Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS3303 Notes 06A

SIGMUND FREUD, PSYCHOPATHIC CHARACTERS ON THE STAGE (1905-1906; 1942) Freud, Sigmund. "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage." Vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. 303-310. Freud begins by alluding to Aristotles view that the purpose of drama is to arouse terror and pity and so to purge the emotions (305). Freud equates this with the opening up of sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life, just as, in the case of intellectual activity, joking or fun open up similar sources, which that activity had made inaccessible (305). This involves the process of getting rid of ones emotions by blowing off steam (305), enjoyment being produced by the relief produced by a thorough discharge (305) together with an accompanying sexual excitation (305). The latter appears as a byproduct whenever an affect is arouses (305). Freud contends that being present as an interested spectator at a spectacle or play does for adults what play does for children (305) when they imitate what adults do. The spectator longs to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs (305) and to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his own desires in short, to be a hero (305). Plays enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with the hero (305). Moreover, the spectator knows it would be impossible for him to act like a hero in actuality without pains and sufferings and acute fears (305), which would cancel our the enjoyment (305-306). He is aware, too, of the possibility that he might perish even in a single such struggle against adversity (306). For these reasons, his enjoyment is based on an illusion (306): his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and, secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security (306). He can accordingly allow himself to enjoy being a great man (306), to express suppressed impulses as a craving for freedom in religious, political, social and sexual matters (306) in the life represented on the stage (306). Other genres are equally subject to these same preconditions for enjoyment (306). Lyric poetry serves to give vent to feelings of many sorts (306). Epic poetry allows one to feel the enjoyment of a great heroic character in his hour of triumph (306). Drama (Freud seems to have tragedy in particular in mind) depicts the hero in his struggles (306) and even in defeat (306), and thereby to explore emotional possibilities more deeply and to given an enjoyable shape even to forebodings of misfortune (306). In serious plays (306), this relation to suffering and misfortune (306) arouses merely concern (306), whereas in tragedies, the suffering is actually realised (306). Relevant here is the fact that drama originated out of sacrificial rites (cf. the goat and the scapegoat) in the cult of the gods (306) for which reason it appeases . . . a rising rebellion against the divine regulation of the universe, which is responsible for the existence of suffering (306). Heroes are first and foremost rebels against God or against something divine; and pleasure is derived . . . from the affliction of a weaker being in the face of divine might (306), a pleasure due as much to masochistic satisfaction (306) as admiration of a character whose greatness is insisted upon in spite of everything (306). The mood (306) catered to by such drama is that of Prometheus (306). Suffering of every kind is . . . the subject-matter of drama (307), Freud argues, and this suffering is the source of the audiences pleasure (307). Thus, the first precondition of this form of art (307) is that it should not cause suffering to the audience (307) and that it should compensate, by means of the possible satisfactions

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involved, for the sympathetic suffering which is involved (307). Freud has in mind, of course, mental suffering (307) for all mental enjoyment is brought to an end by the changes in somatic feeling that physical suffering brings about (307). Normally, for this reason, heroes are not depicted as suffering physically. Many dramas, Freud contends, begin with an exposition (307) of the circumstances (307) in which the mental suffering (307) is acquired (307), though it is true that some, especially classical Greek plays, begin in medias res. These can do this because they rely on the audiences prior familiarity with the material in question. The preconditions (307) of the suffering depicted must be an event involving conflict (307) and must include an effort of will together with resistance (307). It finds its first and grandest fulfilment in a struggle against divinity (307) in what Freud calls religious drama (308). In such plays, the dramatist and audience take the side of the rebel (307). Where a belief in the divine lessens, it is to the human regulation of affairs (307308) which is held responsible for suffering (308). In such cases, the heros struggle is against human society (308) for which reason such plays are social tragedies (308). Sometimes there is depicted a struggle between men (308) resulting in tragedies of character (308) predicated on an agon . . . played out between outstanding characters who have freed themselves from the bond of human institutions (308). In such plays, there are in fact two heroes (308). Sometimes social tragedies are fused with tragedies of characters to depict a hero struggling against institutions embodied in powerful characters (308). Having discussed the terrain on which the action that leads to the suffering is fought out (308), Freud turns his attention to another terrain, where it becomes psychological drama (308). Here, the struggle that causes the suffering is fought out in the heros mind itself a struggle between different impulses, and one which must have its end in the extinction, not of the hero, but of one of his impulses (308). Such plays must end in a renunciation (308). Sometimes institutions (308) can be depicted as the cause of internal conflicts (308), resulting for example in tragedies of love (308): the suppression of love by social culture, by human conventions, or the struggle between love and duty, . . . are the starting-point of almost endless varieties of situations of conflict (308). However, Freud contends that psychological drama turns into psychopathological drama when the source of the suffering in which we take part and from which we meant to derive pleasure is no longer a conflict between two almost equally conscious impulses but between a conscious and a repressed one. (308) Here the precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator should himself be a neurotic (308) for only such people can derive pleasure instead of a simple aversion from the revelation . . . of a repressed impulse (308-209). In non-neurotics, this recognition is met with only aversion (309) and a readiness to repeat the act of repression which has earlier been brought to bear on the impulse (309). In such people a single expenditure of repression has been enough to hold the repressed impulse completely in check (309) whereas in neurotics the repression is on the brink of failing; it is unstable and needs a constant renewal of expenditure (309), which is spared (309) only if recognition of the impulse is brought about (309). Only in neurotics can a struggle . . . occur of a kind which can be made the subject of a drama (309). However, even in them the dramatist will provoke not merely an enjoyment of the liberation but a resistance as well (309). The first such modern (309) drama is, in Freuds view, Hamlet. There, a man becomes neurotic owing to the peculiar nature of the task by which he is faced (309). Hamlet is a man in whom an impulse . . . hitherto successfully repressed endeavours to make its way into action (309). Hamlet has three important characteristics (309).

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Firstly, he becomes psychopathic in the course of the action of the play (309). Secondly, the repressed impulse is one of those which are similarly repressed in all of us (309) and not unique to Hamlet. It is this repression which is shaken up by the situation in the play (309). As a result of these two characteristics, it is easy for us to recognise ourselves in the hero: we are susceptible to the same conflict as he is (309). Thirdly, a necessary precondition of this form of art (309) is that the impulse . . . struggling into consciousness, however clearly it is recognisable, is never given a definite name (309). For this reason, the spectators attention (309) is averted (309) because he is in the grip of his emotions instead of taking stock of what is happening (309). The derivatives of the repressed material (309) reach consciousness, owing to lower resistance (310), while the repressed material itself is unable to do so (310). The proof of this, after all, is that the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me to unearth it (310). Freud is of the view that the consequence of disregarding these three preconditions (310) is that other psychopathic characters are as unserviceable on stage as they are in real life (310). It would seem to be the dramatists business to induce the same illness in us; and this can be best achieved if we are made to follow the development of the illness along with the sufferer (310). This is all the more necessary where the repression does not already exist in us but has first to be set up (310). By contrast, faced by an unfamiliar and fully established neurosis (310), we are inclined to send for the doctor (just as we do in real life) and pronounce the character inadmissible to the stage (310). In short, the neurotic instability of the public and the dramatists skill in avoiding resistances and offering fore-pleasures can alone determine the limits set upon the employment of abnormal characters on the stage (310).