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Dylan Thomas’ Play Under Milk Wood

Introduction: "The Analytic Revelation"

Thomas Mann's paper "The Significance of Freud" published in 1936 gives us some indications as to the importance of early psychoanalysis on the literary life of Europe and America:

"The analytic revelation is a revolutionary force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our own souls. Once roused and on alert, it cannot be put to sleep again. It infiltrates life, undermines its raw naïveté, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance." (Mann, 1965: 591)

As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane assert in their study Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991), this "revolutionary force" was a large constituent of early twentieth century notions of, not only Modernism in literature and the arts but also, what it meant to be a modern man or woman . The early Modernist writers of the inter-war period not only embraced Freud and psychoanalysis as heralding a new paradigm of self-sufficiency and ontological autonomy but also, as a journal entry by Andre Gide exposes, thought themselves part of an existing groundswell of thought that was, above all, quintessentially new:

"Freud.Freudianism.For the last ten years, or fifteen, I have been indulging in it without knowing." (Gide, 1967: 349)

The connection between psychoanalysis and literature has always been problematic. Freud, himself asserts in the opening paragraphs to his essay "The Uncanny" (2005) that "only rarely (does) a psycho-analyst (feel) impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics" (Freud, 2000: 1), however writers, critics and even Freud himself have made extensive use of the interpretive similarities between the two disciplines . Not only are there are a whole host of studies devoted to the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism but in the Introduction to his novel The White Hotel (1999), D.M. Thomas draws attention to the extraordinarily literary quality of Freud's case studies; each containing many of the tropes and leitmotifs one would normally associate with a creative work.

For Freud, the psychical mechanisms of creative writing and dreaming are in, some senses at least, inextricably linked. Both are based in a tripartite system of ideational fantasy formation consisting of: a current situational issue or concern that provokes the memory of a childhood incident or trauma which, in turn, shapes some future action in the guise of a wish fulfilment. Freud sets out the relationship between this system and literature in his essay "Creative Writers and Day Dreaming" (Freud, 1986):

"We are perfectly aware that very many imaginative writings are far removed from the model of the naïve daydream; and yet I cannot suppress the suspicions that even the most extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases." (Freud, 1986: 150)

Freud continues to explain the disparity between the mind of the creative writer and the ordinary day-dreamer, asserting that whereas the latter results in a self-conscious repression of desire (the wishes of the day-dreamer being best left unspoken) the former revels in and promulgates such desire, translated as it is by artistic skill and temperament:

"The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal - that is aesthetic - yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies." (Freud, 1986: 153)

This essay, perhaps more than any other work of Freud's, highlights for us the attraction of psychoanalysis to early twentieth century writers. Metaphysically and spiritually sceptical after the mass slaughter of the First World War and the alienation engendered by rise of the industrial paradigm, Freudian theory offered (as testified by Mann's essay) a distinctly human, non-metaphysical and wholly scientific explanation for the place of the artist within society. For Freud, the artist was distinct from the rest of the populous but this had a purely psychical aetiology, leaving no imperative for notions of religious or supra-human inspiration.

This is undoubtedly some of the attraction of Freudianism for Dylan Thomas who, throughout his letters and early work makes both use and reference to writers and critics that were, themselves, heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Francis Scarfe, in the essay "Dylan Thomas: A Pioneer" (1960) cites Freud as a major influence on the formation of Thomas' early poetic voice, derived in the main from his experiences with what Scarfe calls "Sitwellism" (Scarfe, 1960: 96):

"The dominant points of contact seems to be James Joyce, the Bible and Freud. The personal habits of language and mythology of Dylan Thomas can readily be identified through these three sources." (Scarfe, 1960: 96)

If Joyce lent the young poet some of the lyricism and sense of narrative and the Bible some of the rich cadence and verbal poetics, Freud enabled Thomas to look within his own unconscious and find images and leitmotifs that would find resonance with the rest of humanity as, firstly, personal then increasingly Bardic and archetypal symbols formed the basis of his work.

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