H. R. Lenormand: A Psychoanalytic Dramatist

Henri René Lenormand, although his rise to fame was slow, is to-day at the age of forty-nine considered one of the most distinguished and individual of contemporary French dramatists. “He is perhaps the author who has left the deepest impression on our dramatic art,” Firmin Gémier wrote of him. Years of indifference followed his early productions, Les Possédés , Terres Chaudes, and Poussière. This year three new works of his are being performed in his native country, which has been among the most tardy to do him justice. Médée is starring Mme. Pitoëff, one of the outstanding actresses of the modern French stage, who has acted in other of his plays. Arden de Feversham is being staged by Gaston Baty, one of the leading French producers, who also has been associated with him before. In America, which was introduced to Lenormand some time ago, the Theatre Guild is including his The Coward (Le Lâche) in its immediate repertoire.1

It was with Le Simoun (The Simoon) in 1920, Les Ratés (The Failures), and Le Temps est un Songe (Time Is A Dream) that Lenormand began to be accorded the warmth of reception, by public and critics, which has been his ever since. And with the arrival of fame, attention became directed to the noteworthy psychoanalytic implications of the dramatist. It has even been attempted to make Lenormand a disciple of Freud. Lenormand, however, as Daniel Rops informs us in his Sur le Théâtre de H. R. Lenormand, did not begin to read Freud until 1917-1918; and Rops refers to the dramatist's statements to Gaston Picard, that only two plays and a novel derive from Freud in anything but the most general way.

Psychoanalytic implications, nevertheless, are numerous and interesting in his other works. As Rops observes, he uses the dramatic possibilities of psychoanalysis which it is not necessary for an analyst to have discovered, and the person who studied these without knowing