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The artist stands, as it were, in proxy for his generation: not only for the general population but even for the scientific investigators of the sociopsychological scene.
This essay illuminates the resonance that exists between the dramatizations of America's premier playwright, Eugene O'Neill (1883-1953), and the thinking of Heinz Kohut (1913-1981), the psychoanalyst who evolved self psychology and its unique approach to understanding the forms and transformations of narcissism. Both O'Neill and Kohut stand as important figures of the twentieth century, indeed, as creative pioneers in their respective fields.
A number of psychoanalytic models have been applied to study O'Neill's plays, as well as the conscious and unconscious links between his life and his works. This study reviews these applied psychoanalytic studies and discusses the unique elucidation provided by self psychology to an understanding of O'Neill's works. Moreover the methodology of applied self-psychological studies of literature, in general, and the plays of O'Neill, specifically, is explicated.
During a 30-year writing career (1913-1943), O'Neill helped to convert the American theater from its nineteenth-century identity as commercial theater,