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A male patient dreams of a building. Its shape is gradually changing, architecture in motion, as it were, a construction of steel and wood alternating between forming a bridge and a tower. Back and forth, back and forth. Bridge. Tower. Bridge. Tower. He wonders: what is this? The therapist, a woman, suggests that the dream represents himself, how he alternates between being unapproachable, dismissive, self-sufficient, while at the same time longing for, and fearing, contact with others.
I will leave this dream fragment to hover in the background as we shift images, to Henrik Ibsen's studio around the year 1896. We imagine him in his apartment in Arbin's Street in Kristiania (Oslo), sitting at his desk about to create a new play. We ask ourselves: can he make up any story. Are all options open? Can he do whatever he might want to do with his characters? Or are there limitations? Can it be that, as the dramatist makes his way through his own play, he and his characters encounter a form of regularity that necessarily imposes itself on the material? This essay will explore underlying patterns—here called laws of life—that structure two late plays by Ibsen, The Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead Awake (1899), focusing on the relation between those patterns and the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and object relatedness.