Alfred Kazin
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
LITERARY CULTURE TODAY*
I
There is a young Englishman on Broadway who shouts
every night that he is angry, very angry. Yet when we open John
Osborne's
play, .Look Back In Anger,
and try to find out just what he
is angry about, we make a curious discovery: he is not angry on
specific grounds, as people often are; he is angry at his inability to feel
anger, angry that he lacks a cause to be angry about. At one moment,
after complaining that "nobody can be bothered. No one can raise
themselves out of their delicious sloth," he says, very wistfully indeed
for an angry man-"Was I really wrong to believe that there's a–
kind of-burning virility of mind and spirit that looks for something
as powerful as itself? The heaviest, strongest creatures in this world
seem to be the loneliest. Like the old bear, following his own breath
in the dark forest. There's no warm pack, no herd to comfort him.
That voice that cries out doesn't
have
to
be
a weakling's, does it?"
This is the truest note in a play which emotionally and
artistic~
ally seems rather contrived. It is not intensity of feeling but the
longing for this intensity that is behind Mr. Osborne's confused and
rather forced emotions. And equally, this same
pseud~violence,
expressing the dearth rather than the excess of feeling, has struck me
in several contemporary literary works that parade an air of militancy
and rebelliousness-Norman Mailer's
The Deer Park,
Jack Kerouac's
• Delivered before the Conference on Psychoanalysis and The Image of Man
(sponsored by the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, Inc. to
honor the seventieth birthday of Theodor Reik), May 18, 1958 at the Waldorf–
Astoria Hotel, New York City, and reprinted from
Psychoanalysis and
Psych~
analytic Review
Volume 45 No. 1 and No.2, 1958, through the courtesy of the
editors and the publisher, National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis,
Inc.
