Long Day’s Journey Into Night as a Psychological Play

Introduction:

The dynamism of psychological defense has never been intensively used in the analysis of a literary
work. Psychological defenses are intrinsic aspects of all ongoing interpersonal interaction. They are
largely unconscious responses to anxiety irrespective of the source or content of the anxiety. Therefore,
they are primarily formal aspects of human behavior, each defense has its own characteristics and
patterns and the proclivity to use certain defenses is a basic feature of a person’s character structure.
When the aesthetic appeal of a literary work depends at least in part on the accuracy of portrayal of
character and psychological situation, as in a so-called psychological novel or a psychological play,
analysis of psychological defenses provides a means for understanding aspects of the psychological
structure of the work.

A Psychological Play:

Eugene O’Neill’s great posthumously produced play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, is clearly a drama of
character or a psychological play. The two events depicted as occurring on a single day, the mother’s
return to morphine addiction and the youngest son’s’ discovery that he has contracted tuberculosis,
allow for the portrayal of the psychological history and interrelationships of a disrupted Irish-American
family; as is well known, it is the playwright’s own family. Since the play is an aesthetic condensation of
the events of everyday life, a large number of defensiveness interactions among the characters appear.
A careful evaluation of over 120 segments of dialogue, chosen at random and evenly distributed
throughout the play, by myself and a series of psychologists and psychiatric judges, revealed that the
major defenses manifested by three of the characters the mother, father, and younger son were denial,
projection onto others and rationalization or intellectualization.

The large preponderance of these three defenses throughout the play clarifies the essential structure of
the family portrayed. When such defenses are characteristically used within a family, insuperable
barriers to communication exist. Through denial, there is blank non-acceptance of reality; through
projection, inner guilts are blamed on others and through rationalization or intellectualization, the
distortions of truth are made to appear reasonable, even intellectually stimulating. Furthermore, group
denial often operates to produce psychological disintegration in at least one of the family members,
and, in this case, denial contributes to the breakdown of the drug-addict mother. When the
psychological suffering of a family member is defended against and denied by the other members of the
family, the suffering person becomes helpless. Although she herself may try to deny her illness, she feels
that others deny her suffering because it is too great for them to bear and she feels lost and
overwhelmed. Also, since her illness is not accepted by the others, no real effort is made to help her.

The themes of defensive denial, projection, and rationalization or intellectualization run like a refrain
throughout the play producing a bizarre sense of recapitulation that is only altered slightly by the
younger son’s attempt at renouncing the pervasive denial at the end. In dramatic and psychological
contrast to these recurrent defensive manifestations by the mother, father, and younger brother, the
older brother stands alone. Rather than using these defenses, he characteristically resorts to another
one, the defense of undoing. Through undoing, he, like Hamlet, thinks and acts and then repudiates his
thoughts and actions. Just as Hamlet argues himself out of killing Claudius at prayer, almost immediately
after considering it seriously, the older brother constantly repudiates his hatred, his love, and his
insights about himself and his family. This characteristic use of defensive undoing clashes with the
shared defenses of the other members of the family and produces both psychological conflict and a key
thematic tension in the play. The older brother is unique because he sees the truth and cannot act; he is
therefore both the family scapegoat and a tragic hero.

The importance of this character as a tragic hero is also suggested by the temporal distribution of the
manifestations of his defensive undoing in the play. Although he is present throughout most of the
scenes, he only manifests undoing in the first and last acts. His defensive theme structurally binds the
beginning and the end of the play. It is stated early with mild intensity and reappears in a pounding and
climatic emotional confrontation with his brother in the penultimate scene. The older brother’s role as a
tragic hero has not previously been emphasized in critical analyses but seems quite clear in the light of
these considerations.

One of the unique features of the play as a whole is that almost every possible type of defense, in
addition to those already mentioned, appears at least once. The play provides a cross section of the
defensive aspect of human interaction and, in this respect alone, it allows for virtually universal
identification of the audience with some aspect of the characters portrayed or else it arouses some
anxiety on the basis of uncomfortable similarity. Such anxiety probably enriches the aesthetic impact of
the play.

Conclusion:

It appears, however, that the overall reduction of tension occurring in the course of the play mitigates
this terror at the end. It is the perfect psychological play, the audience is moved and aroused, but not
frightened. Some relief and resolution also occurs.