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Perhaps no other dramatic works have so challenged the modern imagination as Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV. Over the years, critics and audiences have endeavored to penetrate the deeper levels of meanings in these enigmatic and profoundly psychological works only to discover that a fully cogent explanation continues to elude them. It is hardly surprising, then, that the better known of the two works, Six Characters, has attracted a recent flurry of critical attention based on the principles of a sophisticated psychology not so readily available to an earlier generation of Pirandello critics.
The new critical approach was signaled by the work of a psychoanalyst, Charles Kligerman, in a 1962 paper entitled “A Psychoanalytic Study of Six Characters in Search of an Author.”12 Kligerman's study was followed in 1965 by Eric Bentley's article “Father's Day,”2 which offered an interpretation based on Kligerman's earlier work and incorporated the perspectives and insights of R. D. Laing.14 In January, 1974, at a meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, three other analysts presented their views on the subject. The first of the participants, Martin Wangh,30 juxtaposed the thematic content of Six Characters and Henry IV while his colleague Theodore Jacobs,10* in discussing Wangh's paper, posited a psychoanalytic