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Eugene O'Neill's finest play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, owes enormously to the direct and personal influence of two American psychoanalysts, Smith Ely Jelliffe and Gilbert VanTassel Hamilton. Each independently taught O'Neill as well as some of his co-workers psychoanalytic theory, and collaborated in projects leading to publications. Jelliffe and Hamilton steered O'Neill and his colleagues to the writings of Freud, Jung, Edward Kempf, and Adolf Meyer, and discussed the material with them. Thus, their orientation and therapeutic efforts infuse this American classic.
Eugene O'Neill, a Nobel laureate often cited as the “father of American drama” (Gassner, 1967), spotlighted the troubled family, writing first of families in crises and later depicting them over many generations. Fascinated by family dynamics, he had embarked on a series of nine plays he called “the Cycle,” involving a single family line spanning 150 years, including their transition from Old to New World (Sheaffer, 1968; Weissman, 1957).
Long Day's Journey into Night is not in the Cycle, but it is O'Neill's own autobiographic family drama. Dedicating the play to his wife, Carlotta, O'Neill wrote, “I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones” (O'Neill, 1956, p. 7). O'Neill acknowledged that writing the play let him work through his conflictual feelings toward his family. Thus, the play illustrates the principles of reparation in a creative act as defined by Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984, p. 405).