A Horneyan Interpretation Of The Main Characters In Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Eugene O’Neill has been recognized as the most original and most theatrical ofthe American dramatists of the twentieth century. In his masterpiece Long Day’sJourney into Night, he presents to readers a love-hate family with penetrating insightinto the complex inner world of the characters and their society. There has been alarge amount of research on the work from different perspectives, mostly fromphilosophical and societal point of view, from feministic point of view or frompsychoanalytic point of view. Even though psychoanalysis has been previously appliedto analyze the play, the target of analysis from this point of view is limited to Mary, theheroine in the play. In fact, O’Neil gives the other three main characters as muchpsychological depth as Mary. Enlarging the analyzing target and trying to bring morelight to characters that has somewhat been overlooked, the paper interprets the fourmain characters in the play in the perspective of Horney’s new-psychoanalytical theory.The paper tries to reveal the coping strategies of the Tyrones in their psychologicalpredicaments\and attempts to points out that their predicament contains theundercurrent of the times that the characters are in and the influence of the characters’environment upon them. By applying Horney’s new-psychological theory, the paperintends to reveal the psychological profoundness of all the characters of the play andhopes to offer a new insight to the play and to help readers to appreciate O’Neill’sacuteness in displaying to us a picture of the human psyche and the society.