Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 15, 1974. CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVES IN PIRANDELLO'S 'SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR'. Martin Wangh, M.D.

When Six Characters in Search of an Author opened in Rome in 1921, a near riot broke out in the audience. What was it about this play that provoked such intense feelings then and has continued to fascinate us for over fifty years? In seeking the inner meanings and deeper unconscious motivations of the play, Wangh examines two other spiritually contiguous plays by Pirandello and a preface that Pirandello wrote to Six Characters somewhat later. Thus, the writer's productions are the data of this investigation; biographical information is used only secondarily to bolster the analytic findings.

Pirandello's inner resistance to the material of the play is expressed in the title and in the theatrical devices he used. The Six Characters come upon an acting company rehearsing another Pirandello play and beseech them to do their story (to be their author). The actors are unable to express the parts of the Characters and appear ludicrous. This disavowed, unauthorable, and unactable story is summarized by Wangh. The themes of marital infidelity, exclusion of the child from the primal scene, father-daughter incest, mother-son incest, sibling murder, and suicide are all recognized, but filicidal impulses of jealous rage, and unconscious guilt for them, are of central importance. Wangh shows how defense and resistance against the emergence of these impulses are utilized with partial success. He also postulates that the interrupted Pirandello play (the one being rehearsed by the acting company) is itself concerned with the revenge of a husband upon his wife's lover. The point of interruption follows the question by the wife: 'Is he dead?', while the Six Characters begin their story with the death of the mother's love.

This carrying over of filicidal revenge for Oedipal patricidal feelings is continued symbolically in the play written just after