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In 1942, a man of the theater and arts made public Freud's paper, “Psychopathological Characters on Stage”(8), which was written in 1904. In an accompanying essay Max Graf(9) says of the paper, “Freud gave it to me and I now submit it to a world in which the ideas of Freud have become part of the spiritual air we breathe.”
In the same period of the early 1940's, a young playwright appeared on the scene with acclaimed creative gifts, particularly in the direction of portraying psychopathological character. Thus, in this period, the world became familiar with Tennessee Williams' play, “The Glass Menagerie” and shortly thereafter with the now famous character portrayal of Blanche du Bois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”(15, 16).
Much has been said of our current period to the effect that Freud's psychoanalysis has cast a parental heritage upon us in the areas of psychosomatic medicine, psychology, anthropology, sociology, education, and the arts. Our interest here will be in the field of current theatre. Only in passing it might be commented that a predominant preoccupation with portraying the mentally ill exists in all the scripts of movies, radio, television, as well as theatre. Leaving aside the issue of the frequent lack of creativeness that is apparent in the