Henrik Ibsen: Poet, Playwright and Psychologist

By Mark H. Stone and Cheryl A. Wagner

This book presents important psychological matters occupying Ibsen's life including his observations that were transformed into poems and plays. Attention is given to Ibsen's insight into psychological issues pre-dating the ideas as presented in the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Freud and Adler acknowledged Ibsen's psychological insight, but Ibsen's insight into human nature is still not fully recognized. This book addresses that neglect. Ibsen utilized his own life experiences together with a careful observation of human behavior to present what later became immensely important to the yet undeveloped field of psychoanalysis. Special attention is given to Ibsen's simple but important understanding of therapeutic change and decision-making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491718704

Mark H. Stone

Mark Stone is a licensed clinical psychologist in the State of Illinois. He holds the ABPP Diplomate in Clinical Psychology and School Psychology and the NASAP Diplomate in Adlerian Psychology. Mark retired from the Adler School of Professional Psychology as Provost in 2000. He continues to teach part-time at Aurora Univeristy, in Aurora, Illinois. His professional interests include Adlerian Theory and Practice, Measurement, and Statisitcal Analysis. His publcations include several books, book chapters, and journal publications. Cheryl Wagner is practicing therapist and former instructor at the Adler School of Professional Psychology specializing in Parenting, Adlerian Psychology and Professional Development. She earned her graduate degrees at the Adler School of Professional Psychology.

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Copyright © 2014 Mark H. Stone and Cheryl A. Wagner.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1869-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1870-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922654

iUniverse rev. date: 12/10/2013

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1   From Ibsen’s Life-Lie to Adler’s Life-Style

Chapter 2   The Psychoanalytic Theater: Ibsen’s Influence on Freud and Adler

Chapter 3   Ibsen and His Feelings of Inferiority

Chapter 4   A Therapeutic Journey: Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea

Chapter 5   Poet, Playwright, and Psychologist

Chapter 6   A Useless Exit

Chapter 7   Ghosts in Chicago

Chapter 8   Ibsen, Freud and Adler

Appendices

Appendix 1   An Ibsen Chronology

Appendix 2   Ibsen Plays

Appendix 3   Readers Guide to Ibsen, Freud and Adler

Appendix 4   Famous Ibsen Lines

References

Introduction

This book is not a biography of Henrik Ibsen. Neither is it a literary critique of his poems and plays. We treat Ibsen as the psychologist he showed himself to be throughout his life and in his works. Hence, we address Ibsen fundamentally as a psychologist whose insight and exposition can be found in everything he wrote as poet and playwright.

Ibsen’s insightful reflections can be found in his poems less well-known and less available then the last dozen of his twenty-six plays that have made him famous. Ibsen made careful observations about behavior which included his own and the behavior of those around him which he carefully observed and reflected upon. Our remarks focus mostly upon these matters, and only marginally about his life.

The plays of Ibsen were attended by Freud, Adler and others during the origins of what has become known as psychoanalysis. Freud, Adler and others frequently mentioned Ibsen by name as well as commenting upon aspects of his plays. It is our contention that Ibsen inspired and fostered these analytic beginnings although he was not the only literary master who did so. However, Ibsen has not received the recognition in psychology that he deserves for his insight into the human condition. This has prompted our interest in making his psychological insights more well-known for their contribution towards understanding human behavior.

Mark and Cheryl are of Norwegian parentage. Relatives reside in Norway and the family name is Stene from the city of Fredrikstad. Mark and Cheryl taught at the Adler School of Professional Psychology located in Chicago, Illinois. They taught courses in Adlerian psychology, especially addressing Adler’s approach to psychodiagnosis, psychopathology and treatment. Mark is a licensed, board certified clinical psychologist with diplomate status in Adlerian psychology. Cheryl specialized in family and parental treatment and professional development for counselors. Mark has published numerous papers on Ibsen’s thought and plays, as well as two books of Adler’s writings.

Our references are largely in English and almost all are easily attainable. We recommend reading primary sources rather than secondary literary critics or their commentary.

Chapter 1

FROM IBSEN’S LIFE-LIE TO ADLER’S LIFE-STYLE

In the courtyard of the Norwegian National Theater in Oslo are three larger-than-life statutes of Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754, Bjrönstjerne Björnson (1832-1910), and Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). Each one is mounted upon large pedestals reaching high above the courtyard. Björnson and Holberg are national literary figures in Norway. Ibsen is internationally famous for his dramas. H. L. Mencken, in an introduction to Ibsen’s plays published by Random House, called him, . . . perhaps the best that ever lived (1944, p. vii).

Ibsen’s plays address universal problems: deceit and deception, family secrets, confrontations between parents and children, marital strife, unrequited love, acting alone against the crowd, and a woman’s position in society. Some of his dramas employ the far-fetched imagery from which dreams are made. Suicide frequently occurs in his plays. Ibsen brought intense realism to the stage and he created dramatic roles featuring the femme fatale. One critic claimed that every subsequent dramatist has owned a dog-eared copy of Ibsen’s plays.

Ibsen was born in Skien, a small village on the eastern coast of Norway on March 20, 1828. His elder brother by 18 months died only 25 days after Henrik was born. Through the years 1830-1836, three more sons and one daughter were born into the family, but it was openly rumored that Henrik was not his father’s son. When Ibsen was six, his father went bankrupt and the family moved out of town due to financial hardship and embarrassment. Reading and writing developed early in young Henrik. A shy and lonely child, he found solace in reading, writing, and also in making puppet theaters. At thirteen, he left home for Grimstad to become an apprentice apothecary. His first play, Catiline, and some published poems were written in the late 1840’s. In 1850 he left Grimstad to attend Christiania (now Oslo) University, but remained there only a short time before he accepted a position as stage director/author at the state theater in Bergen. He remained there for six years until he became director of the Norwegian National Theater in Christiania (Oslo). In 1858, he married and an only child, Sigurd, was born a year later. Sigurd was to later marry Björnson’s daughter, Bergliot.

Björnson replaced Ibsen at the Bergen Theater and at this time it was Björnson who had the reputation. Over the past century his reputation has declined and Ibsen came to enjoy this leadership position. Björnson and Ibsen were friends, but it was Björnson, not Ibsen, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1903.

Ibsen left Norway in 1864. While now known as a Norwegian playwright, few realize that his major works were composed away from his homeland. He first resided near Rome, later in Dresden and Munich. Ibsen left Norway angered by what he considered a lack of recognition by his countrymen. He finally returned to Norway in 1891 with an international reputation to belatedly receive the recognition he always felt he deserved.

Ibsen is known for the stark realism portrayed in the characters of his plays. One unique aspect in his writing was the neologisms he created. Livslögnen (life-lie) is one of these. In some English translations, illusion is the word substituted. Inspection of the Norwegian word livslögnen shows substituting illusion to be a questionable choice. Later we will see why this word was chosen.

In Vildanden (The Wild Duck) written in 1884, Hjalmer Ekdal, a struggling photographer labors on an invention to restore fame to the family name. The themes in Ibsen’s plays are frequently autobiographical (See Hellinga, 1975). Actually Hjalmer’s labors have come to naught. They never really begin. Technical books ordered are not even unpacked, let alone read. No progress is ever made. His wife, Gina, and daughter, Hedvig, operate the studio while he pursues his dream of fame. Dr. Relling, the town physician, gives an explanation for this situation while conversing with Gregers, a family friend, in Act V:

[Cold, grey morning light]

Gregers:   Ah, so! Hjalmar Ekdal is sick?

Rellings:   Most people do from bad luck.

Gregers:   And what remedy are you prescribing for Hjalmar’s illness?

Rellings:   My usual one. I am cultivating the life-lie (livslögnen) in him.

Gregers:   Livslögnen? I didn’t catch the word.

Rellings:   I said livslögnen. For livslögnen is a stimulating force.

[Later:]

Gregers:   Poor unfortunate man! He has had to narrow down the early ideals of his youth.

Relling:   By the way, don’t use that word - ideals. We have a better one - livslögn.

Gregors:   Aren’t the two words are related?

Rellings:   Yes, about as close as typhus to typhoid fever.

[Later:]

Rellings:   Steal a man’s livslögn, and you steal his happiness at the same time.

This dialogue gives the earliest specific use of livslögn (life-lie) in Ibsen’s work and Ibsen found it the stimulus indeed. We find life-lie used by Alfred Adler, the Vienna physician, as the title of a short paper written in 1912 entitled Life-lie and Responsibility (Adler, 1925). In Adler’s paper occur the alternate expressions life-lines and life-falsehood. Adler writes, . . . the patient is constructing an inner world of his own on the basis of a defective individual perspective in definite contrast with reality… who safeguards his neurotic or psychotic inference and with it the integrity of his disease (pp. 235-236); and . . . they recoil before responsibility or they construct a life-falsehood whose content is their own weakness and whose inference leads to a struggle against others (p. 245).

Alternate phraseology for the same idea or concept is common in Adler’s writings, but Ansbacher’s (1967) history of Life Style and its phrase variants curiously omits life-lie among those given. In response to our inquiry, Ansbacher responded saying,

Let me explain why I did not include life-lie in my life-style paper. Life-style stands for the very essence of everybody’s life, whereas life-lie is not in that prime category. It is only an aspect of the life style of some disturbed individuals. As a mere function of the life-style, it is in the same category as the innumerable other functions. Life-style follows life-lie only chronologically, certainly not developmentally.

Ansbacher, 1996

Ansbacher was mistaken on several of his points. Life-style not only follows life-lie chronologically, life-lie is developmental. It is also striking that Adler never used life-lie again after using it so emphatically in this paper. This neologism was for one reason or another perhaps recognized as borrowed making further employment of its use threatening to Adler’s originality. He either had to acknowledge credit to Ibsen or use a different expression. The later choice was easy to do inasmuch as he had many alternatives. In The Neurotic Character Adler published in 1912, we found that Adler employed more than 30 such variations. Ansbacher is also wrong in believing that life-lie applies to only some disturbed individuals. Indeed, life-lie applies to everybody. This was Dr. Relling’s point and Ibsen’s message. The life-lie varies only by degree. Ibsen means us to see it everywhere in everybody!

Adler mentions the name of Ibsen, but usually in passing. No specific discussion of Ibsen or his play is given in this paper. He gives much more attention to Dostoevsky about whom he wrote an essay. However, Adler frequently cited writers as good psychologists due, he said, to their insightful descriptions of Life Style for their characters.

Why is it that we find no clear connection between Ibsen’s first mention of livslögnen and Adler’s paper on The Life-lie and Responsibility? Can it be due to Adler’s ignoance of Ibsen? No. Ibsen was well known in Germany. He was living in Munich at the time Adler was born in Vienna. Ibsen’s plays were published in German and performed in Germany, frequently in Vienna. Ibsen visited Vienna at least three times in 1873, 1891, and 1899. Lack of awareness is not the answer. Was it a failure to cite properly on the part of Adler? Adler sometimes failed to acknowledge influential ideas gained from the work of others. This was not uncommon. Acknowledging Dostoevsky, mentioned earlier, and Hans Vaihinger, to be discussed discussed later, show Adler’s recognition, respect, and acknowledgment of another person’s ideas. It seems strange then that Adler failed to acknowledge Ibsen’s creation of livslögnen used in the title and the body of his paper, but that is what happened. Perhaps the word was too well known at the time to cite it in the same way people use inferiority complex. The inferiority complex coined by Adler was even attributed to Freud in Adler’s obituary reported in the New York Times. Later editions corrected this error.

In order to further explicate this matter, we created a chronological chart showing the dates for critical events in the lives of Ibsen, Freud and Adler (See Chapter 8). We included Freud because he cited Ibsen in four of his works: Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Notes upon a Case of an Obsession Neurosis (1909), Beginning Treatment (1913) and Some Character Types met with in Psychoanalytic Work (1915). All of Freud’s major writings occur after Ibsen’s major works especially The Wild Duck written in 1884. This chart helps trace the connection from Ibsen’s use of livslögnen to Freud’s discussions of Ibsen’s works and finally to life-lie as used by Adler.

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) describes a dream he has had in norekdal style, as he put it, representing a condensation and mixture of two names, Nora and Ekdal, taken from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House written in 1879 and The Wild Duck written in 1884. A dream made from two separate