the least attempt to come first to an understand- 
 ing of it. It is an exaggeration of one of those wholesale 
 attempts to crowd out the variety, complexity, depth of human 
 nature, by the enlargement of one point of view concerning it. 
 The result owes its grotesqueness to the failure to realize the 
 reality of human nature, not alone its manifoldness and indi- 
 vidual variety of struggle and effort, but the depth and fulness 
 of that struggle, which is based upon the presence of the pro- 
 foundly fundamental elements which constitute human nature. 
 Tommy Trail stands for such a hollow conventionalized form 
 of religion. He indulges in condemnatory revilings, uproar- 
 ious vituperations and blasting dogmatisms which are but re- 
 sounding words. They are merely splashed with a trifle of
 
 88 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 maudlin sentimentality and also serve to cover from the per- 
 petrator of such preaching as well as from those moved to 
 hear him a true understanding of the growth and evolution of 
 a human soul through its very weaknesses and conflicts up to 
 light and life. Dafty, the slyly quiet and merry one, knows 
 more of this really spiritual religion. 
 
 The Tommy Trail introduced to mark the extreme travesty 
 of a religion which seeks more to hide and conceal the true 
 struggle and evolution of man than to recognize it and give 
 it scope, knows nothing of the titanic struggle between good 
 and evil, out of which good is naturally born. His religion' 
 kills where it would make alive. It finds in the excesses of 
 its religious belief and the seeming ardor of its expression and 
 effect a blinding disguise to the very things it most condemns. 
 Better the more frankly enjoyed mingling of the sensuous and 
 delightful with a devoted ardor of worship and service as that 
 manifest in Mary Bliss and her happy orphan group, whom 
 this latter day religion comes to save, or here evidently to rob. 
 
 The mockery lies in the introduction of this figure but it 
 speaks also in the exaggerated form of religion which masks 
 itself against the pure and undefined religion of the heart. The 
 latter seeks its truth sincerely though it may be mistakenly and 
 with wanderings from the truth. And yet too many people are 
 glad to pull such roughened wool over their eyes, rather than 
 boldly and industriously to examine their own hearts and see 
 whither they tend. Otherwise might they see too the selfish- 
 nesses, pettinesses, angers, backbitings, seeking for gain, or 
 sourness of self centered disposition, which here forces itself 
 to notice in petted physical ailments or in the mean spirited 
 plotting in the name of science and religious fervor. 
 
 The soul of Mary Bliss is filled with loving thought of her 
 Lord and the news of his expected coming in Tommy Trail, as 
 her friends have arranged it, falls upon her expectant spirit with 
 a joy that sets her dreams vibrating with a marvelous prefigured 
 reality. The expectancy has power even to transform her out- 
 ward appearance and correct the encroaching feebleness of 
 years. So thoroughly have her dreams assured her that it is
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 89 
 
 long before the cruel truth of the hideously planned attack upon 
 her manner of life with its confidence and trust penetrates her 
 understanding. Her dreams have caused such a childlike 
 reliance upon the greater judgment of others, that in all 
 humility she attributes the unexpectedly disillusioning appear- 
 ance of the expected visitor to pass as her own misunderstanding. 
 The raucousness of speech, sentiment and manner of the 
 preacher fall at first upon an averted listener, timid, tremulous, 
 waiting if she may discern something in this her Lord which 
 will answer to her love and longing and consecration. 
 
 It is a rude awakening when she discovers how she has been 
 unwittingly deceived. No one had planned it just so; Mary 
 Bliss and the conspirators had been working at cross purposes. 
 Each thought the other understood, Mary who had been mis- 
 takenly led to believe that the Lord for whom she watched 
 " at evening, or at cock crowing, or in the morning " had surely 
 come, and the plotters, who thought she had somehow got wind 
 of the famous modern preacher, Tommy Trail, who would drag 
 her out of hell with his fire and brimstone methods, in which 
 all love and beauty and grace were utterly lacking. 
 
 Nevertheless the awaking is also a more real one than they 
 had planned. Her dreams have been violently shaken, but in 
 their stead she has learned the wholesomeness of a little doubt 
 and question. She knows now that there is a better and 
 stronger way for the soul to reach out for itself and find and 
 make its truth. Love and adoration and blissful expectancy 
 are not enough for the inner life of man or woman. No less 
 do all things belong in the symphony of life, the merry, the 
 gay, the worldly and the contemplative, and none so widely 
 separated as our conventional religion, the hard bitter cavilling 
 sort, would leave us to believe, but they must be diffused with 
 more of the sterner sense of reality. There is room and ne- 
 cessity for question and doubt, for the serpent's wise activity. 
 The Hebrew and Christian religions have magnified too ex- 
 clusively the guile and subtle evil of the serpent. Other 
 religions have given more attention to its cleverness, activity, 
 power, the ceaseless activity and creative vitality symbolized
 
 9O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 through him. Though Christ made reference to this his fol- 
 lowers have laid little stress upon it, but Mary Bliss is ready 
 now to add such subtlety and assiduity to her dovelike ac- 
 ceptance of life's dreams and through them of the impositions 
 of her friends. It is not enough, she has come to realize, to 
 sit and passively receive wounds and hurts and adulations alike, 
 or even to lose oneself in the rapturous devotion of worship 
 and the mere joyous service which this calls forth. She too 
 is coming closer into the heart of a reality as it finds itself 
 in this mixed world, this petty, divided, sordid humanity, which 
 yet struggles and strives. Now her return to youth and 
 strength becomes lasting and complete, and she even comes in 
 a closer, truer sympathy to sour Job suffering by the fire. She 
 takes the world just as it is, out of its dreams, while still not 
 losing its dreams, and realizes the need of each individual. She 
 comes closer to weaknesses and uglinesses, to strength and 
 beauty, with that truly sympathetic touch which stimulates to 
 new life for these and crowds out those by stimulating to a 
 life of vigor and worthy ambition. This Mary Bliss was 
 roused to feel and in such a spirit she drew more truly nearer 
 her companion than in all the generous but indulgent courtesy 
 with which she had formerly greeted these misguided friends. 
 
 It must however be Dafty who finally enforces the lesson 
 and with his flaming sword, gilt paper toy though it is, rouses 
 them from death to life. Here again is a return to the truth 
 that the beginnings of all power and aspiration, all spiritualiza- 
 tion are far, far below, basic, simple, earthy, childish. Dafty 
 knows this truth and how salvation is wrought, how eternal 
 life is found. Dafty, the " man out of time," has passed 
 through hell up to heaven. He has tried the ways of these 
 men before him, he has suffered the penalty of narrow sordid 
 self seeking, the penalty which caused ages of experience in 
 growth and development, slow upward climbing to victory. He 
 knows it is not attained by thunderous accusations which hurl 
 one portion of the race to final perdition, nor self blinded ac- 
 clamations which fix one narrow way of salvation for a selected 
 few. Neither is it found in dreams. Dafty represents the race
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 9! 
 
 of no time, of all time, the timelessness which cannot even stop 
 its evolutionary process to mark time. He stands for the cease- 
 less effort of humanity to struggle and work from the indis- 
 tinctness and vagueness of early creation, through the mistakes 
 and wanderings and clumsiness of all effort, particularly human 
 effort with its wider possibilities both of accomplishment and 
 of straying, up to an even clearer light, to a greater power, 
 to a more perfect, harmonious and effectual adjustment within 
 itself and in the world of environment and opportunity about 
 it. This is life. It is growth, evolution, creative evolution. 
 This outlives and finally dissolves and wipes away the petti- 
 nesses, personal faults and personal grievances, which are the 
 partialities. These stand in the way of the vision of the whole 
 and the ever receding because ever growing heaven of salvation 
 just beyond. So Dafty preaches the salvation which lies in 
 learning here and now thus to live and strive toward the greater 
 and to grow beyond the smallnesses. 
 
 Yet because this grows with our growth it is not to be 
 grasped in visions from above. It does not come streaming 
 down through Mary Bliss's angel window of glory before which 
 she stands waiting, nor yet in her hours of meditation and 
 prayer. These are necessary from time to time, in some form 
 or another, in order to keep the vision just a little way before 
 the striving and in order to speak out faster than slow effort 
 can bring to pass the unquenchable yearning and hope toward 
 something better. Even the greed for other's people's money 
 or the angry petted liver can only partially conceal this. Yet 
 the vision itself comes from the smaller beginnings which are 
 our own. They arise of the trivial, the childish and the earthy 
 and grow with our growth. So Dafty's sham sword, made 
 for the children's fete, is after all a fit symbol for the arousing 
 to seriousness and to life of those dead and dying individuali- 
 ties who were allowing themselves to stifle in the narrowness 
 of their points of view. Tommy Trail, who is at last depicted 
 wrapped in his own hellishly pictured accoutrements, even he 
 begins to writhe forth and to live in a new and wider light
 
 92 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 upon humanity. An undreamed of path of true humble activity 
 begins to take the place of the crude and boastful threatenings 
 which had only served to block the way toward everything 
 but the death and destruction he had preached. 
 
 Thus the play leaves them just awakened at last to the first 
 flush of comprehension that there is a different way to attain 
 life and its satisfaction. The narrow schemes are turned by 
 the clever Dafty back upon the promoters of them. The scales 
 begin to fall and they begin as little children to see the way 
 to walk on a path that widens out to a boundless prospect of 
 living. Barely is this suggested to the different personalities. 
 There is at first only the astonishment of the new awakening, 
 hardly yet supplanting the fear occasioned by the closing in 
 of the trifling, self contracted schemes of each one. The life 
 that unfolds from within, which with Dafty has come up 
 through all time, carries with it all the store of the ages of 
 past experience of trying and failing and succeeding, of sinning 
 and of suffering, of hope in dreams and hope passing into 
 the realization of action and achievement. This all proves to 
 lie behind the partial divisions, which we in our superficial 
 blindness, like the characters of the play, have believed constitute 
 the whole of life. 
 
 The very long course of salvation, of good and of evil, 
 of passage from death unto life lies in the full measure of 
 life as conscious and unconscious, some above the surface where 
 we habitually view it, much preserved below our ordinary con- 
 scious awareness, preserved as the record and accumulation 
 of past experience, individual and racial. Life must go on 
 climbing from sphere to sphere, from its hells to its heavens, 
 surrounded by dreams, as it still takes account of the glow of the 
 past, and as it throws this radiance ahead to stimulate us toward 
 a future of progress. And this can come only through a 
 present conflict of forces. The Dafties are within us carrying 
 their swords of simple beginnings, of childish possessions, of 
 means of conflict and of achievement drawn from this world, 
 the simpler, lower experiences through which the pathway has
 
 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES 93 
 
 lain, through which it still lies. Each effort, each petty striving, 
 yes, each narrow fault and sin, if it seeks its place and its 
 regeneration in this wholeness of life, may lay claim to the 
 song of triumph and love with which Mary Bliss praises her 
 Lord for the victory which she discovered lies in this life. 
 " Clear as the sun, fair as the moon and terrible as an army 
 with banners," such a Church looks forth in the morning light.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM x 
 
 Freedom is synonymous with perfect health, and either de- 
 notes the goal of human striving. Both mark a return to the 
 conception embodied in the literal meaning of health as the 
 wholeness of man, which alone is perfect freedom. This is 
 not the irresponsible liberty to do that which brings immediate 
 pleasure or gain, unmindful of social duty or accountability, of 
 one's relations to a society ordered toward the greatest good of 
 the greatest whole. It is rather that freedom by which all one's 
 powers are best directed toward progressive ends and man has 
 found through ages of trial and error that these are communal 
 ends. Such freedom, bound to the social group in racial service, 
 in reality releases man from fetters which cut him off from 
 his fullest powers and opportunities. Contrary to a selfish 
 liberty, it sets and keeps these powers free for that fullness 
 of service which is creative achievement and grants him his 
 place in the steady advance upon which the race long ago em- 
 barked. 
 
 Curtailing of freedom does not lie in external restriction and 
 the limitation set by the differences and misunderstandings of 
 the social group. These after all are but the stimulus and chal- 
 lenge to the really free soul. Fetters are rather within, self 
 forged, though often unwittingly so. " Oh wretched man that 
 I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" The 
 physician is intent upon this cry as it comes daily to his ears. 
 He knows well that the inner disease, however slightly it is 
 sapping the strength and limiting the ability of his patient to 
 take up the free and effective work which is abundantly at 
 hand, or however great the inroads it makes into the inherent 
 
 1 Printed in the Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. V, No. 3, July, 1918. J. 
 H. Benrimo and George C. Hazelton: The Willow Tree. 
 
 94
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 95 
 
 right of man to swing freely into the current of progressive 
 thought and action such disease is bondage to some inner 
 weakness, insufficiency, ineffectualness. A vital psychology, which 
 seeks to cope with this larger problem of man's adjustment to 
 the demands of life, in which lie freedom and health, is still 
 more keenly aware of this question of relative freedom and 
 bondage, which condition man's success. For this is that sort 
 of success that manifests itself in the buoyant power of accom- 
 plishment winning its way from one goal of activity to another. 
 Such psychology sees likewise the compelling force of inner 
 inhibitions and restraints, at least the painful results and mani- 
 festations of these are evident and awaken the question whether 
 one's bondage is not in fact only from within. Are not inner 
 psychical fetters the only chains that really bind the spirit and 
 interfere with health and achievement? 
 
 Obsession, compulsion, these terms are familiar in special 
 mental conditions where freedom is markedly curtailed and acute 
 suffering ensues. There is still failure to realize however how 
 such inner conditions, which are thus recognized in flagrant 
 pathological form, are dominant in still lesser form, perhaps to 
 some degree in every human life. The knowledge and power 
 of observation of the physician grow to include many border- 
 land cases, and those in which only slight deviation or peculiarity 
 marks a restriction of normal power. These are finding a wider, 
 more comprehensively human classification, both better under- 
 standing of symptomatic manifestation and explanation for the 
 same, and also a sympathetic comprehension of them as but 
 differing degrees of the same struggle, endeavor and partial 
 success, which pervade all society, all forms of activity, all vari- 
 eties of life's pursuits. 
 
 The wider training and fuller initiation into such an attitude 
 of understanding, appreciation and ability to guide to a healthy 
 freedom, which are coming to be demanded of every social 
 worker, urge him to look about him constantly alert and re- 
 ceptive to all that can reveal human nature in its manifold 
 phases. He must see these as but varying expressions of the 
 underlying unity of striving, effort, longing, disturbed and
 
 96 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 thwarted by these inner fetters which alone constitute disease 
 and bondage, and thus condition ineffectualness, failure and 
 even death. Such an one therefore at his daily work, the physi- 
 cian in the presence of disease in its more distinctive forms, 
 or either at his recreation, where through art and beauty, gaiety 
 and frivolity, it is still human life in its trials and errors, its 
 successes and failures, that is depicted, is coming to wider ac- 
 quaintance, keener discernment and more thorough penetration 
 and comprehension of just these human problems. Indeed the 
 theater, presenting as it does the artist's intuitive knowledge of 
 the unconscious, which lies behind the scattered phenomena 
 which we are accustomed to call the mental life of man, affords 
 oftentimes the surest entrance into the profound regions of the 
 human psyche. There lie the unseen fetters, and veiled in the 
 language and setting of art, the difficulties which beset every 
 life are revealed, while artistic skill discovers and points also 
 the way of release out into freedom and health. 
 
 The Willow Tree is a play of such rare delicacy of treatment 
 that superficially one might miss its excursion into these secret 
 and often somber depths of the psychical life, did not the final 
 sacrifice grip the inner soul with an answering response of the 
 necessity as well as the beauty of such self effacing devotion. 
 What is the compulsion which has made this necessary, which 
 silently convinces each spectator of the same inescapable de- 
 mand for a supremacy of self denial, which for the princess, 
 though she abounds in the joy of life, ends not in freedom but 
 in death? Why is human nature thus compelled, and freedom 
 for one attained only by the complete vanquishment of another? 
 
 Some analysis of this " Fantasy of Old Japan " will perhaps 
 bring a sympathetic insight into the compulsion which is at 
 work to a greater or less extent in every psyche, preventing 
 the complete exercise of one's powers, not always with patho- 
 logical distinctiveness, but with just so much limitation, suffering 
 and actual acute loss of power, opportunity, or life itself. Thus 
 every life is limited. So accustomed to this has mankind been, 
 and also so rationalized into a complacent disavowal of his own 
 accountability toward such a state of affairs, that his ages of
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 97 
 
 culture, his systems of religion, his individual ethics and morali- 
 ties have been based upon a blind acceptance of it in the terms 
 in which it is upheld and interpretated, those of inexorable fate, 
 inscrutable providence, or an inevitable subordination of the 
 individual to heredity and environment. Only recently has it 
 become a matter of serious practical concern to investigate man's 
 own individual psyche and discover and release the chains forged 
 there, it may be by heredity and by early circumstances, but 
 still individual fetters capable of release from their inherent com- 
 pulsion. If it is possible thus to attain at least a greater 
 freedom for a fuller life, with a greater intensity of achievement, 
 if not an actual extension of the years of active life through 
 such release, every insight into the heart of man should be 
 welcomed, that truest artistic insight from the theater as not 
 the least of these. 
 
 There is, this " Fantasy " tells us, a " wish in the heart of 
 a man," to which indeed life owes its inspiration and aspiration, 
 but to it also its entanglements and bondage. For the way 
 to realize the wish is not unhindered. The wish must for the 
 sake of greater gains conform to other men, to that very society 
 which the instinct of man has constructed about his wish to 
 give it security and opportunity, and which therefore sets to 
 it certain inevitable limits. This is not an imposed bondage 
 of compulsion, but in the nature of man, because his wish has 
 not learned to fit the ego into the broader, social life of greater 
 advantage, the compulsion arises both out of the effort to realize 
 without restraint his ego wish and the necessity of curtailing 
 and redirecting that wish in conformity to his social, cultural 
 position. The ego blazons forth, is rebuffed through the very 
 fear of itself, retreats, hedges itself round by all manner of 
 defense, rationalization, fear, inefficiency, the wish still strong 
 within it, but unable through the defensive fear and taboo which 
 it has created to find its way over into that sublimation which 
 marks the higher freedom. And it misses thus, through its self 
 made limitation, that increase and enlargement which the wish, 
 spurning the early egoistic path, might have found on the more 
 open and effective paths leading to the plane of sublimation, 
 and advancing this again.
 
 98 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 Hamilton, the hero of the play, has lost his freedom. Ap- 
 parently he has entered a life of easy indolence and irresponsi- 
 bility. He is free from the sordid interests and futile pursuits 
 of the restless, feverish Occident and has sunk into a manner 
 of life which appeals to his inner nature and permits a freedom 
 of moods and dreams, which lie close to the wish within his 
 heart. London had rent his inner nature. His love was engaged 
 there but it had to be lived out in terms of establishment and 
 the artificialities of motor cars and social display, the standards of 
 creature comforts and external advantage. The woman of his 
 choice stood for this phase of existence and felt her life to be 
 impossible without these things. His nature, recoiling from this 
 superficial approach, unable to master such forms of reality and 
 yet not willing to be enslaved by them, flees from reality itself, 
 turning instinctively to the heart of phantasy for its escape. The 
 Oriental languor and indolence of his remote garden retreat 
 are concealed under a simplicity which gives them a specious 
 justification to this man, sickened by the superficial unsatisfac- 
 toriness of the life he has left. It is a veritable toyland garden 
 into which he has withdrawn. The seclusion of a tiny cottage 
 in far Japan in its miniature setting, where bright flowers are 
 blooming and small fountains trickling, is a far more fitting 
 environment for his retirement into phantasy than the conscious 
 acceptance of such an ideal retreat could admit. It is the un- 
 conscious child seeking peace, comfort, even the self inflicted 
 pain of nursing its grief and disappointment, which falls back 
 thus easily to the arms of phantasy, to the mother image eter- 
 nally hidden in the heart of man. There he dreams and dwells 
 in the unreality of his ideal world, and there he hangs his verses 
 upon the willow tree. 
 
 Reality however with watchful saving grace comes keen-eyed 
 and seeks out those who have only let the immortal purpose of 
 life become obscured. Even while they dream she touches un- 
 awares, through the dreams even, the truer impulse and quickens 
 it into response. Hamilton makes verses to the rain god and 
 these give the first low rumbling promise of an awakening ac- 
 tivity, and bring their own salvation though this activity is
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 99 
 
 hardly more yet than a phantastic childish indulgence. The 
 unconscious depths, harboring place of all the instincts and im- 
 pulses of the human race, though crowded with often hindering 
 and inhibiting emotions, affects, contain yet within them, stim- 
 ulated and inspired by these same affects, the unquenchable 
 impulse to power and self expression, which is the creative 
 instinct. Active impulse and conditioning affect urge him in 
 very fact to impersonate the rain god of ancient mythology. 
 All mythology attests to the unconscious association of the 
 mother with the heart of the tree and her localization there. 
 Myths of birth from the tree confront us in the legends of such 
 remote lands and cultures as those of ancient Greece and the 
 islands of Oceanica. That most human of the religions of an- 
 tiquity, which moved the heart of ancient Egypt, devoted a 
 solemn ceremonial to the representation of its beloved god Osiris 
 lying among the branches of the sycamore tree to commemorate 
 his birth from his mother Nut. Nor is there wanting similar 
 abundant evidence of the power of the rain god over Mother 
 Earth, the strife with the heaven god in this capacity as the 
 son seeks to replace him, which is the concrete though uncon- 
 scious struggle of each individual to find in this manner com- 
 plete power and satisfaction with the mother. 
 
 This his phantasy may be his destruction, if the infantile wish 
 controls until it overpowers him. Therefore the hard world 
 of reality speaks opportunely in the voice of the sincere and 
 earnest Geoffrey, warning his friend against the madness toward 
 which this tends. This friend, however, type of blind self de- 
 fending rationalization, comes with eyes quite darkened to the 
 reality that lies in the dream, where after all the undying im- 
 pulse arises and advances to its own out of the source of 
 pleasure phantasy. The young rain god, because he is the 
 embodiment of the creative impulse, cannot remain satisfied with 
 the mere dream of nearness to the mother. The phantasied 
 prayer does not suffice ; he must write out his poem, " rather 
 good poem, too, Geoffrey, I was rather proud of it." And so in 
 the pride of his creative effort he unconsciously rises from the 
 mother image toward his own salvation.
 
 IO O PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 It is then that the embodiment of the mother wish, renewed 
 in the form that leads away upon the path of sublimation, comes 
 to him with more than the marvel of his fondest dreams. The 
 truest presentation of the reverse of the mother-son wish, seek- 
 ing to escape its chrysalis of phantasy, necessitates that the 
 father shall bring this mother reincarnation, the younger woman 
 made in the mother image, but herelf young and fair and there- 
 fore true object for sublimation and freedom through it. It is 
 the father heart that has given her birth, rediscovered and re- 
 created her in the mother image, from the mother willow by 
 his power of love. This lies in an old man, type of the ancient 
 life of Japan, who has carved from cedar wood, and ivory and 
 jade an image, the image of the Princess of the Willow Tree, 
 which to his love seems almost to be alive. Could he believe 
 himself a more worthy carver, he believes that the woman em- 
 bodied there would certainly live again under his hands. 
 
 He knows full well the parent's reluctance to give her to 
 the hand of another. Yet the " dim old eyes " looking out of 
 the far mist of the past, this old man " five hundred years older 
 than his son," who in his haste with the gifts of the world has 
 made only cheap contact with reality these eyes have the vision 
 of the past and of the future that lies within it. 
 
 They are the eyes that look through the old tale from its 
 farther side in the legendary past out into the need and demand 
 of present activity and duty. His narrative of the Legend of 
 the Princess of the Willow Tree is more than a prophecy, for it 
 is his own soul's history and that is the eternal conflict and 
 victory. He has felt the price of that progress which is freedom, 
 life, the immortality of the race. With determined mastery of 
 the trembling which marks the depth of sacrifice demanded 
 of the parent, aging and passing on, he recites the legend which 
 yields to the younger man the object of his seeking, which is 
 to be to him at the same time his salvation through the losing 
 of itself for his freedom. Thus again the eternal paradox, which 
 is only the never ending alternation which Jung has told us 
 must always lie beneath life to keep it moving now and ever 
 toward its goal of progress but with the also ever recurring 
 rebirth from the fountain both of pleasure and of life.
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM IOI 
 
 He relates to Hamilton, who becomes the purchaser of the 
 Image, the tale of the Princess of the Willow Tree, a beautiful 
 old legend from the " days of the mists of the dawn of history," 
 who smilingly sacrificed all for love. In that olden time a 
 general had fallen under the displeasure of the Mikado and 
 was sent into banishment. Near his cabin where he dwelt grew a 
 willow tree and from it had appeared to him the beautiful woman 
 who dwelt at its heart. She had lived with him and loved 
 him until one day she learned that he had been summoned once 
 more to Japan to save her from her enemies, and to marry 
 the Mikado's daughter, but had refused to leave her. Volun- 
 tarily she removes the obstacle of her presence from his path by 
 begging that the willow tree, symbol and source of her life, shall 
 be cut down. She laughs gaily while he carries out her wish 
 and still laughing disappears from his sight as the tree falls. 
 The carved image the old workman believes to be a portrait 
 of this ancient heroine, reproduced by the knowledge which his 
 dreams of her loveliness have imparted to his hands. He leaves 
 the image with Hamilton after telling him half reluctantly 
 and fearfully of the old Japanese superstition that a mirror, 
 containing as it does the soul of a woman, laid in the bosom 
 of the image might bring her to life. But he warns Hamilton 
 not to presume to use thus the magic of the gods. 
 
 No sooner has the image maker departed than Hamilton dares 
 the experiment and is himself spell-bound to see the image 
 slowly waking to life. She is a wondering untouched child 
 woman, innocent of the ways of the world into which she has 
 stepped and dependent upon the love and tenderness of Hamil- 
 ton who inducts her into its practical everyday concerns and 
 its deeper mysteries. Underneath this simply sweet exterior she 
 has however all the depth of wisdom which makes her the eternal 
 soul of woman, and capable in the end of the supreme sacrifice 
 whereby the source of love and life, the mother soul, can lay 
 aside all the delights with which she charms and the reward 
 of pleasure which is hers through them, and retire again from 
 obstructing the man's pathway to a higher and broader exercise 
 of life.
 
 IO 2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 Thus attained there dawns however the fulfilment of the 
 hero's bliss. It seems supreme, complete at last, at least after 
 he has finally made his choice between this tender woman, new- 
 born, and the old world beyond, which once more in the person 
 of Mary Temple, the woman from England, directly thrusts 
 its claims upon him. Now at last there is the freedom of en- 
 joyment, which seems to restore to him all he had lost, or 
 seemed to have lost because he had not really found it as yet. 
 
 His is the delight of worship of the lovely creature, father- 
 created, yet in truth only actually brought to life because his 
 faith in her reality exceeded the timidity of the older man, 
 who dared not put the mystery to the test. His alone was the 
 right in the power of the younger man to call her into being, to 
 breathe the breath of life universal impregnation phantasy 
 from the childhood of the race 1 upon the mirror which should 
 then reflect to the woman all that her living soul might mean 
 to the man who would thus give life to her and then take this 
 life to himself. His was the task, moreover, of bringing her 
 to a knowledge of the real meaning of life which was shared 
 with another, lived not in dreams to itself alone. His masculine 
 spirit might rejoice in its creative power and the authority which 
 it had established over the being in his hands. Yet the perfec- 
 tion of this creature no less than her innocent helplessness holds 
 him to a sense of his responsibility. The limitation of his right 
 and power by the power of love and devotion within her re- 
 deems him from a too egoistic goal to the more perfect life 
 of mutual adaptation and concession. Already she is winning 
 for him a freedom from the inner compulsion which belongs 
 to the mother fixation, which demands that all shall be directed 
 toward the pleasure wish of the infantile egoism. A certain 
 unconscious incest fear is also a barrier against this and sets 
 up some of the restriction which tempers the relationship toward 
 this embodiment of his unconscious ideal. At the same time, 
 since it is all unconscious, it occasions an inner conflict with the 
 
 1 See F. L. Wells : A Summary of Material on the Topical Community 
 of Primitive and Pathological Symbols. Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 
 IV, No. i, January, 1917, pp. 55-57.
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 
 
 103 
 
 desire itself, which makes the final decision toward England 
 and duty, when news of the War arrives, impossible for him 
 and compels the woman's resolution of the question by the sac- 
 rifice of herself. Who can say how much the inner compulsion, 
 arising out of this early infantile, strongly affective attitude 
 toward the mother, infused the ardent desire to give life to this 
 woman and appropriate her to his unsatisfied and disappointed 
 love, and how far it compelled the growing strength and delight 
 of this love until the sacrifice became unavoidable? Of such 
 inner causations are our acts merely the outward and often 
 the mystifying expression. Freedom loses itself within the 
 compulsion and then must be attained in the end by the 
 path of pain and loss. If this course can be traced even so 
 obscurely, until by such studies the hidden life shall become 
 more plain, the development of this play, through its exquisite 
 unfolding, will not have been in vain. 
 
 It was in the hands of Hamilton to follow the path of self 
 gratification and to have taught the woman that way. Instead, 
 because there is another power than the infantile determinant, 
 which is working toward a truer freedom, and because he has 
 felt this truth in this embodiment of the ancient heart of the 
 willow tree, he adopts a different course. The child that merely 
 sinks back upon the mother's breast there to have every wish 
 fulfilled will only seek that which pleases as the moment's toy. 
 The mother image in its actual truth is forgotten; in its place 
 is substituted the so-called freedom of having returned to the 
 place where wishes come true, as the unreasoning child con- 
 ceives wishes and seizes after their fulfilment. The truth which 
 the freed spirit within us seeks and finds is other than this and 
 toward this Hamilton turns. He has found that which reality, 
 accepted with the straightforward spirit of the adult attitude, 
 will reveal to all, but which is withheld from the autoerotic 
 self seeker. This is the recurrent message of the play which 
 opens up the path of freedom and health. 
 
 The lovers, their faces thus set toward the freedom of reality, 
 enter upon a life of mutual bliss, but of mutual service likewise, 
 to be finally consummated only when the price of freedom has
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 been paid. Knowledge and experience dawn at first through 
 the unselfish consideration and self restraint of the lover, often 
 puzzled and awed before the questioning innocence and complete 
 trust of the virgin woman before him. The double com- 
 pelling forces are however at work. On the one hand, even 
 in his chaste restraint toward the object of his care, he is build- 
 ing up more strongly upon this new object the old infantile sense 
 of rest and peace and self absorbed enjoyment of its love; on 
 the other hand, within her is the racial depth of the mother 
 soul, tending likewise doubtless toward the pleasure goal, but 
 yet with an ultimate truth and strength which forbids the losing 
 of the creative goal, and wins it finally by its supreme act. The 
 heart of the willow tree, though ages old, has the immortal 
 power of revivification and rebirth for itself and the being upon 
 whom it bestows its love. It is old and yet fresh and young 
 and untried. 
 
 This pretty world of delight, of which she will take all as 
 her gift, which must be filled only with bright birds and pleas- 
 ure and harmlessness, is hers by right merely of claim upon 
 her hero's love. In it she may perhaps employ the feminine 
 devices of pouting, jealousy, the aid of personal adornment, 
 whatever will keep her in playful touch with that which she 
 counts her own. She will defend herself by shutting her 
 thoughts to the time when she must be old and ugly and un- 
 attractive. The images and symbols, means of pleasure and 
 enjoyment, are at hand to be cherished and used. She cannot 
 accept the fish as the coarse mercenary dealer offers it nor value 
 the birds and crickets according to their market price. Pleas- 
 ure for her must be a free and happy gift. Buying and selling 
 it in terms of gain are not to be conceived. Value for value 
 is a part of the lesson to be learned but never that perversity 
 of sacred gifts which makes of the emblems of love objects of 
 barter and gross nutriment. So at any rate may be interpreted 
 the touch of appreciation she puts upon these things, in the light 
 of the unconscious struggle which is manifest in the effort to dis- 
 cover and use life aright. If we could value better and more 
 truly the symbols which are to the unconscious in fable, legend
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 1 05 
 
 and individual dream, expressions and opportunities of the love 
 life and its creative power, we too might learn the unsatisfac- 
 toriness and the disease-producing power, the loss of freedom 
 in the abuse of these possessions. The symbolization which 
 finds itself in these things is too readily denied and thus a 
 cultural prudishness fails to see the inner value for which these 
 stand. This dainty personification of the ancient heart of things 
 instinctively and intuitively proceeds in her choice and valuation 
 of them straight to their true inner worth. 
 
 The fish therefore must be consigned not to the kitchen but 
 to a home among the free swimming goldfish in the pool and 
 birds and cricket must sing and rejoice in happy freedom, such 
 as that in which she herself lives. Yet she knows none the less 
 instinctively the value of the masculine serpent god, god of com- 
 fort in the home, to whom she prays for the rest of her lord 
 by night and to whom she finally entrusts him for his care 
 when the time of her departure comes. It is the love that 
 spreads for Hamilton " that soft feathered cushion of his " for 
 his repose. She is hurt also by the vehemence of his love and 
 yet shyly, smilingly proffers her acknowledgment that she likes 
 being hurt by him. He also must reveal at her question love's 
 realities, with the awe of the greatness of love that knows self 
 restraint and asks reverently whether he has the right to make 
 the path to her across the snow, to her the butterfly more white 
 than the snows of Fujiyama against which it might fly. 
 
 Of such stuff not dreams alone are made but of such concrete 
 elements, touched here with a beauty surpassing in delicacy yet 
 exquisitely frank, does love consist, and through such concrete 
 elements, hidden and revealed -in the symbolism, does love in 
 its creative mission find expression. They are the forms through 
 which is made known the " wish " which is " the most real 
 thing in the heart of a man." Man has grown suspicious of 
 the wish striving thus to make itself known and, frightened, 
 has sought to crowd these things out of sight, deny their mean- 
 ing and value, until such repression has succeeded outwardly 
 in bringing them to ill favor and within in forming the fettering 
 of the emotional life and its compulsive direction of psychic
 
 XO6 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 energy into symptomatic paths, through which the repressed 
 factors secure a blind escape. Thus disguised and not under- 
 stood they control external conscious life but in doing so cur- 
 tail its freedom and limit the higher expenditure of energy in 
 perfect health. These concrete factors are too real, too vital 
 to remain quietly in the heart of man. The artist has dared 
 again and again to bring them forth, touching them gently, free- 
 ing them through beauty, and so granting to himself and to 
 those who look upon and receive his work a corresponding free- 
 dom from the disturbance and upheaval which follow upon such 
 repression and misdirection of these desires and strivings. He 
 in this way opens out the path to health in the right use of them. 
 
 Not the least of the mission of this charming fantasy, there- 
 fore, lies in the placing thus beautifully and wholesomely into 
 our hands some of the images and symbols with which the 
 eternal wish in the heart of man must busy itself. The delicate 
 handling of these points the way to the sublimation, which 
 comes not through repression but through the artistic and thus 
 transformed use of these things. Their higher as well as their 
 lower values are brought to attention, each in its place and each 
 in its own true worth and beauty. Like the beliefs of old Japan 
 to faithful, simple-hearted Nogo, the stories and the language 
 of the unconscious " make afraid, make shiver." We have be- 
 come so frightened over them, in the long-continued effort to 
 get away from their little understood and acknowledged power 
 and value, that we have lost sight of them as very definite path- 
 ways which our own human race has laid down out of the 
 things of " beauty and eternity," and as the way which leads 
 back again to attain the knowledge which is mastery and serv- 
 iceable control. A clearer acceptance of them is sure release 
 from the compulsion to dark and hidden courses of feeling and 
 action, in which freedom is lost. 
 
 The profoundly moving message of the play lies however in 
 the larger synthesis which embraces and outreaches the wish 
 in the heart of man. It takes these lesser elements, the incom- 
 plete language of the wish, and it brings them to conscious 
 fulfilment. Still more it lifts them through the larger purpose
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM IO7 
 
 of the wish, as it exalts and transforms that wish, up to the 
 higher attainment of racial service which society requires. 
 Pleasant indeed is it for the lovers, islanded in their romantic 
 dream world founded upon the heart of things, to play and 
 delight in these verities of love. Something deeper neverthe- 
 less must be preparing, through which they shall really discover 
 and test the ultimate depths upon which love bases its creative 
 right to exist and the heights of service toward which its cre- 
 ative impulse must soar. The truth and strength of the spirit 
 of love and sacrifice must respond to the clarion call of reality. 
 The eternal heart must meet the demand to lose all, or refuse 
 and seek only the immediate pleasure. Before the crucial test 
 the man stands in bewilderment. His way is not clear, he is 
 not free. Externally he is not free, for he has a responsibility 
 toward the dainty creature whom he has summoned from the 
 unknown for his own pure delight. It is the mother image 
 which he has unconsciously sought and which now holds him, 
 through its very helplessness and dependence, in the form in 
 which he has known it, standing as the " terrible mother," which 
 Jung discovers in mythology and in individual struggle, the 
 unconscious image from which it is impossible to break away. 
 Is thus the path of freedom for service and achievement barred, 
 one's conscious purpose and wish rendered unattainable? Per- 
 haps to Hamilton the return to the very heart of the ancient 
 willow was merely the return to the unconscious child wish. 
 Holding now the mother image, which his desire has recalled 
 from the ancient soul of the race, it instead holds him and all 
 freedom is lost. He is powerless before even the call to duty 
 for his " England and George King." Action, to which the cour- 
 age of his English friends has been roused, is no more possible 
 to him than it is to the compulsive neurotic reduced through 
 the opposing forces of his inner conflict to a helpless inactivity. 
 He must follow a path of self established loyalty which con- 
 flicts with the larger needs of the world. 
 
 One thing however is unknown to him. He is far from an 
 actual understanding of the inner source and meaning of his 
 conflict and his ability to desert this woman whom he has made
 
 IO8 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 his, to whom indeed his responsibility, since he has called her 
 into being, is clear. Scarcely better knowledge has he of the 
 depth and reality of the world-old mother soul. Not so lightly 
 perhaps would he have left his frail treasure that last evening 
 to the power of her own thoughts and convictions, had he been 
 able to penetrate beneath the blithesome, playful attitude of 
 joyous living which had been his to know. The woman's heart 
 too, the eternal mother heart, attains to but one way of freedom. 
 Whether it is freedom for itself or for the soul committed 
 by love to its charge, it is found by the way of sacrifice. Who 
 can say, in the present mere dawning of understanding and 
 interpretation of the intricacy of unconscious motivation, which 
 underlies conscious observed activity, and of the conflicts waged 
 beneath the surface, the extent of the unconscious inhibitions 
 and contraints? Here too the same compulsion in the struggle 
 between the pleasure wish on the one hand and the upward 
 striving of the eternal wish on the other throw about the mother 
 soul the fetters which destroy the action of perfect freedom. The 
 effort to overcome, to master the baser desires, those which 
 lead back to rest and the indolence of inactive peace, the effort 
 to force on the creative urge defeats its own end and cuts off 
 life itself. It is not however futile. The defeat comes along 
 the upward path of striving and is therefore only apparent. 
 The sacrifice is not in vain. It is one of those compromise 
 results with which the race in its imperfection and insufficiency 
 has for the time to be content. It is the price too often of its 
 greater gain, but the price is willingly paid and for it the world 
 obtains progress, stimulus to further endeavor, immortality. 
 The mother heart is to man the source and the symbol of all 
 pleasure and delight and comfort. It is also the eternal source 
 of the power which urges man, whether he knows it or not, 
 onward to duty and activity, as Hamilton was driven from the 
 peace of the garden home to face reality and find there at last 
 not only his duty but the consummation of his joy. Such was 
 the intimation in the completeness of the final sacrifice of the 
 mother heart, which sent him to duty, to wife and the children 
 which she had never had. Like the princess of old, this new
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM 
 
 IO9 
 
 incarnation of the heart of the ancient Willow Tree left the 
 man to seek all these in the sphere to which he and his work 
 belonged. True to the deepest psychological meaning of the 
 eternal mother heart, the heart which was in the willow tree, 
 not only the bliss of pleasure was there for the child man, but 
 it is the source to him of rebirth, from which he goes into the 
 world of activity there to find useful work and the sublimation 
 of the mother love, which alone belongs to adult reality. 
 
 The world shouts to the hero who goes forth on such a 
 path. It boasts for him of glory, honor, duty, This spirit 
 which is in the mother soul, on the contrary, its victory which 
 is the steady advance of the race, move in silence and alone. 
 The travail of a rebirth, in whatever man or woman it takes 
 place, is a victory in the loneliness of an inner struggle, its 
 own Gethsemane. Happy if there is at hand the faithfulness 
 of some humble Nogo, as there was for the Princess, who, 
 though sobbing with the abandon of a simple soul, would yet 
 lay the axe to the root of the tree. The shadow of the sac- 
 rifice transfigures even him as he too enters into its power. 
 The threat of death cannot prevail upon him to bring the sac- 
 rifice to pass. But when he recognizes the claim of something 
 deeper, that something more even than the eternal well-being 
 and life of the Princess is at stake, something that answers 
 within him to a greater call, he complies. All protest is stilled, 
 and unflinchingly, uncompromisingly the task is performed. The 
 tree on whose standing the life of the princess depends is hewn 
 down. 
 
 There is a peculiar fitness in the portrayal of this dran.a 
 of life in this kingdom of Old Japan. It is a land externally 
 of peace and delight. There is an outward perfection of clean- 
 liness and trimness and scrupulous care, which adds to the charm 
 of its beauty. A softness and delicacy and prettiness of nature 
 are its own characteristics. Its artists reproduce it and even 
 the common people are touched with its grace and flit about 
 their daily pursuits with an almost butterfly fancifulness and 
 freedom of light and carefree movement. Dress and manner 
 and smiling face, even the ceaseless slip of their sandaled feet
 
 IIO PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 or the click of their wooden clogs, all are expressive of the 
 simple playful character which lies upon the surface. Yet a 
 greater power makes itself manifest in their national history 
 and closer knowledge of their daily lives reveals also the care 
 and weariness, poverty, discontent, strife beneath this pleasant 
 exterior. Thus also in their pretty land do the frequent earth- 
 quakes and actively eruptive volcanoes, which have produced the 
 scarred and jagged mountain peaks, speak of a greater energy 
 beneath the surface, which struggles to break forth and having 
 no guidance or control works destruction and ruin. 
 
 Such forces, however, in the human psyche are capable of 
 understanding and control, if man becomes willing to look 
 within. To such an insight this " Fantasy of Old Japan " is 
 directed. It grants more than a hint of the forces of desire 
 which arise there, meet and entangle one another and hinder 
 the useful constructive discharge of these forces. It points 
 the way to salvation through sacrifice, by which freedom from 
 this inner restraint and compulsion is attained. It offers far 
 more than this, however, to the thoughtful investigator who is 
 seeking a fuller freedom for man, which will assure to him 
 a more perfect health, in which attainment can be won by a 
 more comprehensive understanding of these hidden things and 
 a greater freedom of constructive use and creative activity may 
 result. This is a .goal to be won in our present ignorance and 
 insufficiency by this path of sacrifice, but it opens a way of 
 fuller knowledge of the inner nature, which will find rather a 
 more liberal exercise of all its faculties toward a higher, more 
 thoroughly racial service in a more complete sublimation. It 
 gives promise that this may in time supplant the present cur- 
 tailment and loss of certain powers that others entangled with 
 them in the little understood desires shall become free. Sac- 
 rifice has always been recognized as the " law of service to the 
 whole " ; sacrifice must itself however be free to become more 
 thoroughly constructive in a synthesis and upward direction of 
 these powers, not in the destructive cutting off of opportunity 
 and energy which our present ignorance of the hidden con- 
 flicting psychic forces necessitates.
 
 COMPULSION AND FREEDOM III 
 
 " So long as we are blindly and ignorantly, rolled about by 
 the forces of nature," Matthew Arnold has said, " their con- 
 tradiction baffles us and lames us; so soon as we have clearly 
 discerned what they are, and begun to apply to them a law of 
 measure, control, and guidance, they may be made to work for 
 our good and to carry us forward." In knowledge of these 
 forces lies individual and social health, that ideal of social health 
 in which men and women are no longer struggling at cross pur- 
 poses, but united in mutual and ever widening achievement. The 
 drama, by each appeal to look into the inner center of these 
 forces, advances by so much our knowledge and understanding. 
 For by its beauty it attracts to the heart of things, by its truth 
 it convinces of the reality found there.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION a 
 
 " Our play deals with mother's love, the love of youth, and 
 the hate of men, which makes them do unhappy things." Thus 
 simply the Chorus introduces the message of " The Yellow 
 Jacket." At first sight this introduction and the working out 
 of the drama would seem to present simply a pleasing and 
 attractive story of such mother's love passing over into ro- 
 mantic love and tinged just enough with the darker things of 
 hate, to blend them all in a happy ending. It is a happy play, 
 in spite of the tragedies which lie in its unfolding, because of 
 its victorious and joyous ending for the hero and because of 
 the charm given it in the fancifulness of its Oriental setting. 
 There is besides a remoteness granted through the latter and 
 the admixture in it of indifferent realism offset by the vivid 
 imaginative coloring by which the ordinary external aids for 
 producing the necessary theatrical illusions are dispensed with 
 while yet the illusion is so richly supplied. 
 
 Aside from these more obvious charms nevertheless and the 
 simple movement and outcome of the story, there is a psycho- 
 logical unfolding which moves deeper and is as old as the 
 tale of human love itself. All literatures have busied themselves 
 with the telling of it, sometimes in its successful development, 
 as the hero has won his way out to victory over the inevitable 
 obstacles, but oftener in the tragedies that have represented 
 the seriousness of these obstacles innate in human life and its 
 love and causing too often a fatal outcome. 
 
 1 Printed in the Medical Record, Apr. 21, 1917, under title: The Yellow 
 Jacket and the Flowery Kingdom: A Recent Dramatic Conception of 
 the "CEdipus Complex." George C. Hazelton, George Cochrane, Jr., J. 
 H. Benrimo: The Yellow Jacket. Boston, 1921. In T. H. Dickinson, 
 Chief Contemporary Dramatists. 
 
 112
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 113 
 
 It is not the story of love alone as that forms more narrowly 
 the theme of drama and romance, but the great drama of human 
 life which is contained in the words in the summary, " mother's 
 love, the love of youth, and the hate of men which makes 
 them do unhappy things." At least we have here that side of 
 the great drama of life which represents the hero's career in 
 the task of winning his way and becoming master of himself 
 and his destiny. And if this is presented chiefly in this as in 
 other dramas, from the masculine aspect of the story, it is no 
 less true in principle and practical working for the woman in 
 her effort at adjustment in the unfolding of her life. In the 
 latter case it would only be expressed in somewhat different 
 terms. 
 
 Freud has designated the ever recurring theme and its pres- 
 ence in every life by the term " CEdipus complex " from the 
 Sophoclean drama, one of its most renowned expressions in 
 literature. Most briefly stated it represents the relation of the 
 child individually to the father and the mother and the profound 
 tragedy which may result throughout life from a maladjustment 
 of that threefold relationship. There the situation ends in dark- 
 est tragedy, here out of the same posssibility of relationships 
 they are brought instead to a happy issue and the hero emerges 
 at the last free both of the love that might bind him or of the 
 hate that would destroy him, a victor in his own right, wearer 
 at last of the " sunhued garment " for " his steps are toward 
 the sun, whither he goes." 
 
 The classic features of the CEdipus story or " family ro- 
 mance," out of which it grows, are all present in the " Yellow 
 Jacket," sometimes ludicrously, sometimes touchingly exagger- 
 ated but making of the developing story a true epitome of life. 
 The tiny baby boy is recognized at once as the unwelcome 
 rival to the father, just as in the old classical tragedy the babe 
 was prophesied by the oracle to be the destroyer and usurper 
 of the father. The father, governor of the province, repre- 
 senting the Emperor, the Son of Heaven, and therefore ex- 
 alting himself and his conception of power, can brook no rival 
 to his desires and to the deified exaltation of himself. He
 
 JJ4 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 fears his own loss of power and prestige, sensing the inroads 
 the small feeble babe can make in his capacity for growth and 
 conquest which lie before him but which are receding behind 
 the aging father. On this account he craves the stimulus of 
 the younger woman, the second wife, whom he would exalt 
 to the place occupied by the babe's mother. Mother and son 
 must both be removed. Rivalry and jealousy, in the vain effort 
 to maintain and exercise the waning forces which are repre- 
 sented in the older passing generation, are the manifestations 
 of an active hate which aims to obtain the ends which serve 
 only the self, and which are therefore in the end self defeated. 
 Just as will be seen the offspring of the rival marriage, that 
 which selfishly and through crime attempts the re-establish- 
 ment of the father's waning power and the overthrow of the 
 son who should rightfully have carried forward that power in 
 his own time, the rival offspring is only a weakling of the most 
 selfish and unproductive type. He is so filled with that eternal 
 indolence which is the besetting inner psychic sin of the race, 
 the offset to the spirit of progress and endeavor, that he yields 
 at last eagerly to his stronger brother rather than exert or 
 expose himself to retaining even the false semblance of power 
 which he has been enjoying. 
 
 The drama shifts and alternates its psychic scenes as it al- 
 ternates the actual pictures upon the stage. The unconscious 
 wish which represents desire on the part of the son is also in 
 evidence, working no less as a representation of the unconscious 
 wish element active beneath the external course of events than 
 the father's striving for power. Racially the son's wish lies 
 upon the side of right, and probably for this reason enlists 
 most fundamentally the sympathy and championship of the 
 audience and not alone because his wish constitutes the more 
 obvious theme and the external structure of the play. The 
 son's wish, in the opportunity before the young life of promise, 
 is directed toward the reality of achievement, the father's is di- 
 rected selfishly to the personal prolonging and enjoyment of 
 a power which has had its day of exercise and already repro- 
 duced itself for posterity.
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 115 
 
 Nevertheless it is upon both sides the ever repeated racial 
 conflict between the old and the new between father and son. 
 As the father in the character assigned to him in the play claims 
 the title of high ruler, so in a deeper, more subtle way is the 
 same high aspiration, which belongs always to the inner wish 
 of man, represented in the situation developed through the child 
 and through his struggles back to his rightful parentage as 
 the play proceeds. The drama sets him consciously as the son 
 of one of high standing, the governor of the province. There- 
 fore logically he must win his way back through the intrigues 
 that have deprived him of his lawful place, to the kingdom 
 and the throne which are his. But the telling of such a tale 
 contains a deeper reference to the wish in the unconscious heart 
 of man and to its complex working there. The construction 
 and development of the tale is an artistic realization, phantastic 
 though it may be, of a universal, deeply buried but active desire 
 and effort after power and sense of security and worth. Again 
 it is the mission of the drama to unite phantasy and artistic 
 expression and give to such a wish at least this substance. 
 Through the victory of the hero, through his winning in the 
 strength of reality rather than mere dreams, it directs also to 
 a saving reality all who secretly cherish such a wish and dan- 
 gerously rely upon phantasy gratification rather than the ac- 
 tual purposeful accomplishment in some more real and work- 
 able form. 
 
 The " Yellow Jacket " follows the universal form of such a 
 wish. The humble child claims a ruler for his father. The 
 child mind is not satisfied with less in accord with the seeking 
 for ego glorification. The phantasy says, as the plot of the 
 drama puts it into the mouth of the hero: " These kindly but 
 humble parents are not mine. I must forth to seek my own." 
 As so often with the conscious handling of the unconscious 
 wishes, the wish is projected around so that beginning and end 
 appear reversed. Thus for conscious recognition the child is rep- 
 resented as nobly born but cast out. He and his mother are to 
 be murdered but this would interefere with the unfolding of 
 the psychic wish, except in so far as it would establish still
 
 jj PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 more surely the son's desired right to regard the father as 
 unjust and the object of hate. To further more positive ends 
 of the wish however the father's plans are foiled. It is enough 
 for the psychic purpose that the murder is in his heart. The 
 babe is snatched away and the mother left to die without the 
 direct intervention of the father's selfish and indifferent cruelty. 
 The mother must be rejected nevertheless so that the child may 
 claim her as all his own. She can return no love to the un- 
 natural monster nor can his love intrude itself any more upon 
 her, but the mother and son are bound by the closest ties now 
 of common rejection and suffering. 
 
 This play proceeds at once, however, to take the development 
 of the child not along the dangerous paths of fixation upon 
 such an original impulse but makes it the starting point of a 
 sublimation into health and freedom. No compulsion arises 
 from the childish attitude which might extend the baneful in- 
 fluence of the early desires throughout the hero's life but these 
 serve only as the inspiration toward conquest in the hero's own 
 strength and right of manhood. In this sense the play forms 
 an ideal treatment of the subject, an ideal which is by no means 
 a false one, but the realization of the true possibilities of life, 
 as set over against the too frequent neurosis which represents 
 failure to attain the ideal. It is a pretty oasis of success among 
 some of the dramas which bring the truths of the inner life to 
 our knowledge rather through the tragic story of failure in 
 the struggle. Both are equally instructive and at the same time 
 this happier presentation is saved from a false idealism for it 
 is not unmixed with the elements of failure, the infantile self 
 seeking and egocentricity to be overcome in the hero himself 
 as well as the effects of the " hate of men, which makes them 
 do unhappy things." 
 
 The intuitive artistic sense which wrought the play has 
 realized the mother attachment as a source of great danger to 
 the child unless through spiritualization, call it sublimation, it 
 becomes inspiration toward the full attainment of life and its 
 consummation in normal adult love. The plot of the father is 
 foiled by the wife of the farmer who is detailed to commit
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 117 
 
 the murder of the mother, which would cause the death of 
 her child. At the suggestion of his wife, the devoted maid of 
 Chee Moo, this first wife, the farmer substitutes for the victim 
 of his murderous sword the evil maid of the second wife, who 
 has breathed out various dark suggestions which have fed the 
 hate : " I am one of the darkest shadows of our play." Chee 
 Moo thus goes free with her child but not free to live with 
 her child. She owes a deeper and truer debt of life, not to 
 her husband's selfish fearsome cruelty, but (to the spirit of 
 growth and freedom which must unfold in her little son. That 
 same spirit belongs not to one mother with her son but to the 
 whole race. It demands of her the supreme sacrifice even as 
 it did of. the woman Heart of the Ancient Willow Tree. It 
 appears to her in its timeless form, in the spirit of the babe's 
 great grandfather. " And this," says the awakened mother, in- 
 quiringly, " is the little Wu Hoo Git, who inherits your to-day 
 and your to-morrow," and the ancestral spirit answers : " As 
 I inherit his yesterday and his yesterdays before it." 
 
 The mother love appears as a conscious love, seeing the 
 future through the eyes of the present, but blinded by the sor- 
 row of her own defeated hopes and joys to the profounder 
 meaning of his life which must extend timelessly into the past. 
 It cannot unaided recognize the deeper psychical life, where the 
 child must build his own structure untrammeled by the love 
 and care of another, who would chain him where he himself 
 did not belong. Yet her blindness is not the fixed selfish one 
 of her licentious husband. It is only the momentary conflict 
 of the present yielding courageously its hold upon that which 
 it would so gladly retain. The sacrifice ' attains its value and 
 its impetus toward the racial purpose because the self thus first 
 tests its worth and writes, as did this mother, the terms of the 
 hero's birthright in her own life blood. 
 
 She listens, not without the hesitation born of mother's love 
 and caution, to the ancestral spirit's message : " His steps are 
 toward the sun, whither he goes. . . . The ravens will feed him ; 
 the eagles will show him the mountain peaks. . . . And a maiden 
 will arise to teach him the story of love. ... He will go up
 
 n g PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 and up, till he wears the sun-hued garment." And then out 
 of her natural sorrow and fear, in the racial triumph of the 
 mother's heart, this " mother who would give all and does give 
 all " writes on his baby garment with her own blood : " This 
 is Wu Hoo Git, pure and perfect, now, decreed to live ten 
 thousand years." She departs then to heaven, realistically as 
 the Chinese stage devises, and the babe falls to the kindly 
 ministrations of the faithful farmer and his wife. Thus the 
 unconscious wish drama is also carried on. The child phantasy 
 has thus provided for the substitution in time of the august 
 parentage for the humble father and mother with whom its 
 early years are spent and its actual childhood memories formed. 
 
 The time comes in the drama when the young manhood of 
 the hero feels the call of its own power and nobility. The fet- 
 ters of humble conditions and inexperience strain to be broken 
 and the mother soul in the farmer's wife, no less sincere than 
 that of Chee Moo, is ready also but with the same loving re- 
 luctance to bid him godspeed. " He promises to return. He 
 thinks he will return to the mother breast. ... If he leaves 
 our sheltering care, he will never return to the mother breast 
 except in memory. I worship my soul alone." 
 
 The double element in the attitude of a child toward his 
 parent, whereby the parent image is split into two aspects cor- 
 responding to the child's inner selfish fixation or his outward 
 development and adjustment toward reality, finds illustration in 
 the two fathers of the hero. The self centered jealousy of the 
 august father is offset by the better relationship with the sturdy 
 and honest farmer. The latter rejoices in the " glory of our 
 beautiful foster-child " and his right to the boy lies in the act 
 by which he rid the child, himself shall we say psychologi- 
 cally of the embodiment of the evil rivalry of the father re- 
 lation. This stronger father too lives in that spirit of the 
 future which can quickly release his own right over the growing 
 youth and welcome " the man's life journey to match his ex- 
 alted station" which "must call him. . . . Look! He comes 
 like the sun over the eastern hill. He brings a new day to us." 
 Wu Hoo Git: "I long for the free air of life." Lee Sin
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 119 
 
 [the farmer] : " You will not find contentment there." Wu 
 Hoo Git : " Then where shall I find contentment ? " Lee Sin : 
 " In hard work and pure love." Wu Hoo Git : " And where 
 will I find pure love ? " Suey Sin Fah [the farmer's wife] : 
 " In a mother's arms." Lee Sin : " In a wife's embrace." And 
 the hero fares forth to learn for himself whether this is true 
 or no. 
 
 The unconscious question and conflict which underlies this 
 whole family romance on the part of the boy contains other 
 elements of hatred and rivalry which make for unhappy things. 
 These are projected by the art of the unconscious psychology 
 upon various other persons of the play and the situations which 
 are created to cast difficulties in the hero's way and distract him 
 from his deeper purpose of discovery and upbuilding. These 
 all would drag him through jealousy, hatred, self gratification, 
 all the wiles of the inner self seeking wish life, away from this 
 greater and truer purpose, which is the racial one. The chief 
 embodiment of these shadows is that of the younger brother, 
 the most natural rival figure to be opposed to the hero and his 
 success. His final overcoming will also again represent the fulfil- 
 ment of the unconscious wish for supremacy and exaltation of 
 power. Since this is to lie with the hero in the finding of true 
 love apart from the infantile source of it, in the wife rather 
 than the mother, the supremacy is a righteous one and belongs 
 to social and racial ends. 
 
 The rival brother is the opposite of this and epitome of all 
 that is weak and pleasure loving. " I advise this honorable 
 audience that I am a man, though I possess a daffodil nature. 
 I go to view delightful embroideries, but retard my footsteps, 
 that you may observe my charm. I was born great. Wu Sin 
 Yin was my father, and Due Jung Fah, the second wife, my 
 mother. A wonderful alliance, as I am the superb result." 
 Scarcely any comment upon these his own words is needed to 
 introduce the character of this younger brother and its sig- 
 nificance in the drama. He is indeed the superb result of the 
 father's weakness, stimulable and creative only along the path- 
 way of weak and unscrupulous self indulgence, and he repre-
 
 I2Q PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 sents the partially equipped, inadequately apportioned character 
 utterly unfit to reign in his own right or in that of service 
 to his people, as he is utterly incapable of love except the 
 utmost extravagance of self love and effeminate adornment 
 and indulgence. He is the epitome of narcissism, that love of 
 self, that all must conquer if they would succeed. His rival, 
 the hero, " must not dwell. He is simply vulgarly manly, while 
 I possess feminine qualities of great luxuriance." He cannot 
 tolerate the genuine type of power with which he is threatened 
 in the noble youth. Therefore he " must contrive to destroy his 
 honesty and cleanness of life." 
 
 The trials of strength and endurance, as well as of ingenuity 
 and of faith in his power to win, to which the hero is hence- 
 forth subjected, are attributable therefore to this embodiment 
 of all the rivalry of ease and self seeking as opposed to the 
 effort and hardship which lie upon the steep and narrow road 
 of progress. The first device is to lure the young man, through 
 the agency of the monkey formed man, to the type and grade 
 of love that is bought and sold. It is new to the innocent youth, 
 who in his guilelessness responds with all the naturalness of 
 the awakening man to the tempting sweets spread before him. 
 His eyes are soon opened to the sordid unreality of it all and 
 the unsatisfactoriness of a love which has no character of per- 
 manency nor any measure of its inner reality. " Gold is the 
 measure of your affection. Your hearts are outbalanced in the 
 scales by a few grains of yellow dust . . ." and he departs 
 to more arduous but satisfying pursuits. 
 
 It is not long before he has been seen by Plum Blossom. She 
 is the new incarnation of that mother spirit which can never 
 desert the inner heart of the man, only abides the day when it 
 may reappear in a form which is new and complete in itself, 
 free of all childish fetters and yet somehow infused with the 
 never dying essence of old memories and former love. The 
 first actual meeting with Plum Blossom occurs fittingly when 
 this inner essence of memory has stirred a definite longing for 
 a recognition of the past, something that will assure the youth 
 that his life is complete, not his alone in the present and the
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 121 
 
 future but grounded in the past as well. He cries out for his 
 ancestors whom he thinks to find " in the city of the dead. ... I 
 will pray at the tombs for the gods to give me an honorable 
 mother. ... I will pray at the tombs for the gods to give me 
 an honorable mother, with a delicate name one that drops 
 like a sweet song from the lips," and quite unwitting of the 
 significant outcome of his choice he chooses through the name 
 on the tomb the maiden who had already chosen him and in 
 whom he is able to make the healthy sublimation of the mother 
 desire which he is unconsciously demanding. As he bends be- 
 fore the tomb of Plum Blossom's mother, the younger Plum 
 Blossom peeps from the shadow of the celestial weeping wil- 
 low tree behind him. One is reminded of the opposite fate of 
 Narcissus, who enamored of his own likeness stood at the pool 
 unmindful of the nymph near by pining for him and so lost 
 his opportunity and hers for their mutual salvation. It is not 
 so with Wu Hoo Git. He healthily forgets the tendency of 
 a pleasure which answers only to its own desire. They are 
 united they may, according to Chinese usage, be united in 
 common speech only because they have a common mother, the 
 one he has just artificially chosen. It is true psychically, the 
 lovers must meet in the depth of the ancient childhood desire 
 but not to remain there. They become so entranced in mutual 
 admiration of one another's qualities that Plum Blossom is 
 suddenly recalled to herself, " We are forgetting our mother," 
 but there is more than the conscious reference in the spoken 
 resolve of Wu Hoo Git: "... I renounce our mother and 
 will contend with him who seeks your hand." 
 
 It is more necessary now than ever that the hero shall es- 
 tablish his connection with the past more definitely so that he 
 may satisfy the proud and cautious father of Plum Blossom, 
 so he sets out more determinedly than ever to win his way to 
 his own estate. Although this is the kingdom of his birth and 
 his father's throne, it is not a backward way that he is to travel. 
 The healthy youthful arrogance of Wu Hoo Git has made this 
 so completely his own rightful goal, and his attitude is so much 
 more one of real governorship than that of the selfish voluptuous
 
 I22 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 governor of the past, that the path toward the goal is a forward 
 one. The weak scheming brother represents that backward 
 tendency, the hero presses steadily ahead in all his purpose 
 and attainment. In winning the royal jacket or in possessing 
 at last the maid, he is looking toward the future and building 
 in all his attitude for it alone. Hence his success. 
 
 Even Plum Blossom however must be withdrawn from him 
 while he learns through the encountering of new difficulties 
 both the measure of his own strength and also its dependence 
 upon the love and devotion of a woman, the mother and her 
 successor. His masculine conceit prevents this dependence from 
 becoming a too appreciative one. When the slipper which Plum 
 Blossom gave him to wave toward her saves him in his extremity 
 he believes all too readily that after all it was his own prowess 
 that has saved him. Thus does man usually receive the de- 
 votion of love, utilizing it and going boastfully on his way. 
 He is bound in the toils of the Spider, who has enticed him into 
 the meshes of his web, where he then hopelessly entangles him. 
 The shaking of the slipper has an instant effect upon the " demon 
 Spider." " My web spins not. My joints crinkle in the light 
 of purity." But as Wu Hoo Git finds himself released from the 
 entangling strands and feels in his " expanding soul the power 
 to o'ercome all monsters wild," he adds, " I would that Plum 
 Blossom might see my unaided triumph. She would adore my 
 fiery bravery." 
 
 Still sorer trials lie yet between the hero and the two goals 
 of his desire. The unhappy schemes of envy and hate are not 
 yet exhausted. There comes a time when the destroying power 
 has reached its ultimate influence, a purely blighting one, in 
 the congealing coldness which overtakes him and freezes even 
 the slipper in his bosom. " I would shake the slipper, but it 
 is a block of august ice." His cries to Plum Blossom are of 
 no avail. In this last extremity she cannot answer them, but 
 something deeper within him must be once more touched before 
 his final ascent to victory. Once more he must taste the depth 
 of the old mother love. The mother's spirit waiting and watch- 
 ing its hour in heaven above brings through her prayer the
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 123 
 
 warmth into his world-body. Yet his conscious thought is not 
 of her. The mother love must be content to be hidden still under 
 her sacrifice to the younger substitute, wherein lies the hero's 
 final step into freedom. His last faint warmth of life has 
 breathed itself into the name of Plum Blossom, which remains 
 a melting icicle kiss upon his lips. His first waking conscious- 
 ness is again of his upward journey: "Lead me to the moun- 
 tain top one august step above that I may see the world of 
 love and my inner self." He moves on dazzled by the sun 
 shining glorious above him, only dreamily conscious of his 
 mother's voice. He is not entirely unmindful however of the 
 source of his life and love, for one little gray cloud in the 
 huge brass bowl of the sky " is my mother soul cloud. So 
 with every golden shower of happiness there is a touch of 
 gray for one must pause in happiness to shed a tear for a 
 mother heavenward passed." 
 
 And now his icy fetters melt completely away and he has 
 strength and courage to fling himself against the palace gates. 
 Before such courageous resolve the weak and evil powers of 
 selfishness and self indulgence beat a languid but safe retreat. 
 Step by step as the conqueror makes his entering way the cow- 
 ardly brother smothers one valorous boast after another in his 
 " inability to get away " until he is quite ready at the hero's 
 demand to " bump " the head he is glad to retain and betake 
 himself to his self chosen prison, " A garden ! A garden filled 
 with smiling flowers." Wu Hoo Git ascends at last the throne of 
 his ancestors, robed in the yellow jacket, " the sun-hued garment " 
 which marks him the chosen of heaven to rule. Once more 
 he draws forth the slipper and its summons completes his 
 triumph and his entrance into the fulness of life; it brings his 
 chosen Plum Blossom to his side. The mother is not present 
 only above, as an inspiration and a recognition from afar that 
 he has established his own life's kingdom. It is her voice in 
 the distance, " The world and wisdom are his." 
 
 This happy retelling of the CEdipus story carries a mental 
 refreshment and a stimulus toward the ever-recurring conflict 
 between the individual venture forth upon the path of reality,
 
 J24 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 which is the price of progress, and the pleasant and sheltering 
 arms of phantasy, which would keep us in the regressive realm 
 of the infantile. Yet through all the light fancifulness of the 
 play and its pleasing presentation one is reminded of the crys- 
 tallization of this CEdipus constellation in the nation from which 
 the theatrical setting is borrowed. To be sure the play has 
 elements, such as a certain American freedom of love making, 
 which one could scarcely find in Chinese society and which 
 seem likewise to lie far remote even in their phantasy life. 
 That they do exist there, however imperfectly, is evidenced by 
 the imaginative qualities which can transform their meager stage 
 equipments into a richness of suggestion which fairly rivals 
 the elaborate devices of the occidental theater. They manifest 
 themselves also in the wealth of symbolism which appears not 
 only on the stage, but is part and parcel of daily life. Never- 
 theless, the sordid misery and poverty of life in that vast em- 
 pire, republic as yet only in name, allows but little healthful 
 phantasy play. 
 
 It would seem that centuries ago, when other peoples were 
 voicing the great fundamental complex in the projected form 
 of ancestral worship which gave emotional relief and therefore 
 freedom for development away from its bondage, China for some 
 reason allowed it to run into a fixed mold from which for 
 all these centuries there has been no escape. It stopped for 
 them the clock of time and left them, full grown then and ac- 
 complished beyond the rest of the world, like the sleeping figures 
 in the enchanted palace. 
 
 The cause would be hard to seek back in those dim centuries 
 of the past. The results are apparent in the wretched lives of 
 hundreds of millions of people, in the slavery of both men and 
 women to the one family ideal, an ideal as Sir James Legge 
 has said, which looks' backward and not forward, in the stag- 
 nation of all progress which has marked their centuries of 
 history. 
 
 The family complex fetters them. They have never passed 
 beyond ancestor worship. It is their religion, it pervades all 
 government, it makes or rather mars their family life. Slowly
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 125 
 
 the light of progress is touching these bonds, but the great nation 
 is yet so far from its awakening that we may speak of the 
 China of the past as still bound and barely starting on the quest 
 for its own life which urged on the hero of the play. 
 
 Here it is that " The Yellow Jacket " is so true to the Chinese 
 life. It presents very clearly and definitely these features of 
 the fundamental complex just as they oppress China in actuality. 
 Its Emperor only so recently was indeed the " Son of Heaven." 
 The president still sacrifices to Heaven Shang-ti, the Supreme 
 Ruler. It has been argued for them that they were monotheists 
 par excellence, but this monotheism manifests itself as the su- 
 preme exaltation of the great divine ruler. It is this idea of 
 power and authority rather than of any other character which 
 they conceive in their supreme God. In practice they are wor- 
 shipers of many spirits, but most conspicuously of the ances- 
 tral spirits. Its fruit in their lives testifies to the unproductive- 
 ness of this continuance of a primitive form of belief so many 
 centuries since it had outworn its usefulness in the advance 
 of culture and civilization. It proves itself a regressive attitude 
 toward life. The son lives for the father, for the grandfather, 
 for the shades who have long preceded him. Woman has no 
 importance save as she may be the instrument for raising up 
 sons, not for succession but for maintaining the recession into 
 the past. Everything about the home centers around male pres- 
 tige through the backward gaze not the forward note of prog- 
 ress and hope in the son. Therefore, the son's wife becomes 
 only the drudge in the home, the helpless slave of the mother- 
 in-law who toils for the men. Her own family no longer have 
 control of her. Plum Blossom's pretty rebellion against the 
 mother-in-law threatening her future finds many a darker echo 
 in the real China. Many have been the prospective brides who 
 have fulfilled Plum Blossom's threat and chosen death rather 
 than the dreaded servitude. 
 
 Filial piety is extolled in China's sacred books and com- 
 mended by idealists, but actual conditions bear truer witness 
 to the effect of such enforced retrogression. Formal worship 
 and compulsory obedience and respect do not lie deep. They
 
 I2 5 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 make for hatred, quarreling, wrangling, Families do not live 
 at peace among themselves. The empty formality of a phase of 
 human development dead and forsaken by other nations these 
 thousands of years produces that indifference in the most sacred 
 things which so astonishes the occidental mind. These things 
 are as hollow as their loudly extolled filial piety. In the play 
 the " property man " appears as the perfect exponent of that. 
 His superb indifference to the bombast of boastfulness or pomp, 
 of heartrending sorrow or exquisite joy, the air of boredom 
 and disdain with which he can set up mountains for the hero 
 to climb or whisk the dust from the chairs on which their high- 
 nesses have just been seated finds its counterpart, too, in the 
 real China. The untidy priests in the temples care as little for 
 its intrusion by curious foreigner or careless, unkempt wor- 
 shipper. They can as unconcernedly drink their tea as the 
 " property man " could turn his back and partake of his bowl 
 of rice and let great events take their own course. 
 
 This is a dark picture of the land itself. Are there no lighter 
 elements in it? Yes; they stir to laughter and to delight in the 
 play and to wonder, too, at what may be their significance. They 
 too bear the character of infantile, the features which would 
 appear among a people who live thus in the past and must 
 express their desires and impulses in that concrete form which 
 lies so much nearer the remote past of primitive man. 
 
 Noise, racket, and din ! The " assistant property men " do 
 their best and the " God of Thunder " has things all to himself 
 for a time, yet it is all less than naught to the rattling and 
 banging with which China itself sounds on every possible oc- 
 casion. Whether or not the Chinaman has lost his faith in 
 the many spirits abroad to be frightened away by the din, the 
 noise is an indispensable part of wedding and funeral, of feast 
 day and fast day, of welcome and godspeed, not one salute but 
 all that gun and gong can combine, with firecrackers demolished 
 not by the pack or the bundle, but by the hundreds massed 
 together in a manner that would stupefy the Yankee boy's provi- 
 dent soul. Just as infantile is such an assertion of power 
 as are the methods of the thunder god on the stage who thinks
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 127 
 
 by the quantity and perhaps quality of his noise to overwhelm 
 the hero and turn him back to regressive paths. Thus the in- 
 fant thinks to win power by thunderous noise and the peculiar 
 crude get-up of the thunder god with his black and yellow 
 suggests that early infantile power source which analysis finds 
 to contain so much attraction in the unconscious as a phantasy 
 level, the black and yellow of the dirt or fecal level. One 
 wonders whether the brown covered hills sprinkled with black 
 boulders which is so much a feature of their natural world, 
 together with their muddy yellow rivers, may not have helped 
 to fix such a phantasy. Surely, the Chinaman feels at home 
 in the dirt layer. Thread the narrow streets of his filthy cities 
 to be convinced; stop at the stalls which tempt him not you 
 all along the way with their repeated display of rich fried food, 
 greasy and brown, and think how far in development his interest 
 has yet to rise. 
 
 One cannot tarry long, however, before ready Eastern hos- 
 pitality thrusts upon the often unwilling guest another form 
 of native delectation. Insipid, half sweetened cakes vie with 
 sweetish, brackish teas to tempt the Chinese epicure and puzzle 
 the analytic foreigner as to their symbolic value to the Chinese 
 mind. It is true to the expressive symbolism of the play that 
 the all-powerful ruler and his " honorable second father-in-law " 
 demand the honeysuckle leaf repeatedly renewed in their tea. 
 Here again nature has assisted the Chinese form of phantasy 
 development or has lent herself willingly to the cultivation of 
 sources of phantasy gratification. The fruit which they brew 
 with their tea on choice occasions, the floating honeysuckle leaf 
 or the orange blossom, bespeaks the concrete representation of 
 the seminal fluid which lies in so concrete a way as part of 
 their love phantasy just as it appears in the archaic symbolism 
 of the dream and of the psychosis. The mystic soma of the 
 gods is to them perhaps unconsciously retained in their common 
 brews. 
 
 The sense of smell, too, finds its delight in the cloying sweets 
 which lie so close to the sensuous side of love. We know the 
 heavy odor of their sacred lily, which must blossom at least
 
 128 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 once a year in every home. In the south of their land the 
 pumelo blossom outrivals the orange and the "seven lee fra- 
 grance " might truly be thought able to cling to and follow one 
 for the distance of seven "lee" as the name signifies. 
 
 The eye likewise seeks the direct language of phantasy ex- 
 pressed in telling form. The laying on of paint and powder 
 in frankly heightened artificiality speaks in as clear characters 
 as the manifest symbolism of their mode of written speech. 
 Painted faces, marvelous coiffure, which denotes a woman's 
 locality and to some extent her standing no woman could ap- 
 pear in public respectably without some or many ornaments 
 thrust through her hair the tiny pointed feet barely as yet 
 dispensed with as a mark of respectability and social position, 
 these are but a mere mention of the bewildering symbolism 
 by which this strange undeveloped people seek self expression 
 and manifest their as yet unassimilated comprehension of life. 
 
 No wonder that the " Yellow Jacket " transports one into an 
 enchanting dream world which, however, lacks that harmonizing 
 atmosphere which advanced culture has thrown about the more 
 concrete pictures of the primitive and childish world. In this 
 land men and women live still among the individual objects which 
 appear in our cruder unsoftened dreams of the night, where 
 each element comes and goes in incoherent confusion and be- 
 wildering multiplicity of vivid detail. These men and women 
 are closer, as the night dreams are, to the world to which the 
 psychotic returns for whom a unifying control is no longer ex- 
 ercised by the reality of the actual century in which he lives. 
 
 Thus again " Daffodil," the effeminate rival brother, is only 
 perhaps an extreme example of that grade of partial develop- 
 ment which magnifies the homosexual or " homopsychic " ele- 
 ment before it has found through maturity its proper sublima- 
 tion. The long, enveloping robes of the Chinaman, garment 
 upon garment, of soft silken texture and rich or delicate, which 
 marks the pride and taste of the well-to-do gentleman, suggest 
 that his virility is considerably obscured behind elements which 
 have not as yet reached their full evolution. His tendency to 
 go softly and speak softly likewise exaggerate this same partial
 
 THE NATURAL PATH OF SUBLIMATION 
 
 stage behind which capacity for development still lies partly 
 dormant. 
 
 More robust elements have not however been wanting and 
 recently signs more abundant of their awakening to a fuller 
 development. In the last decade or two the touching of hands 
 more and more practically and vitally with the nations of prog- 
 ress has not only stimulated them. It has, furthermore, dis- 
 covered those traits in them which make for strength. There 
 is promise of a mighty synthesis of that multiplicity of symbolism 
 in which it will lose the character of its individual features and 
 merge them rather into a full-grown progressiveness when 
 they have broken the fetter of the past. They have yet to learn 
 to close the gateway which, according to Bergson, should shut 
 away the past, admitting just enough of it at any moment as 
 will further the action of that moment. Virile and steadfast 
 advance along the path of progress lies in their future. 
 
 The hero who wins the yellow jacket, a refined harmony of 
 tints, very different from the base yellow which clothed the 
 thunder god is the figure of China's promise. He typifies the 
 strength and resource that He almost untouched, untried in its 
 vast area. Not only its natural wealth untold, but the vigor 
 of growth which covers the brown hills wherever the soil is 
 tilled are suggestive of such a future. No other green is so 
 richly vivid as its velvety fields of rice which change the dark 
 hillside. Its luxuriant groves of bamboo spring up as if by 
 magic. The yellow sands of its river banks and fertile valleys, 
 its stretches of mountain land have their growth of grain or 
 forest. And above its cloying scented flowers the scentless wild 
 rose climbs high and the flaming hibiscus flaunts a note of 
 power to come rich and warm with the fulness of an unfettered 
 life.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 1 
 
 " Swift, through some trap mine eyes have never found 
 
 Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep, 
 
 Thou, giant Harlequin of Dreams, dost leap 
 
 Upon my spirit's stage. Then Sight and Sound, 
 
 Then Space and Time, then Language, Mete and Bound, 
 
 And all familiar Forms that firmly keep 
 
 Man's reason in the road, change faces, peep 
 
 Betwixt the legs and mock the daily round. 
 
 Yet thou canst more than mock: sometimes my fears 
 
 At midnight break through bounden lids a sign 
 
 Thou hast a heart: and oft thy little leaven 
 
 Of dream-taught wisdom works me bettered years. 
 
 In one night witch, saint, trickster, fool divine, 
 
 I think thou'rt Jester at the Court of Heaven ! " 
 
 SIDNEY LANIER, The Harlequin of Dreams. 
 
 Freud has called the dream the " royal road into the uncon- 
 scious " and brought into service one of the most commonplace 
 factors of human life as a means for searching into life's con- 
 flicts. The dream is such a universal and ordinary ocurrence 
 in every life that it appears, to the unthinking, foolish and mean- 
 ingless. Regulated conscious thought, hard at work for cen- 
 turies upon centuries trying to subdue and control the wayward- 
 ness of actual wishes and strivings which tend to outrun all 
 control, has condemned dreams as foolish, mad, useless, for- 
 getting that they were once regarded more seriously when the 
 world was younger and thought was still more candid, before 
 " camouflage " became a universal fine art. And they may still 
 be utilized to penetrate the inner life, its wishes and strivings. 
 Here again the artistic creator with his quicker, more active 
 1 Printed in the New York Medical Journal, Apr. 5, 1919, under t tie : 
 "Dear Brutus": The Dramatist's Use of the Dream. J. M. Barrie: 
 Dear Brutus. 
 
 130
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 13! 
 
 intuition comes into closer touch with the unconscious and brings 
 its content to conscious attention. It is fitting therefore that 
 his happy exposition of the science of the dream should be in- 
 cluded in this study. 
 
 In Dear Brutus the genius of James M. Barrie has spoken 
 very directly and clearly of the service which the dream may 
 render for the understanding not only of one's inner life, but 
 for its readjustment and rehabilitation. Whether from conscious 
 intention or from the deeper truth of artistic intuition, he has 
 portrayed its actual service in the redemption of life from sad- 
 dening waste and bitterest dissatisfaction. Barrie, in his wisdom 
 and humor, stands between the scoffing multitude who see only 
 the foolishness of dreams and their apparent freakish triviality, 
 and the serious psychopathologist who considers them, in their 
 functional import, worthy of earnest investigation. He lets his 
 little old Lob, so akin to Lanier's Harlequin of Dreams, break 
 the bonds of rhyme and reason as he appears upon the stage 
 to set the dream work in motion. Some words overheard one 
 night at the theater before the play had proceeded far paid 
 genuine tribute to the dramatist's intuition. " It certainly must 
 have been some lunatic that wrote this play." A wise lunatic, yes ! 
 One who has the wisdom and the courage of the deeper hidden 
 truth to see in all the mad gambols which far outreach care- 
 fully circumscribed conscious thought, something human, some- 
 thing seeking expression, something from the inner heart of 
 man and woman where both difficulty and success are con- 
 ditioned and determined. But this " lunatic " has also in richer 
 measure than the ordinary man the large wisdom and control to 
 bring meaning and order and service out of the lunacy of the 
 dream. 
 
 First of all there is Lob. The dream world has nothing to 
 do with " Space and Time . . . and all familiar Forms." 
 The stream of the unconscious from which dreams appear, re- 
 leased from the too highly vaunted intellectual repression of 
 reason which holds them in check during the humdrum hours 
 of waking, belongs to all the ages since life began. Therefore 
 Lob is ageless or of all the ages. He has no memory of timed
 
 j-2 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 events, of years measured in brief periods. He was just as 
 active when " Merrie England " flourished and the " philomel " 
 sang its song of love, as when the nightingale of today melts 
 away with its melody the dividing barriers which conscious 
 thought calls time. Lob his little simple name rings its changes 
 through many tongues is no forgotten and discarded past. Lob, 
 love, life, libido, belongs to the measureless unconscious life 
 of man, the preservation of its power, impulse, striving, and 
 he moves and flits and plans and makes things come to pass 
 out in the external conscious world as well. He is power, real 
 vital dynamic force, love and life, creative, constructive energy. 
 It is a stultifying blindness, a superficial timid aloofness from 
 the stream of knowledge and power within, which breeds dis- 
 content, misunderstanding, false control of our unseen desires, 
 or loss of control and wasteful drifting. 
 
 These things have moved Lob's deeper heart to bring certain 
 poor, blind time servers to his house for the magic Midsummer 
 Night. Keenly urgent and alive but warily cautious of opening 
 upon them this flood of possibility, he suggests and only half 
 pretends that there is any marvelous plan before them. But 
 he yearns inexpressibly to bring them at least into touch with 
 the real profound life within them, and it may be that some 
 will respond. He is subtle and quiet, as little to be thwarted 
 as is the stream of life itself. He hides the intensity of his 
 purpose by whimsicality, as securely as life itself hides and 
 only half discloses its sure, still purposes. The flowers grow 
 for him. He has only to stand before them and they are as if 
 coaxed to unfold. And if they fall and break, as happens when 
 he drops them from the vase, they are not cast out as useless. 
 Like life in its true course, he is wiser and more tender than 
 that. They can be readjusted, rewatered, the broken one is 
 reestablished, some of its stem is lost but it is encouraged to 
 stand up and still prove bright and serviceable among the others ; 
 just as good in a new way, if only the new way is cheerfully 
 and resolutely accepted. This is his simple childlike prattle to 
 them. This vigorous little Lob, whom even a stupidly blinking, 
 visionless old butler cannot sucessfully put to bed and to sleep,
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 133 
 
 he it is who holds in his hand the rousing of all these souls 
 to their own possibilities. Yet even. Lob is tremulous, not sure. 
 So is life. It has only its possibilities; what shall be done with 
 these, what shall be made of the dreams of sleeping or of wak- 
 ing, even life cannot say. Each individual makes his own choice, 
 whether or not he shall fulfil these possibilities for himself. 
 
 Lob yearns over them all but mostly over the two, Mr. Dearth 
 and Mrs. Dearth, in whom, though they have drifted sadly 
 astray, he knows lies the greater possibility of the right turning. 
 Particularly he sees the power that might lie in the hand of the 
 woman. She has turned blindly from it, blaming only her 
 husband, the rejected object of her opportunity, for the things 
 which have gone wrong for them both. Lob is almost afraid 
 to have her enter the realm of dreams and face the baseness 
 and disaster of her own inner desires, in the facing of which 
 nevertheless alone lies her " second chance." 
 
 In the first act all have been waiting and wondering what 
 is in Lob's mind concerning them. He himself is scarcely sure 
 even yet that the magic wood of dreams will be there on this 
 Midsummer Night, but it is closer than any one of them would 
 have imagined. The radiant growing garden of the day has 
 given place to the mystic dream world. No one suspects that 
 it is so close. The curtain had been drawn before the flower 
 garden while the scene of perfidious lovemaking between the 
 philanderers was taking place. Now it is suddenly withdrawn 
 and the magic wood is there. The waiting guests look at it 
 and at one another in wonder, awed, questioning, afraid of that 
 " second chance," yet drawn one by one irresistibly into the 
 strange secrets of the wood, their own secrets and their own 
 renewed opportunities. The drunken artist is the first to enter 
 it, he who had awakened the pity of all the company and who 
 together with his wife had particularly stirred Lob's yearning 
 heart. His life is the visibly wasted one, force and initiative 
 gone. He is too broken and ashamed to do other than meekly 
 accept the reproach and censure of his embittered wife. That her 
 selfishness and hardness have repelled and defeated his creative 
 power she has yet to learn; but the darkness and emptiness
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 of the desires which will constitute her dream do well to make 
 her hesitate fearfully, before she steps into the wood for her 
 second chance. 
 
 Meawhile the others have gone. Lady Caroline, gowned in 
 gold of a glittering sheen, scornful, proud, in the haughtiness 
 of a gilded snobbery, sails majestically into the forest's glades. 
 Mr. Coade, easy, polished, blessed with an affluence and no need 
 for exertion, follows the spell of whatever may be for him. 
 The triangular lovers the man whose mind stays made up 
 hardly longer than its object of choice is in sight, the girl flattered 
 by his attentions and the plausibility of his self conceit, and the 
 bright eyed little wife who was looking around for her husband's 
 love which she feared she had lost and some one might have 
 picked up these three follow each other in quick succession to 
 see what the wood may do in revealing their true desires. Even 
 Matey, the dishonest butler, sets ponderously forth, hardly so 
 much impressed by his second chance, as compelled to the self 
 revealing dream, whether he will or no. Only Mrs. Coade, 
 comfortably, placidly happy, remains behind, upstairs, far from 
 even the suggestion of the mystery of the wood of dreams. Her 
 day has gone by. There is no more creativeness to her love, 
 no more inspiration and vision. She has settled all too soon 
 to the biological running down of the sands and is no longer 
 eager for a stimulus to herself. Nor does she offer an incentive 
 to her husband, which might have saved his dream from its in- 
 eptitude and revealed some keener desire than that which he 
 has to acknowledge in the end as his. So Mrs. Coade merely 
 haunts the house during the night, candle in hand, anxious in 
 regard to the others, but to no avail. For the house is deserted 
 by the adventurers and only Lob slumbers on at his chimney 
 side, patiently awaiting the working of his dream experiment. 
 
 But the wood, what is transpiring there? Psychoanalysis in 
 its persistent working with dreams has found that for practical 
 therapeutic purposes they may be viewed in at least two aspects. 
 First, they are the means of revealing to conscious attention, 
 fixed upon them after awaking, inner complexities which un- 
 known desires create in our lives. This demands the revelation
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 135 
 
 which their detailed whimsicalities, with the aid and the disguise 
 of symbolisms, so cunningly set forth. They are often startling, 
 in spite of clever disguises, in the secret desires, the pettiness, 
 the primitiveness, the childishness, the baseness of interest which 
 they reveal still at work beneath the surface of what we term 
 a civilized, cultured, adult mind. They show the source of the 
 confusion, the uncertainty of striving, and the indecision as due to 
 the variety of desires and of the different cultural layers to which 
 such desires belong, which are at all times present within us. 
 The dream, however, has a further function, a further message. 
 Out of these desires and out of the clearer revelation of them 
 it aids the mind in its choice and control of these to higher syn- 
 theses. It reveals better possibilities and sets one on the correct 
 pathway of synthesis and control which will attain these and 
 unify life. Bearing in mind then this double function of the 
 dream, we need not be surprised with whatever Barrie's play 
 may reveal to us. Like the analyst with his patient, he must 
 first draw the curtain from the desires in their nakedness, high 
 or low, base or noble, and then lead gradually to the conscious 
 grasping of them, the slow, at first bewildered, acceptance of 
 them, and then the determined use of the acquired knowledge 
 of self ; or shall it be only the continuance in a life of indolent, 
 indifferent drifting? Even in the latter case, however, some 
 impetus and concern will have arisen from the dreaming. Some 
 " little leaven of dream-taught wisdom " work them " bettered 
 years." 
 
 Since there is a power in the dream to discover unsuspected 
 realities of desire partly hidden, partly revealed by the symbolic 
 actions, manners, dress of ordinary conscious life, it need oc- 
 casion no surprise to find first in the wood the haughty Lady 
 Caroline madly in love with Matey the butler. He sleeps with 
 his head pillowed in her lap. Her glittering, golden gown is 
 exchanged for motoring garments hardly less suggestive of the 
 sordid affluence which her prosperous dream husband has 
 brought her in the financial success which has also satisfied his 
 dreams. Their position upon the ground, from which they are 
 separated only by the luxurious rug from the " Rolls-Royce "
 
 136 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 left somewhere near, is all indicative of the low position of 
 their desires. There is no inspiration or aspiration in either 
 of them. The fat, clumsy Matey limits her horizon with his 
 boasting of his clever dealings in the " world of finance." Even 
 she is not in his vision. The fat brown cigar tempts him far 
 more than the request to kiss her ring, her "golden fetter," 
 and his thoughts are only on the baser accruing of wealth and 
 the circumventing of the rest of the world of finance by his 
 schemes. No, the dream could not change his baseness of desire 
 and method of dishonesty. His striving for power develops 
 no more than merely to substitute one base form for another. 
 And it keeps "the nails in my boots for those beneath me." 
 
 The philanderer had already given a picture, before he entered 
 the wood, of the end of his desires. He is one of those in- 
 dividuals who see no further than the horizon of the self, such 
 a Narcissus that his own image fills the pool of events quite 
 completely and quite entrancingly. Joanna, the love of the mo- 
 ment, or Mabel the wife, one time loved, are only objects upon 
 which the narcissistic self reflection shines forth. So in the 
 first act, still in the waking world, Joanna attempts to love and 
 admire him but his love for her is only a boastful rehearsal 
 of his own graces of spirit, his own loneliness and separateness 
 of soul. These are just so many rich mouthfuls of self appre- 
 ciation and conceit, the enjoyment of the feigned loneliness and 
 regretfulness oozing through with an unctuousness which de- 
 ceives the very man himself. It is the essence of egotistic self 
 pity which masochistically suffers to enjoy. And for a time 
 it deceives the equally selfish Joanna. Mabel's vision is rather 
 keener. She is a contrast to these too common types of thickly 
 blinded self worshippers and deceivers. Quick, alert, she is 
 able to pick up a situation as tangled and absurd as it is dis- 
 astrous to her comfort and contentment, and in sprightly fashion 
 make the best even of it. Certain flashes of spiteful hatred 
 come through, however, to place her among the ordinary and 
 imperfect members of human society. 
 
 In the wood the situation of these lovers is reversed. The 
 dream seems to be devoted principally to clearing the air a
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 137 
 
 little for the man, John Purdie, and awaken him somewhat 
 from his extreme egotism. He is still pursuing the wrong 
 woman, so it appears to him in the dream, and so he enjoys 
 still the flavor of the forbidden and attainable only by clan- 
 destine means, but in reality his fickleness and lack of stability 
 evidence themselves in that he pursues his wife and deserts 
 the other woman, thinking his wife the forbidden object. 
 His methods are none the less self worshipful and reveal that 
 his blindness to the object is one deeply rooted in the egotism 
 of his nature. Of course the object must be nothing when self 
 is all and fills the horizon. " You know why I love you, Mabel ; 
 because you are so much like myself." Joanna's triumph while 
 awake and her surprise at Mabel's lack of appreciation of the 
 self engrossed viewpoint which is hers and Purdie's are now 
 reversed and the falseness and shallowness of her obscured 
 judgments come to her in their true light. It is her turn to 
 indulge in little wrathful explosions, most sharply at the last 
 toward " philomel " in the trees over her head, that bird of 
 love whose true nature she little knew. Mabel has shifted her 
 pale gown of desertion for a vividly bright one, warm and 
 eloquent of love. 
 
 Coade has not attained the life of usefulness which his waking 
 anticipation of a second chance had conceived for him. Ah, no; 
 he has escaped the comfortable unstimulating partner of his 
 daily life only to pipe and dance in idle, careless self enjoyment. 
 He has returned in play only to the childish level which lurks 
 in the unconscious, ready, the moment the ordinary pressure 
 of the daily life is released, to summon to autoerotic pleasure. 
 This is easy of attainment, requires no effort, fills the place all 
 too readily of the creative power which should have supplanted 
 it more securely than this. Neverthless he is as happy and 
 merry and pleasurably unconcerned as only dreams can permit 
 one to be. 
 
 The others, however, those upon whom Lob's wish had most 
 seriously bent itself, how does it fare with them? The wish 
 for true living, that which is sincerely happy because it expresses 
 itself untrammeled in the genuine constructive force of its na-
 
 138 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 ture, must have been alive in the poor drunken artist at least. 
 The' dream wood has released him from the weaknesses, the 
 ineffectually, the external disappointments which had turned his 
 natural energy from the paths of success and work. Here in 
 the wood he has found both of these. Energy has not wasted 
 itself here in pathways which bring neither complete forget- 
 fulness nor afford any of the satisfaction which life really 
 demands. Now the artist is an artist, presumably rising betimes 
 in the morning as the man awake had regretfully stated he 
 used to do. In the dream he is out even to seize the spell of 
 the full moon and make it his for definite productive ends. And 
 with him is the daughter who is chief symbol of the creative 
 power and wish, the daughter whom the selfish, hardened un- 
 productiveness of his wife has in reality denied him. 
 
 This scene of consummate dream art, so replete with the grace 
 and power of the dramatist's thought, cannot be easily passed 
 by. To go back a bit, Barrie has confessed in the sketch of his 
 mother, " Margaret Ogilvy," something of what she had meant 
 to his life and what a prominent place she held in all his creative 
 work. She constantly reappeared by name or otherwise in his 
 best female characters. It is not strange therefore that this wish 
 daughter should bear the name of Margaret. Furthermore 
 psychoanalysis has been teaching us the lasting and dominating 
 influence upon all of one's later life, and largely conditioning 
 its success or failure, which the love of a child toward its parent 
 may have. Life's success or failure depends upon the attitude 
 formed then. This expresses itself in a fixation upon the parent, 
 which means introversion, dependence, inability to meet life in 
 one's own strength and effort, or on the other hand the parent 
 love becomes only the inspiring model for all of later life, urging 
 to extroversion upon external things and an adult acceptance 
 and use of love and all other opportunities that life may bring. 
 Barrie himself has said that " nothing that happens after we are 
 twelve matters very much." Furthermore we have the testimony 
 from the life of one of our great anatomists as to the hold of 
 the mother upon the child's life and its return through the
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 139 
 
 undying wish in the form of a daughter. Burdach 1 relates his 
 intense experiences in the birth and life of his daughter to whom 
 he gave his mother's name and whom he allowed to supplant 
 a strong fixed affection and desire toward his idolized mother 
 who had died earlier. The wife in his narrative seems to have 
 been only a secondary consideration. 
 
 It would seem that the dramatist has here laid emphasis even 
 if only intuitively and unconsciously upon a combination of 
 factors grown very familiar to psychoanalysis. They are given 
 simply in the drama: the artist who has failed in his work, 
 whose life for some reason has not attained its freedom and 
 has instead sought refuge in the often frequented port decanter. 
 He has been unable to command and hold the love of the wife, 
 whose wild untamed beauty had at first fascinated him. His 
 deep inner desire, which perhaps had formed the unconscious 
 fetters which had caused this failure and his disastrous career, 
 returns in the dream in the daughter form, whom Barrie con- 
 fessedly suggests as a revived mother image when he gives her 
 his own mother's name. And yet the dramatist's art, no less 
 than his creative and reconstructive purpose, which is thus ar- 
 tistically to point the way out from fixation and failure to 
 renewed living, utilizes this same daughter-mother figure to 
 reinspire the artist and lead him to rebirth. Such is the mis- 
 sion of the dream; it reveals the danger side of the unconscious 
 wish but its constructive, " prospective " tendency as well. It 
 is the thought to which Jung has given elaboration in his 
 Psychology of the Unconscious, in which he discusses the " ter- 
 rible " mother object of the infantile desire leading to death and 
 the lif egiving mother from whom comes the psychic rebirth, " the 
 mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life 
 for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish." 
 
 The artist's dream makes much of the moonlight, which 
 Sadger 2 has shown from his psychoanalytical experience and 
 from literature has much to do also with parent influences, often 
 
 1 Cited by J. Sadger in " Sleep Walking and Moon Walking." Nerv- 
 ous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 30. New York and 
 Washington. 
 
 2 Locus cit.
 
 I40 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 associated by the child mind with the light of the moon, and 
 surviving from childhood into adult life. Barrie has added a 
 further touch from his childhood memories when the artist and 
 the dream child are engrossed in catching the full expression 
 of the moon for his picture. The playful references of both 
 child and father are strongly suggestive of the influences which 
 Sadger's study has discovered operative in these associations in 
 the unconscious and conscious phantasy life and the erotic in- 
 terpretation of the moon. Then the dream daughter turns her 
 head up saucily and .delivers her address to the moon which 
 savors of the erotic fancies which have been addressed to the 
 moon or conceived of it throughout all the ages. But when 
 the maiden wonders if the moon would feel insulted at being 
 possibly considered old enough to be her mother, the light 
 hearted artist's answer comes straight from Barrie's own mother 
 reminiscences. He has told us how Margaret Ogilvy was wont 
 to borrow his school boy Latin phrases and surprise those who 
 complimented her daughter. " Would it not be more to the point 
 to say, '0 mater, pulchra filia pulchriorf" which the father 
 in the play offers as a rejoinder to the moon to defend her 
 youthfulness, translating it into, " O moon, who art more beau- 
 tiful than any twopenny ha' penny daughter." 
 
 One might well linger over this brightly tender scene. Its 
 artistic interest is great, its psychological depth no less. It 
 touches the hearty, healthy wish and energy, alive in the deepest 
 life of the artist, which outwardly and practically had gone so 
 far astray. It reveals the eager, half timid, wholly venturesome 
 straining of the child to enlarge her love and yearnings out 
 into womanhood. Imperiously her power exercises itself upon 
 the father, who has no choice but to yield to her will. Yet she 
 has been molded, unwittingly, unconsciously guided and formed 
 by him. Even the shape of her ears are his handiwork, and 
 significant again of the keen association between the child's 
 night phantasies and loving parental care is the recall of her 
 earliest recollection, the vision of the star, which also she learns 
 her father had planned for her first consciously retained mem- 
 ory. Then she steps out cautiously into the woman's sphere
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 14! 
 
 and tests her own valuation of a son setting it over against her 
 father's exclusive estimate of a daughter. " Dearth : ' Daughters 
 are the thing. . . . Sons are not worth having, Margaret. 
 Signed. W. Dearth,' " and Margaret responds : " 'But if you 
 were a mother, dad. . . . Sons are not so bad. Signed. 
 M. Dearth.' " Then, as they proceed : " Margaret : ' Daddy, now 
 you are thinking about about my being in love some day/ He 
 nods. ' I won't, you know ; no, never ! Oh, I've quite decided. 
 So don't be afraid/ At back of him whispers, ' Will you 
 hate him at first, Daddy ? ' ' It is the privilege of the dream 
 to be at once so candid and so contradictory as Dearth when 
 he answers to the repeated question, " ' Would you hate him at 
 first ? ' ' I hope not. I should want to strangle him, but I should 
 not hate him.' " 
 
 A cloud, an intimation from the real world where this happi- 
 ness of the wood has not come to pass, darkens the brightness 
 of the moonlit wood. Mrs. Dearth appears, the mother who 
 had failed to bear this child and make this happiness a reality. 
 Her dreams have revealed the disastrous wishes which lay 
 within her. She is ragged, hungry, wretched. Her ambition 
 has been gratified ; she bears the name of the Hon. Mrs. Finch- 
 Fallowes but she is forsaken. She has proved the truth of 
 her husband's warning words in the waking world at which 
 she scoffed, and she has found that the Hon. Mr. Finch-Fallowes 
 is a " rotter/' Starving and hunting for bits which the tourists 
 may have left between the roots of the trees, she is glad to 
 accept the aid which the artist and his daughter give her from 
 their scanty means. The thought of her preys upon the happi- 
 ness of the artist's mind, even as the wood darkens after she 
 conies and goes, and he sets off in the direction of a light he 
 sees in the distance to procure her food. He sings as he goes 
 expecting to return in a few moments to the dear little daughter, 
 but she is only a dream, and with her frightened cry darkness 
 completely swallows up the wood of the dream : " Daddy, dad- 
 dy, daddy, daddy, daddy. Come back, come back, daddy! I 
 don't want to be a might have been ! " 
 
 One needs to have learned to take dreams somewhat seriously 
 to appreciate fully the waking up from the night in the wood.
 
 . A9 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 142 
 
 Barrie has skillfully pictured the perplexing transition when 
 the world of the unconscious only slowly yields to the sharp 
 clear light of definite, practical reality. He knows, at least 
 intuitively, of the puzzled groping between the two realms of 
 mental thought, when the effort is made to bring together the 
 conscious and distinct and the unconscious world which lies not 
 only just beneath but also reaches mysteriously into profound 
 and illusive depths. This is the patient task of those to whom 
 dreams are of definite service for the reordering of life, and to 
 such again Barrie's message is full of sympathetic suggestion. 
 
 A dramatist less artistically true might have made much 
 greater profit out of their dreams for all the characters who 
 had gone into the wood. The play would have pointed its 
 moral, the dream done its ideal work and all lived happily ever 
 afterward. The truth of the play as it is lies, however, in its 
 adherence to reality with all its startling revelations and its 
 phantasy. The best in the real world comes only by a slow 
 and imperfectly working change. Life does not stand still for 
 a moment and the self revealing dream must always work to 
 some slight extent at least its " little leaven." So Barrie per- 
 mits it to do, at least in all but the sordid pair, Lady Caroline 
 and Matey, the butler. Yet even in them who can say there 
 is not a significant flash of humbling self knowledge? Lady 
 Caroline puzzles over to herself : " And I seemed to like it," 
 though she in self defense against too great understanding and 
 self acknowledgment quickly assumes her attitude of scornful 
 haughtiness. Matey drops less conceitedly back to the familiar 
 feel of the coffee tray, though his fingers slip instinctively to 
 the pocket where he habitually drops his tips. 
 
 The philanderers are the first to come out of the wood and 
 stumble back into waking. They find themselves in the dark 
 in the room that is strange to their recent experience. Purdie's 
 exaggerated self interest and pity make him fear he has 
 fallen down a cellar hole in the dark. As they flash on the 
 light they discover no one else present except Lob still asleep 
 by his chimney side. At least he appears to be oblivious to 
 their existence, so soundly asleep that all their efforts to be 
 polite to this apparent owner of the house they have happened
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 143 
 
 upon fail to obtain any response. Only when they are once 
 more absorbed in their own affairs does he give elfish signs of 
 his alert watchfulness over the success of the dream experiment. 
 As the arrivals come drifting in the " trickster " slumbers on, 
 profoundly indifferent. 
 
 Purdie's perplexities follow him into the waking as they fol- 
 lowed him away into the dream. This time he has won Mabel, 
 so much the dream accomplished for him, and they believe they 
 have taken refuge in this strange house on a deliciously clandes- 
 tine expedition, but the embodiment of the third factor in their 
 uncertainty presents herself at once, Joanna, the neglected and 
 spitefully jealous wife of the dream. Their waking, all three 
 together, is as confused and perplexed as any strange inter- 
 mingling of the wishes of the unconscious with the groping 
 efforts of consciousness to establish again the ordinary relations 
 with reality. For here at first as so often the wishes from 
 neither side have a decisive influence. There is on the part of 
 Purdie at least that weakness of character which means the 
 honest yielding to neither one course of action nor the other, 
 through the selfishness and blinding of his own self admiration. 
 Joanna falls a little more decidedly out of the race as soon as 
 she is wide awake and Mabel assumes again her bright quick 
 attitude as the real mistress of the situation. She is more that 
 now than formerly for the biting stings of jealousy are softened 
 through the humor which comes with an appreciation of the 
 real state of the case, that is, of her husband's proclivities, and 
 perhaps her own readiness to walk just where Joanna did be- 
 fore. She at least has attained a somewhat larger view. 
 
 All are enough enlightened to admit a better knowledge of 
 their true tendencies and the hope that they may be a bit better 
 for their experience. They are also enough ashamed to hide 
 from Mrs. Coade the character of their experiences as she 
 comes in, candle in hand and rather vexed at the irregularities 
 of the night which have disturbed her complacent rest. Her 
 equanimity is hardly satisfactorily restored when her husband 
 returns still in a merry, playful mood and unable yet to remem- 
 ber his staid married state. Only he has enough desire for her,
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 144 
 
 this pretty, comfortable woman, to begin making love to her 
 again, stranger to him that she is, until he is fully awake and 
 appreciative of her faithfulness. Then he has to confess the 
 failure of his dreams, from which he had hoped so much in 
 proving that there slumbered within himself a latent energy and 
 strength. And all he could boast of was a night of idle but 
 happy amusement. 
 
 When all these have found themselves once more in the or- 
 dinary waking world, partly ashamed, wholly glad to be on 
 ground more openly familiar, the thoughts of all turn pityingly 
 to the other two who have not yet returned. Their awaking, 
 they feel, will be one of sorrow. All recognize not alone the 
 waste in the lives of Mr. Dearth and Mrs. Dearth but the 
 stronger and better possibilities which these lives also contained. 
 And then Mrs. Dearth appears through the curtained entrance 
 behind which lay the magic wood. The bitterness to which the 
 fulfilment of her dream desires have brought her is exaggerated 
 as she brings the uncouth manners of the ragged starving woman 
 into the lighted room, bright again with reality. The rags are 
 no longer in her dress, which like that of the others has been 
 transformed on leaving the wood to that of the real world. So 
 she wears again the blue steel trimmed robe of domination. But 
 it ill fits with the cowering servility of her manner as she sees 
 and devours the food upon the table, ravenous still with the 
 vividly dreamed hunger of neglect, symbolic perhaps the dram- 
 atist has meant of the empty wife and mother's heart. While 
 she eats and tells her story with the depravity of untruth in 
 the form of the perverted truth, how she gave away her food to 
 the hungry artist and his pretty child in the wood, the happy 
 artist comes in. All present are now truly awakened to pity 
 and awed to silence. They face, as they realize, a heart rending 
 tragedy or no, not one of them conceives of hope, only doubt- 
 less the sprite in the chimney corner who apparently slumbers 
 on. Even he has come to the crucial point of the test, though 
 he yet gives no sign. Unless perhaps there is a more earnest 
 quietness in his form instead of the merry contortions which 
 had evinced his unobserved interest while the others were awak- 
 ening.
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 145 
 
 " Yet thou canst more than mock : sometimes my tears 
 At midnight break through bounden lids a sign 
 Thou hast a heart. " 
 
 Dearth's first shock of the reality, which the dream had so 
 joyously and hopefully replaced, comes in the recognition that 
 he has exchanged the sensible useful brown tweeds of the wood, 
 the clothes in which he could healthily work and play, for the 
 seedy, soiled and spattered clothes of the life into which he 
 had not fitted, which bore the marks of his dissipation and de- 
 cline. He comes back to the past he had so briefly left with 
 a quick realization and a poignancy of regret and sorrow. Even 
 here, however, is the same redeeming note which had faintly 
 sounded before and which had marked his pity and kindness 
 to the forlorn woman in the wood. His first thought is one 
 of pity for her who must suffer through him. The old redemp- 
 tion motive of love saving through pity is at work. It helps 
 to waken the wife from her wretched dream, but more it rouses 
 her after the revelation of her dream to love and pity also for 
 him. Their hearts are melted together with grief, but are 
 welded also in a new hope. They can no longer endure the 
 shallow atmosphere in which they had moved with the others. 
 Mrs. Dearth hastily leaves the room and her husband is not 
 long in following her, for her love at last finding itself had 
 surrendered its pride and indifference before him. 
 
 The rest are now quite fully awake and the tenseness of the 
 situation is relieved by the outbreak of Purdie into a bit of the 
 very real world of trivialities and commonplaces, and the whiff 
 of the morning of another day of life. For just then Matey 
 solemnly opens the door of the breakfast room and announces 
 breakfast, and to Mrs. Coade, " I have given your eggs six 
 minutes, ma'am," for she always, as might be expected, takes 
 them hard boiled. Purdie's resolution to profit by his experiences 
 has already failed to uphold him with absolute safety, as he feared 
 it would, for on the way to breakfast he already stops to whis- 
 per, very loudly, in Lady Caroline's ear of the interesting lone- 
 liness of his soul. But Mabel's understanding being quickened, 
 she is both patient and kindly admonitory to this weak child
 
 J4 5 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 she has married, and she reminds him of his waiting breakfast, 
 while he promptly recovers and obeys. Just so much of a glim- 
 mer of regeneration had the dream wrought for him. At least 
 he knows where to recognize and correct what he can of his 
 life at the source of the difficulty. For he has learned to say 
 with Shakespeare: 
 
 The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, 
 But in ourselves, that we are underlings. 
 
 This is the text of the play which Barrie has so delicately yet 
 so wisely written. Joanna at least can " hold on to breakfast " 
 and leads the way into the breakfast room. Lady Caroline ap- 
 pears unregenerate, but in truth the added superciliousness with 
 which she passes her dreamed of husband on the way, as she 
 follows the rest, shows that something is touched within, even 
 if so far it has done no more than put her upon the defensive. 
 
 This often lies in added vexation or exaggeration of already 
 over-compensating qualities for dimly recognized weakness. Just 
 so with Matey whose chagrin at his revealed baseness, which lies 
 deeper than he had suspected, reacts with a spitefulness and 
 vexation toward the author of these revelations, whom he be- 
 lieves he has at last in his power. He is ready to wreak a petty 
 revenge upon him, as human realization of its own weakness 
 is prone in this way also to deceive itself by such an exhibition 
 of futile power. The rest having left the room, he turns wrath- 
 ful ly toward Lob's corner and seizes the great chair in which 
 the little man is almost hidden. " I've got you now where you 
 can't escape me." He shakes the chair violently in gleeful an- 
 ticipation of hustling the trickster off to bed or under lock and 
 key or wherever he thought Lob could be confined. But no, 
 Matey, you little understand Lob or Life. The chair is empty and 
 no trace of his victim is to be seen. Puzzled and balked Matey 
 soberly lumbers across the room to turn off the lights and once 
 more draw the curtains to let in the morning sunshine. The 
 garden is not altered since yesterday ; the mystic wood has with- 
 drawn as it came and the flowers bloom brightly and philomel 
 sings merrily, as if no interruption of the course of things had
 
 THE HEALING FUNCTION OF THE DREAM 147 
 
 occurred. And there in the sunshine before his flowers, head 
 tilted toward the morning sky and listening to the bird's sweet 
 song, stands Lob unaltered also by all that has transpired about 
 him. 
 
 He is not, however, unmindful, no more than through those 
 hours of seeming slumber. Lob has still his watchful work to 
 perform and the blessing of his inspiration to give to those who 
 embark on the active stream of things. He has not to wait 
 long before there is sign of such response to his tenderly and 
 anxiously devised experiment of the night, over which he is 
 still patiently watching. He catches a glimpse of Mr. Dearth 
 and Mrs. Dearth, for whom particularly he had schemed and 
 hoped and he joyously hides himself while they pass by. Their 
 transformation has been an actual one. It has lasted over into 
 the test of the bright day. All traces of the dissipation, waste 
 and failure manifest in either of them the night before are 
 gone, whether as the artist had worn them in his wretched out- 
 ward appearance in the drawing room, or as Mrs. Dearth had 
 revealed them hidden in the sordid wishes of her inner nature. 
 That which was good and of real worth has taken possession 
 of them both. They are clothed for work and for healthy happi- 
 ness in the open air. They stop, to draw in deep breaths of 
 the scented air, to rejoice in the flowers, birds and sunshine, and 
 then fare forth happily to the merrily hummed tune with which 
 the happy artist had pervaded the wood in his dream. There 
 is no need for them to " hold onto " the trivial things with which 
 the others have once more secured their place in the real waking 
 world. They know greater more lasting realities. 
 
 No sooner have they passed on than Lob springs again to 
 view before his flowers. His face is soft with loving concern 
 and a satisfaction such as only can be found in the realization 
 that the way of truth has been opened, that one has assisted 
 in the finding of the lost self and its setting forth on the path 
 of sincere endeavor. Lob knows that the most real healing has 
 come to them, not through other circumstances, but through the 
 taking of another turning, finding their lost powers and utilizing 
 these and just these in other directions.
 
 148 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 This is the essence and art of mental healing, the message 
 which every true artist is bound to preach. The others perhaps 
 they have learned a little of the lesson and made or will make 
 some few efforts in this direction. Lob's tenderness has not 
 forgotten them. The wave of the hand with which he dis- 
 misses them is a lingering one, not wholly a dismissal, not without 
 affection and hope there too ; but he returns again to the receding 
 pair where hope can pour itself in a last loving farewell of 
 assured expectation. Then his happiness bubbles over once 
 more into playfulness. He tucks himself into his chair with the 
 vase of petted flowers in his hand. 
 
 The tender, wise physician may rest. His patients are grop- 
 ing toward their cure, the elixir of self knowledge working in 
 the veins of their minds, dull and obscured and clouded by selfish 
 egotism, convention, indolence as these may be. Two of them 
 have shaken themselves free of these and are already well on 
 the road toward perfect health. 
 
 "Yet thou canst more than mock: sometimes my tears 
 
 At midnight break through bounden lids a sign 
 
 Thou hast a heart : and oft thy little leaven 
 
 Of dream-taught wisdom works me bettered years. 
 
 In one night witch, saint, trickster, fool divine, 
 
 I think thou'rt Jester at the Court of Heaven ! "
 
 CHAPTER X 
 " THE JEST " : THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE x 
 
 Each drama has a particular value in its content and struc- 
 ture as a whole. The author conceives a certain situation or 
 continuity of events which is utilized to develop the psycho- 
 logical thought for which the drama internally stands. In so 
 doing he makes, as it were, a cross section of human life as 
 he throws a certain grouping of factors into high relief. " The 
 Jest," coming as it does out of the fifteenth century, represents 
 a section through the development of human civilization at a 
 period remote enough from the present to reveal a brusqueness 
 of manner, a frank coarseness of language, as well as an open- 
 ness of impulsive action according to the freedom of individual 
 desire, whether in brutal violence or in more refined spiritual 
 aims, which culture does not so directly permit today. It shows, 
 therefore, another glimpse into the unconscious, a portion of 
 the development of the race which has been more or less cov- 
 ered over by the intervening five centuries of cultural repression. 
 
 There is, however, a still more profound psychological interest 
 in such a production. The drama represents a grouping of the 
 factors at work setting the conflicts at all times in human lives, 
 the warring elements working for good or for evil, the activity 
 of hate opposed to that of love. In this story of the fifteenth 
 century the destructiveness of hate predominates, but this makes 
 " The Jest " no less a drama of truth and of mental and moral 
 stimulus than it might otherwise be. Health lies, as has been 
 seen, in facing life as it exists, and that more deeply than is seen 
 in a mere presentation of external results and wielding these 
 perhaps dramatically according to desirable ideals. Mental 
 strength is not engendered by mere idealizing but by the coura- 
 
 1 Printed in the New York Medical Journal, Oct. 4, 1919. The Jest. 
 Translated from Sem Benelli: La Cena della Beffe. 
 
 149
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 J 5 
 
 geous facing first of the working of internal forces, watching 
 them even as they lose in the conflict through the strength of 
 the primeval emotions. These latter blind individuals to the 
 choice of a reasonable adjustment, which considers social re- 
 lations and mutual adaptations. They drive so violently along 
 the path of sheer feeling and desire that even reason is swept 
 to their service and changed to the cunning which aids in the 
 precipitation of disastrous ends. 
 
 Love has as many definitions as the phases in which it mani- 
 fests itself in the kaleidoscope of human desires, longing, and 
 pleasure. Yet it may be comprehended also in a definition 
 whose simple dynamic force contains all the variety with which 
 it might otherwise be defined. Thus practically and forcefully 
 considered love is union in feeling and action for constructive- 
 ness or creativeness. If this is so then its reverse side, hate, 
 is disunion, the same force in all its might, clashing element 
 against element, hindering and checking all productivity and 
 driving to destruction. The bitter jest of life this, a joke that 
 lies not only in the keen irony of the plot by which the artist 
 in the play overcomes the fleshly monster of cruelty and torment 
 and reaches in the end his own spiritual destruction as well. 
 It is the cruel jest also of human psychology that good and 
 evil lie so close, that the same ppwer, its course altered over 
 such a narrow threshold, flows mightily and effectively to all 
 creation, upbuilding on the one hand, rushing to pain and de- 
 struction and downfall on the other. 
 
 All this is epitomized in the woman of the play. She is the 
 center and inspiration of either course. Trite is the utterance 
 of this fact and yet it will always be repeated, whether in the 
 offensive doting brutality of a Neri, in the gentler love making 
 of the sensitive Giannetto, or in the more eloquent pathos of 
 the humble but devoted Lisabetta who visits Neri in prison and 
 whose truth flies straight to the good in Neri and knows none 
 of the evil. It must always be so for woman must represent 
 in herself the creative source and stimulating goal for creative 
 desire. Biologically this is undeniable and spiritually it is even 
 more broadly and immeasurably true. And this truth is figured
 
 "THE JEST:" THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 151 
 
 in all nature and all thought. Literally and figuratively, there- 
 fore, love is summed up in woman and the conflict surges about 
 her. 
 
 Ginevra, the fishmonger's daughter, has apparently all the 
 natural charm which makes a rich feminine appeal. Giannetto, 
 the spiritual youth, has dreamed his dreams of beauty and in- 
 spiration, " We loved each other. She was good and beautiful. 
 I painted her as the Madonna in my ' Annunciation.' We were 
 to marry." And Ginevra herself, though seduced through 
 money and power to the lower levels of her nature, where she 
 can stoop to mock those sacred hours, reveals still in her mock- 
 ery regret for the holier influence she exercised in those days. 
 " Do you remember a poor child kneeling in a cloister garden ? 
 She wears a long blue robe and holds a lily stalk in her two 
 hands. She does not move. She kneels and dreams and listens 
 and the hours go by. . . ." But Giannetto says of the power 
 of those days, in contrast to the effect of the hatred which has 
 long been nurtured by his enemies and then deepened fearfully 
 when they stole her from him and brought her to the present 
 level : " Compare the ' Entombment ' I am working at with my 
 ' Last Judgment ' done two years ago. Why even a child could 
 note the falling-off. My heart is not the only thing that died 
 beneath their torments. My soul died, too." 
 
 It is not, alas, merely passive loss of power that has come 
 to the artist through the cruelty of these enemies, encouraged 
 and applauded by the narrow self absorbed exercise of suprem- 
 acy on the part of the woman. Love or its opposite is the 
 representation of energic force, which does not remain quiescent. 
 The artist is driven also along the path of destruction. " But 
 oh ! sir ! " he says to his aged friend, " I have one thing left 
 my wits! tempered like the blade of a fine sword, turned by 
 my suffering into gleaming steel! And these wits of mine set 
 me now to lure my enemies with flowers and feasting and with 
 silver flutes to their eternal ruin. ... I was so good until 
 these two brothers changed me to a devil." 
 
 Giannetto has been the victim of brute force, malicious, over- 
 mastering in its lustful sadistic fleshliness, since his boyhood.
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 At twelve years of age he was compelled to submit to the vile 
 torments of his enemies as they imposed upon his physical 
 weakness the one form of power which they were capable 
 of comprehending. Their treatment exaggerated this weakness 
 of his to a timid cowardice, overwhelming the greater spiritual 
 strength and nobility which they could only taunt. The savage 
 and childish baseness of superiority based upon physical strength 
 and lust alone is cleverly suggested in the petty forms of torment 
 to which they submitted the youth, even if allowance is made 
 for the ruder humor of the age which the drama represents. 
 With the uncultured barbarity of childhood they " spat on me 
 and made me catch twelve big blue flies and eat them one by 
 one. . . . And from that day to this we never met but 
 they fell upon me with their fangs and claws." 
 
 They were two huge brothers, hired soldiers from Pisa, Neri 
 and Gabriello Chiaramentesi. At last they add to their coarser 
 sports this crushing evil. They seize Ginevra in her home just 
 before the banns are to be published for her marriage to Gian- 
 netto, buy her from her father for fifty ducats, and Neri, claim- 
 ing her, seduces her soul as well as her body. Then, at the 
 feast with which the play opens, he returns her to Giannetto's 
 sight only to mock and lacerate him with the revelation of the 
 shallowness and corruption of her nature. 
 
 At this banquet the " jest " begins its work. Giannetto's 
 sharpened wits have prepared a final and deep revenge after 
 a night of insult more deliberate, more elaborate, than any 
 cruelty yet perpetrated, aided also by the connivance of the 
 faithless Ginevra. She had falsely acquiesced in a final leave 
 taking tryst, which gave occasion for the seizure of the artist. 
 He was apprehended by the powerful buffoons, stripped, tat- 
 tooed with their dagger points, with which derisive devices were 
 pricked upon his skin, and finally thrown fainting into the black 
 river water. Rescued from this by some fishermen he has ar- 
 ranged, with the aid of the great Lorenzo, a feast to which 
 his enemies are invited. The two brothers appear in all the 
 glory of their brute strength, filled with scorn of Lorenzo the 
 Magnificent and all his associates and with their contempt of
 
 "THE JEST:" THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 153 
 
 the artist in no wise abated. They further inflame his desire 
 for revenge by bringing with them the tempting though false 
 and mocking Ginevra to goad the artist's pain. The fact that 
 his old suffering for her is roused to a keenness and sensitive- 
 ness which they are incapable of knowing and which necessitates 
 a strong control and suppression on the part of Giannetto, serves 
 to feed the flame of vengeance more hotly and to give to it a 
 subtlety and an abandon which at first even his own sharpened 
 wits had scarcely conceived. 
 
 There is but little in this drama of the pure glow of the force 
 of love. Here and there are remnants of it, some of the steady 
 redeeming power which has not yet been transformed to the 
 devouring flame of hate. Giannetto still loves Ginevra. Her 
 shallowness and treachery have not destroyed the sincere and 
 holy respect with which his early desire had gone out to her. 
 Yet lurid passion and revenge soon darken the love that remains. 
 He loves the dwarf, his faithful servant and the physical coun- 
 terpart of his own timidity and inner consciousness of weak- 
 ness. But the dwarf becomes only his reliance to support and 
 aid him in his design for revenge. Neri in his boisterous way 
 loves his brother Gabriello and there is a rough attempt at fair- 
 ness between them in regard to the girl, but the hatred of Gian- 
 netto stirs up the unconscious slumbering jealousy and at the 
 last tricks Neri into destroying his brother, as it first tricks 
 Gabriello into playing the traitor to his brother's possession of 
 the girl. 
 
 The devilish hate engendered in this once gentle artist leads 
 him to plot a jest which shall be one indeed. " And these wits 
 of mine set me to lure my enemies with flowers and feasting 
 and with silver flutes to their eternal ruin." Through soft 
 speech, a humble mien, compliance with their noisy insults, he 
 plies Neri with wine of Cypress "that is liquid fire." The 
 brother has already departed, urged away from the city by the 
 conflict between desire for the girl and loyalty to Neri, which 
 the artist has taken care to rouse into his consciousness. Firing 
 Neri then to vindication of his boasted prowess and courage, 
 the artist goads him forth in his drunken condition to a more
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 ' J^ 
 
 than foolhardy attack upon the adherents of Lorenzo the Mag- 
 nificent. It is an adventure that no one but a madman would 
 undertake and the toils are laid that this strong soldier, tem- 
 porarily maddened by wine, should be apprehended and treated 
 as a veritable dement, all protests and assertions of his sanity 
 being of no avail. As they increase in violence, according to 
 the nature of the man and his habit of violent speech, they 
 mount up in the sum of appearances which are against him. 
 This is the jest. Thus is he in the power of the feeble artist. 
 
 The artist meanwhile has secured the key of the house where 
 Neri has earlier sent Ginevra to await his coming and his 
 pleasure. There is a poisoned sweetness to Giannetto's revenge 
 without which his plans would be incomplete and which he loses 
 no opportunity to bring before his enemy's notice as the latter 
 stands bound in the dungeon where they have confined him. It 
 is Giannetto who uses the key and gains access to the woman, 
 but even here revenge must reach its utmost and she must yield 
 of her own will to the superiority of her former lover. So the 
 vengeful plot is slowly protracted and Giannetto is ready the 
 next day to confront Neri writhing and foaming with helpless 
 rage, lashed to the underground pillar. In a still deeper dun- 
 geon the latter is also submitted to all the horrors of a medieval 
 test as to his possession by the demons of madness. Most gall- 
 ing, however, is the bland mockery of Giannetto as he cleverly 
 disguises from all around, through an assumed pity, his responsi- 
 bility for the sufferings of Neri and his actual instigation of 
 them all. All this is too painfully known to Neri himself, who 
 must be goaded also by the consciousness of the mockery of 
 Giannetto's bearing, the helpless realization that he and his 
 enemy know between them the trickery and fraud of the whole 
 proceeding, which so excites the pity of the onlookers. Thus 
 deeply bites the jest as it proceeds. 
 
 Then comes the sudden news that the brother Gabriello has 
 returned from Pisa, and a fearful thought takes shape in Gian- 
 netto's breast. His dwarf first utters it that the love of women 
 "goads ... the brother to commit the crime of Cain." But 
 a better moment, albeit mixed with fear, first comes over Gian-
 
 "THE JEST:" THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 155 
 
 netto. He is at the point of releasing Neri. Once for all he 
 offers him absolute freedom, to cease his joke if Neri will give 
 his word never again to torment and torture the poor young 
 artist. He pleads with Neri, " There ! I have said it, Neri. I 
 have stripped my soul. You see me as I really am in all 
 my weakness and my vanity. Your joke had lasted for so 
 many years and I had suffered so, was it strange that when 
 the moment came I struck at you? If I went too far, remember 
 that I am not used to triumph. But now please God! the 
 dreadful game is ended. Give me your word and I shall set 
 you free. . . . Speak, lest both of us be lost." 1 
 
 Neri however is obdurate. The suggestion of fear and of 
 yielding in his enemy, who had been so long his helpless prey, 
 only serves to rouse afresh the contemptuous triumph with 
 which Neri had always hitherto approached the artist. Half 
 in mockery, half in the role of the doting type of madman, 
 which by this time he has assumed, Neri renews his derisive 
 insults. Giannetto's terror grows not of the loathsome brute 
 before him, but of the hideous plot forming in his own breast, 
 the consummation of hate which is bound to bring destruction 
 upon destruction. " Oh, Neri, keep me from this mortal sin ! 
 I am so young! I want so to be good all good and clean, the 
 way I used to be! Oh, I would rather never pray again than 
 ask forgiveness for such wickedness! Now help me, Neri no, 
 you must you shall " 
 
 Neri, mockingly deaf to the last to Giannetto's entreaties, goes 
 forth freed, unheeding the artist's dark threat as to the ven- 
 geance which will be awaiting the soldier when he again crosses 
 his own threshold. Giannetto, alone with his dwarf, faces now 
 the hot breath of deepest hate ; " Oh, Fazio, now how my plans, 
 my pretty plans, how they wriggle and squirm to get away, 
 to swish along the floor, to coil themselves around your hot, 
 brown throat, my enemy. Oh, Fazio, I stand at the edge of 
 a pit . . . My horror of it grows and I love life the more. 
 Fazio, the thread I have spun so fine, I must now tie into a knot 
 of death! . . . Fazio, to-night, to-night, I must damn my own 
 soul to hell! . . . Pray for me, Fazio, for I shall never pray 
 again."
 
 156 
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 As in a happier drama of life all the determining forces work 
 toward the full fruition of some great purpose, so here do the 
 many currents of hatred which have been roused and inflamed 
 meet to a blasting destruction which includes all of life. Just 
 as body, mind and the sum of individualism which we call soul 
 are all united* in the love which informs them and inspires them 
 to the fulness of creative life, so here body, mind and soul 
 burn with the flame which can only blight and disintegrate 
 in utter ruin. In the woman the sacredness of love has been 
 absorbed into the gross selfishness and the seeking of advantages 
 which feed merely her own gratification and vanity. There is 
 no further goal in her thoughts and desires. The tenderness 
 and inspiration which the " painter of madonnas " had succeeded 
 in partially awakening were quickly spoiled by the allurements 
 that lay in the trinkets which money could buy, the passing 
 domination exercised over the brute force that kept her, the 
 fleeting conquest won over any chance lover and the brief pleas- 
 ure seized with him. 
 
 The heartless Ginevra, whose love Giannetto had easily won 
 back from its allegiance to Neri, is even then responding to a 
 love message sent her through her tire woman and is awaiting 
 the song of the new lover from the garden when Neri once more 
 appears in her room. He has precipitated the final execution 
 of Giannetto's plan, for he has hastened to Ginevra's house to 
 intercept the artist when he shall return to Ginevra. It is then 
 that Neri, in his own ferocious way, puts the woman to the 
 test and proves the utter lack of true love within her, the com- 
 plete prostitution to her own advantage and welfare of all that 
 makes her woman's nature. There is with her no thought of 
 the sacrifice or the service of love. The ordeal to be sure is 
 a severe one, but no glimmer of response of a love that is true 
 is manifested toward any one of the men. 
 
 Neri makes known his scheme of revenge. Ginevra as usual 
 must hang the small alabaster lamp in the window to announce 
 to the approaching lover that all is well and then upon his en- 
 trance into the darkened room Neri will meet him with death ; 
 either that or Ginevra herself must forfeit her life. Ginevra
 
 "THE JEST: " THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 157 
 
 can only begin by throwing all blame on the absent lover, her 
 one thought to clear and save herself. " Neri : ' Well, do you 
 throw him overboard ? ' Ginevra : ' Yes ! Kill him if you must ! 
 But let me live ' Neri, contemptuously : ' You love him, then, 
 as much as you loved me. What a rag you are ! ' ' 
 
 For just such an act of attempted vengeance and ultimate 
 cruelty on the part of Neri was Giannetto prepared. His own 
 plan had been quickly laid with the knowledge that the brother 
 had returned from Pisa as his last plea to Neri failed. As soon 
 as Neri was released Giannetto had hastened to Gabriello and 
 arranged with him that the latter should visit Ginevra, disguised 
 in Giannetto's own white cloak. This is the figure, therefore, 
 that steals into Ginevra's bedroom under the watchful eye of 
 Neri, concealed there in the darkness. He has first compelled 
 the trembling woman to enter, that the deed performed in her 
 presence shall lose none of its horror. 
 
 There is no delay in the hideous succession of events which 
 mark the final cataclysm of destruction. Hate rushes unchecked 
 to its several ends. The brief struggle in the bedroom is suc- 
 ceeded by the rushing out of Ginevra, wild, disheveled, the em- 
 bodiment of the ultimate bitterness and death of a love that 
 has lost its nature in self and the nothingness to which such 
 utter prostitution must lead. Neri stands at the threshold for a 
 moment triumphant in his bloody deed, gloating over it in a 
 savage burst of hate, only to be confronted by the slender figure 
 of the artist, pale, with a quiet triumph which contrasts with 
 that of the baser brute before him and Neri learns the horrid 
 truth. He has slain his brother, the one being toward whom 
 he was capable of any real love. Because this is so, he has 
 slain his better self, the self that saved him from complete ab- 
 sorption in hate and violence. It is not only this better nature, 
 it is also in fact the brother he has slain, the warm, brave, living 
 body, not the materialistic nature alone, but the body as instru- 
 ment of true love and its force and power for life. Nothing 
 is left for Neri, the man whose life was summed up in the 
 forceful use or abuse of that body. He plunges now actually 
 into the abyss of madness, where before he had been merely
 
 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 the plaything of the artist and his jest. All reason is gone. 
 There is nothing more for him but the blindest yielding to 
 every foolish and ungoverned whim, except as he shall fall into 
 the care or the maltreatment, the humanity or the inhumanity 
 of the control of others, in whose hands he is now forever 
 powerless. 
 
 This is more than even Giannetto's wildest dreams of revenge 
 had planned. " Now God forgive me! He is mad! Stark mad ! " 
 And the artist falls on his knees and tries to pray for his enemy. 
 But what prayer is of avail when all is dead? Self, with the 
 power of love in its hands, had sought only its own. It had 
 turned away from the pathway in which love lives and infuses all 
 that it finds there with power. Self turned back upon itself and 
 hate arose. All the force of self but went to feed hate. Power 
 remained on every hand but it burned destructively and its end 
 was death. Body, mind, and soul were destroyed. 
 
 " The Jest " owes its importance and its value upon the stage 
 in part to its skilful representation of the life of an earlier time, 
 a period when the newly awakening intellectual life of the world 
 flourished in an era of political power and of beauty and pleas- 
 ure. Its language is that of an earlier century as its setting. 
 Its lesson of dramatized truth is, however, changeless. It lies 
 in the same play of human passions which exist in us today 
 and which sweep on with the same inevitableness to destruction 
 if turned into the pathways of hate. This may not be so easily 
 recognized in the present in the ordinary walks of life for five 
 centuries have brought much restraint and much external emol- 
 ument of the outward expression of such passions. As language 
 has become more softly veiled, so also has a certain gentleness 
 of manner and of self control come to pass in outward behavior. 
 Yet the passions have not changed. And the fact that they 
 lie more deeply beneath the covering of a progressive culture, 
 though this serves to hold them to a certain extent in whole- 
 some restraint, is also accountable for the lamentable degree in 
 which society has lost sight of the force for which they stand. 
 
 Energy is one and the same. There is no difference in the 
 inner essence of a brutal, blustering Neri or of the gentle artist.
 
 " THE JEST: " THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 159 
 
 whose soul burns itself into a holy religious zeal in his painting, 
 and turns to the deepest poison of hate in the end, nor yet 
 of the shallow and faithless Ginevra, whose power of love, 
 devoted only to her selfish gratification, becomes the source of 
 strife and hurt. All are containers of the energy which moves 
 on to one goal or the other, to love and more life or to hatred 
 and death. Individual personality and circumstances have de- 
 termined for them different forms of expression or it may be 
 have blocked the expression of such life force. As each per- 
 sonality has thus continued its way or altered it for better or 
 for worse, success or disaster has been the result. And this 
 is the sum and substance of human life today as well as then. 
 No one is a blind and unwilling victim of an inherited person- 
 ality nor of circumstances but, as with these dramatic characters, 
 choice is always within each personality to be exercised every 
 moment, consciously or unconsciously, for the use of the dynamic 
 force of life. Therefore attention cannot be too often fixed upon 
 these fundamental facts of power which makes up the moving 
 passions of life for good or for ill. The world grows sick from 
 lack of clear knowledge of them and the possibilities in their 
 outpouring to create and construct or the inevitable results when 
 they rush unchecked to destroy. 
 
 It is the same today as in the fifteenth century. Beneath the 
 restraints which serve, now as aids to conduct, now as hin- 
 drances, the same forces still play, divisions of the one great force, 
 which is the movement of life. In some it moves with the dom- 
 ination of overmastering cruelty, although of a more modern 
 and refined type than in the mercenary soldiers, Neri and Gab- 
 riello. In another it burns with the steady glow of success and 
 achievement until it ic diverted by disappointment, injustice, or 
 cruelty into a no less forceful activity, though now an unpro- 
 ductive one, as with the frail artist Giannetto. With another 
 it is blocked by stupidity, by adverse circumstances which have 
 not been overcome, perhaps simply by never having found its 
 way to a satisfactory productiveness in spite of waiting avenues 
 of interest, to which the race is sorely blind. Or it is choked 
 by selfishness as that of Ginevra. Even the many lives which
 
 J^Q PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 seem undisturbed by such expression of force harbor it no less, 
 too often unaware of its existence themselves and still more 
 unaware of its possibility. 
 
 Yet such power is never really still. Its ways of exercise may 
 be surreptitious, roundabout, disguised, often distorted far from 
 their original source in the deep desires and passions of human 
 lives. The unacknowledged, or even unrecognized activity may 
 be manifest in symptoms of unhappiness or of actual neurotic 
 suffering. The power may be expressed by restlessness and dis- 
 satisfaction. At the same time it may creep forth in a more 
 active but still unsatisfactory form. Love seldom or never has 
 its perfect work. The poisons of hate, flowing in many di- 
 rections, are ever at hand. They are not necessarily directed to 
 those to whom one might, even if only in the depths of the un- 
 conscious, call one's enemies. As with the artist they can never 
 be active without involving also the self. 
 
 The lesson of this drama written in heavy lines cannot be 
 overlooked in its relation to this diversion of the force of life 
 in these universally prevalent ways. Yet its theme is also more 
 clearly definite. It moves in the more fundamental pathways 
 in which man and woman find themselves, in which they meet. 
 It pictures the evil that may be wrought by a self seeking that 
 forgets all but its own gratification, its own selfish establish- 
 ment, to which it also prostitutes itself. It is this which creates 
 the offensive brutality of a Neri and the brother who duplicates 
 him. Power becomes rampant in its overweening might. With- 
 out the will to power life could not proceed but when this has 
 no vision which relates it to one's fellows for mutual welfare 
 but serves only itself, then it gives no place on the earth 
 to one whose service to mankind follows some other pathway. 
 Such a one, if weaker in the physical force to withstand, be- 
 comes only the despised prey of the power, which, inflamed by 
 its own boastfulness, as Neri was heated with the hot wine of 
 Cypress, rushes heedless also to its own destruction. The love 
 of a woman is only its own unreasoning gratification. There 
 is no social purpose in such power nor in such love, nor is there 
 any true self realization, only blundering self glorification and
 
 "THE JEST:" THE DESTRUCTION WROUGHT BY HATE 161 
 
 in the end failure. As in Neri and Gabriello, they belong to 
 mercenaries, moved by no impulse of patriotism or other higher 
 motives, but soldiers for hire, for personal gain. 
 
 Giannetto's will to power also, directed at first happily to a 
 high and noble service, when it becomes embittered by long 
 oppression and the multiplication of wrong, turns upon the 
 losing path of self seeking. His goal in his well planned jest 
 is not the actual reestablishment of his power, such a true as- 
 sertion of himself that even his enemies shall be compelled to 
 give him place. Even if such a desire is present to some degree 
 in his first turning to revenge, it is soon stifled in the poisoned 
 satisfaction of outwitting his arch enemy and stealing back from 
 him also the pleasures of which he has been robbed. Though 
 the better feeling asserts itself once more, as his triumph grows 
 supreme, and urges him to prevent the last great crime, in the 
 end he but proceeds to the final consummation of revenge which 
 destroys all. Satisfaction, yes, he wins that in large measure 
 if complete triumph over his enemy can bring it. But the price 
 is a costly one. Destruction to his enemies in body and mind, 
 while he has dared to damn his own soul. If his painting had 
 fallen off earlier because hatred and desire for vengeance had 
 begun their work in his mind, what can be expected of his work 
 henceforth with the curse of accomplished destruction resting 
 upon him? 
 
 The power which Ginevra exercises is of a subtler sort but 
 it lacks the dignity even of a well directed hate. She is indeed 
 a bauble for the last bidder. She boasts that perhaps she was 
 born " to drive with reins of silk two roaring lions " or to win 
 the poet dreamer to herself. Yet she knows as little of the 
 satisfaction that comes of a well used power as she does of any 
 real contentment from the trinkets which all too easily win her 
 love. '"Oh, these. I'm tired of them already.' (Eagerly) 
 ' There is a pearl necklace on the Ponte Vecchio.' " What power 
 her unstained purity may have exercised upon Giannetto's work 
 yields all too quickly to a petulant form of triumph in the trifles 
 with which her favor is bought. These only breed fresh dis- 
 satisfaction and stimulus to the wish which craves' merely for 
 itself and creates nothing.
 
 l62 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE DRAMA 
 
 Love inspired through the true nature of a charming woman, 
 who realizes herself in a self forgetful outpouring of its strength, 
 is the source of social life. This fundamental element in society, 
 as well as every form of energy striving, or pathway of the 
 will to power which it inspires, belongs to a mutual social adjust- 
 ment and mutual recognition of each individual's right and par- 
 ticular form of mastery and service. This mutual adaptation 
 forms and cements and continues to evolve society. It requires 
 some sacrifice, some acknowledgment of the weaker by the 
 stronger and qf the stronger by the weaker. All this was 
 lacking in the catastrophe to body, mind and soul which the 
 drama represents. Wherever also they failed in the Florence 
 of the fifteenth century the destructive work of hate dis- 
 turbed and disrupted and hindered the harmonious constructive 
 work of that newly awakened world. Love in its most funda- 
 mental sense and in its broadest developments has its way to 
 win in the constructive need with which society is confronted 
 today, individually and collectively in the world tasks newly set. 
 Nevertheless hate may work just as forcefully but destructively, 
 hindering and destroying in the divisions caused by individual 
 seeking set over against such mutual concession and adjustment. 
 Self seeking prostitutes as it seeks only its own, and falsely 
 thinks to content itself with those narrow ends which belong 
 to such seeking. Union of feeling and action is lost sight of 
 in the desperate effort to establish one's self or hold one's lonely 
 individual place against the might with which one dares not 
 unite. Such disunion, whether abroad in wider social events or 
 whether serving narrowly to cut off the individual life to its 
 own pleasures and bitter pains, ends in death. Body, mind and 
 soul fail of their great social birthright of life and are dead.
 
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