Rank, Ibsen, and O'Neill: Birth trauma and creative will in selected dramas

This study uses the birth trauma and creative will theories of Otto Rank to analyze the characters in selected plays of Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill. It also applies these theories to the artists' lives. Rank believes that anxiety originates at birth when infants are separated from their mothers. Throughout life, people both yearn to return to the womb and yet fear reliving the pain of separation.; For Rank, anxiety is overcome through creative acts of will by artists and other ingenious people. Because they live within their own egos, neurotics cannot overcome anxiety. Instead of achieving selfhood, they often regress to deathlike states. Neurotics suffer from the Rankian "life fear" or isolation from others and also from "death fear" in which their personalities are "dissolved in the whole." Immobilized by their various fears and anxieties, they cannot achieve individuation.; Creative people like Ibsen and O'Neill project their anxieties onto their works. This is apparent in O'Neill's biographical play Long Day's Journey into Night. Conversely, Ibsen and O'Neill's neurotic characters fail at creativity. Such characters are analyzed in Ibsen's Brand, Rosmershom and The Master Builder and in O'Neill's Desire under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, and Journey.; Ibsen and O'Neill consider people's pasts as relevant to their present actions. Mary Tyrone lives virtually in the world of her youth. The mythical past is also meaningful in Ibsen and O'Neill's plays. Sometimes the playwrights use mythical heroes to parody the heroic stature of their protagonists.; The focus here is to study Ibsen's plays in the context of society, and O'Neill's in that of family life. Despite their choice of backgrounds, however, both writers present neurotic, uncreative men and women, who because of unresolved birth trauma anxiety, cannot achieve authentic selfhood. Yet Ibsen and O'Neill, like many modern playwrights, sustain hope even for individuals in the depths of despair. Like Rank's artists, perhaps "tomorrow" these forlorn characters will conquer their fears and project their anxieties as their creators have done so well.