SOURCE: “O'Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, ‘Death Instincts,’ and the Trauma of Birth,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 211-30.

In the following essay, Watt discusses Rank's version of psychoanalysis in relation to the dramas of Eugene O'Neill.

“You were born afraid.” 

Mary Tyrone to Edmund

 “But he's dead now [Major Melody]. And I ain't tired a bit. I'm fresh as a man new born.” 

Con Melody

 “She loves me. I'm not afraid! … She is warmly around me! She is my skin! She is my armor! Now I am born—I—the I!—one and indivisible.” 

Dion Anthony

I

In one extremely defensive interior monologue in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), Charles Marsden contemplates the widespread influence of Sigmund Freud's thought on the American intelligentsia. In doing so, Marsden also predicts what interpretive tools many readers of O'Neill's plays will employ when digging through characters' psychological strata: “O...