198
PARTISAN REVIEW
Stanley Edgar Hyman
FREUD AND THE CLIMATE OF TRAGEDY
Psychoanalysis and tragedy are not easy matters to discuss
from a mere reading knowledge, with no experience either behind the
footlights or on the couch. Yet if we take tragedy not as a subdivision
of drama but as a larger complex of attitudes and actions found in
many literary forms, and psychoanalysis as a cultural rather than a
medical phenomenon, specialists have written little enough to our
purpose, and the overlap between the two areas has been so inade–
quately discussed that a critic of literature may perhaps be pardoned
for stepping in brashly where theater people and analysts hesitate
to tread.
Tragedy as we know it had its first and greatest flowering in
fifth century Athens, in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, and its fullest theoretical formulation in the
Poetics
of
Aristotle. The forms of Attic tragedy, as Aristotle half knew from
tradition, derived from the sacrificial rites of Dionysus, in which
the god in bull or goat form was annually slain, dismembered and
resurrected. The plots of Attic tragedy came principally from Homer,
and the bloody stories of incest and murder fit the ritual forms so
well because the Homeric tales themselves,
as
Rhys Carpenter has
shown most fully in
Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric
Epics,
derive from similar rites far from Mount Olympus. Out of
the
agon
or dramatic conflict between the god in human form and
his
antagonists, evolved the ethical concepts of
hamartia
or short–
coming, the tragic flaw, and of
hybris
or pride, the imperfect insight
into man's true stature in relation to destiny and the gods. These
defects motivated the action, and for the spectators, in Aristotle's
formulation, the tragic action aroused pity and terror and symbolically
purged them through catharsis. The moral ingredients of tragedy are
thus: the flawed protagonist swollen with pride;
peripeteia,
the sud–
den pitiable and terrifying change in his fortunes; and a cathartic
climax
that
Herl1ert
Weisinger in
Tragedy and th't! Paradox of the
