You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Despite the Censor, and under the inner promptings of the Wish, what Dramatization does for the dream, the drama does for Life. It fulfills it. … Now it is a rare thing for a sane consciously—guided individual to express in the manufactured ravings of a madman, the very thoughts the latter, by an unconscious mechanism, expresses in delusion. To us it is almost reminiscent of the detailed and successful fabrication of a dream, by some neurotic in the course of analysis; which again and again proves as valuable as the genuine dream itself. But when Thought is thus spontaneously expressed by a psychologically—minded dramatist (seemingly ignorant of the technicalities of the newer psychology, but by intuition, possessed of a knowledge of some of its independent findings as to the role of the Unconscious) and certainly by a man of superior intellect, it becomes especially valuable to us in our specialization. For it is nothing short of a stroke of genius for the author of a tragedy thus to deceive himself, the Censor and the world, and produce what has been universally acclaimed, a masterpiece of drama. Pirandello's Cosi E (“And that's the truth”)contains in three short acts, the germ of the commonest and crudest phantasy of the insane mind. He states the problem through the mouths of the apparent insane, yet by this very method disarms all criticism and analysis, and allays all suspicion with the ingenuity of the devices he adopts.
Probably most of us who have had dealings with the insane, are at once wary of the individual who is beginning to have difficulty as to the realness of Reality; when things only “seem to be,” actions are “as if”; and “perhaps there is no such thing as truth”; “how can we be sure life is not a dream”? “What after all is phantasy?”