The document discusses Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra and analyzes how it relates to Freudian psychology. It argues that while O'Neill claimed his knowledge of psychoanalysis was limited, the play clearly depicts Freudian concepts like the Oedipus complex through the characters' desires to possess their mothers and hostility towards their fathers. It provides specific examples from the play of how characters like Orin exhibit classic Oedipal symptoms and transfer their fixation with their mothers onto other women like Lavinia.

2. • what is Freudianism?
• Whether Eugene O'Neill
had knowledge of
Psychology or not?

3. Unscientific Freudianism
• Freudianism in the play is popular and
unscientific.
• M.B.E. is not a carefully documented case
study nor was intended to be.
• Doctrines of Freud were widely
misunderstood & over simplified by public.

4. O'Neill's Intuition or Knowledge of
Psychology ??
• O'Neill himself insisted that his knowledge of
Psychoanalysts was unscientific &
fragmentary
• Guided more by intuition than by theory.
• "There is no conscious use of Psychoanalytic
material in any of my plays. All of them could
easily be written by any dramatist ..

5. • who had never heard of the Freudian theory.
• it was my dramatic instinct & my personal
experience of human life that guided me.

6. Specific details of Freudianism
• It is a oversimplified
proportion that every
male is attracted to the
woman who resembles
his mother in physical
appearance &
• Every female desires a
male who resembles
her father.

7. Mourning Becomes Electra
• How to apply Psycho-
analysis in the
Mourning Becomes
Electra?

8. Mourning Becomes Electra
The prototype of the female in the play is Marie
Brantome.
Christine & Lavinia both resembles her, especially
in their "peculiar shade of coppergold hair".
Adam says to Lavinia: "Lavinia, you're so like your
mother in some ways. Your face is the dead image
of hers. And look at your hair. I know only one
other woman who had it. It was my mother.

10. Oedious & Electra complex

12. • Reciprocally-
• Lavinia hates Christine.
• Adam hates Ezra & Orin.
• Orin hates rivals for his mother's love, Adam &
Ezra.

13. Mother complex
• According to the play "The Oedipus complex"
arises because the mother loves the father too
little & the son too much.
• The Freudian hypothesis explains the
attraction & attachmens that motivates the
event.

14. • Each Mennon is driven by an impulse on that
person who resembles the parents of the
opposite sex
• In Orin & Lavinia, the third generation, this
impulse has grown into fixation.

15. Son dreaming about mother
 While away at War,
Orin dreamt of his
mother as an island of
peace. The wish to
possess mother & the
acting out of the father
murderer give Orin the
classical Oedipal
symptoms. This
complex moves him to
murder Adam.

16. On Death of Adam...
• Orin says: "Mother don't moan like that
!How could you grieve for that servant's
bastard ! I know he was the one who planned
father's murder ! You couldn't have done
that...................But you will forget him ! I
will make you forget him! I will make you
happy.

17. Lavinia becomes Mother
• Orin says to Lavinia: You don't know how like
mother you have become, Vinnie.
• He further says "Can't you see i am now in
father's place & you're in mother??
• By talking Lavinia, Orin would fulfill his desire
to possess mother completely.