LAWRENCE S. KUBIE, M. D.

7 EAST 81ST STREET
NEW YORK

BUTTERFIELD 8-5230

July 24, 1941

Dr. Gregory Zilboorg
14 East 75th Street
New York, N. Y.

Dear Gregory:

I believe I have written to you occasionally in the past about Miss Valerie Reich. Miss Reich is an extraordinarily accurate and expert typist. She has, in addition, exceptional fluency in various languages and even idiomatic fluency in translation. Finally, she is now being trained in scientific indexing; and it occurred to me that she might be useful to you in the preparation of the index of your book.

Should you wish to reach her you can do so at 316 West 94th Street (telephone Ac. 4-9486).

LSK:fp

First Printing

NOTE

*Lady in the Dark*

is the sole property of the producer and the authors, and is
fully protected by copyright. It may not be acted, either by
professionals or amateurs, without the payment of a royalty.
Public readings and radio broadcastings are likewise
forbidden. All inquiries concerning rights should be addressed
to the producer, Sam H. Harris, 239 West 45th
Street, New York City.

The non-professional acting rights of *Lady in the Dark* are
controlled exclusively by the Dramatists' Play Service, 6
East 39th Street, New York City, without whose permission
in writing no performance of it may be made.

COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

We are very odd about unhappiness. We see it all around
us. We deplore it and make fun of it. We fight it with
prayer, and we escape it in alcohol. We wrestle with it in
philosophy, art, music and literature; and we shout it down
with singing and dancing. We have a vague feeling that the
pursuit of happiness is a shade beneath human dignity; yet
we are scornful of those who avow unhappiness without reserve. Everywhere we see failures who are unhappy. And
everywhere we see successes who are equally unhappy. The
strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the fortunate and
the unfortunate, married and single, busy and idle, every
conceivable pattern or setting of life can be searched with a
Diogenes lantern, only to find men who, as Thoreau said,
"lead lives of quiet desperation." Only here and there, scattered
among these quiet, desperate folk, the searcher stumbles
on some few who possess an equanimity which they themselves
cannot explain.

This is ancient knowledge; but it has acquired new significance since Sigmund Freud first saw that this universal human discontent is a form of illness.

This discovery has meant a revolution in the cultural life
of the world. When human discontent was seen to be the
neurosis of the so-called normal, history repeated itself. To
the Greeks all physical illness was the province of the priest:

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PREFACE

sickness was a punishment visited by the gods, to be relieved
by their ministers. It was one of the moments of great eman-
cipation when physical illness became an object of scientific
rather than religious care; but it was not until the last fifty
years that a comparable revolution occurred in the realm of
psychic pain, removing it from the sphere of art and morals
to that of scientific inquiry and medical therapy.

Basically, this is what psychoanalysis means to the world.
And in this gay and tender play, perhaps for the first time
on any stage, the struggle of a vigorous and gifted human
spirit to overcome deep-seated, unconscious, self-destructive
forces is portrayed accurately. This, then, is no ordinary play.
In its ultimate implications, it is a Song of Songs of Woman,
not merely the tale of a particular woman.

It is the story of a woman who is talented, proud and cou-
rageous, who reaches a pinnacle of success in her chosen field,
and at that moment has what would be called in layman's
words a "nervous breakdown." Everything in her life which
formerly ran smoothly now causes her intolerable tension,
anxiety and indecision. She cannot deal with her associates.
She cannot control her moods. She is overcome incessantly by
fatigue and a compelling need to sleep. And she is filled with
resentment, depression, fear and indecision, which surge up
in her with an intensity far beyond her control. From the
technical psychiatric point of view the portrayal, both of the
illness itself and of its evolution out of her normal life, is
accurate in the subtlest details.

The story of this woman, of her illness and of her recovery
is the saga of what can happen to any woman—and, with
some transposition of forces, to any man. It is the story of a

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PREFACE

life which achieves an apparent success in the pursuit of a
chimerical and unattainable fantasy. As long as this is still in
the making, she could always tell herself that the next step
would bring her the ease, peace, security and reassurance
which would mean happiness. Meanwhile, she did not recog-
nize even the presence of the rage, depression and terror be-
low the smooth surface of her life—much less what they were
about. The only hint of her underlying tension was a life-
long insomnia. She knew only that each step up the ladder
gave her a momentary surcease from pain, and that the next
moment she was goaded on to struggle to another rung.

The world called this ambition and the creative impulse;
but in her illness it becomes evident that it was a blind com-
pulsive flight. Therefore, when this woman reached the top
she crumbled at the height of her success, not from "over-
work," nor simply because she "wanted to be married," but
because her Pyrrhic victory left her empty-handed and be-
cause every "successful" moment in her career had merely
added to her accumulating burden of frustration. As she
stood at the pinnacle she stared into the terrifying spectacle
of fame turning to dust and ashes in her mouth.

She plays out this aspect of her problem against the rela-
tively inert images of three men and what they represent to
her. For until she emerges from her "illness" no human be-
ing is a reality to her. Her three men are dummies out of a
window display, on whom she drapes the compelling fantasies
of her childhood and the fear and hate of these fantasies
which had formed in her in those nursery years.

Up to the time of her breakdown, the most important rela-
tionship of her adult years had been to an older man who

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PREFACE

stood off in the wings of her life, offering her a background
of warmth and care, of professional assistance, of reassurance
and consolation. His role was not unlike that of a mother or
a father; or, under more usual circumstances, of a wife to-
ward a busy husband—or perhaps of all of them combined.
But until suddenly he became free to marry her, she did not
realize that he represented a fantasy of a father and mother
rolled into one, and that she could not possibly marry him.

In sharp juxtaposition to this parental figure are set first the
childlike juvenile glamour-boy, the movie hero of adolescent
fantasy literally come to life, whose pseudo-virilism is slowly
stripped from him to reveal the anxious and dependent child;
and second, the adult man whose challenge she ultimately
has to face.

This ultimate man is the one who refuses to play the role
either of the subservient parent or of the submissive child,
and who, by his outrageous mockery and overt erotic foolery,
challenges her right to live in her no-man's land between the
sexes.

Superficially viewed, the struggle is over these three men.
In reality it is wholly within herself, a struggle between the
conflicting yearnings, fear and angers of her own nature. Her
decisions have to be made about the external affairs of life:
the cover of the magazine, the clothes she'll wear, the man she
will flirt, dance or marry with. But onto these specific issues
is displaced the basic indecision of her spirit, so that she can
reach no decisions, however trivial, as long as she is dominated
by the overwhelming although forgotten tragedies of her
earliest years.

Out of the fantastic furor of her dreams, out of the artful

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PREFACE

analytic synthesis of memory and fantasy which emerge from
these dreams in the analyst's office, she recaptures the free-
dom of spirit which had been hers not merely before she
had become ill, but even before the childhood hurts had forced
her into a protective shell.

With extraordinary clarity and simplicity the story is un-
rolled of an only child who adores both a mother of legendary
beauty and a kindly father. She loves them, she loves their
praise, and without a trace of fear or self-consciousness she
can sing little songs to win their applause, until suddenly
one day her father's heedless phrases shame her. These
phrases are about the obvious: jokingly but disparagingly
they compare her looks to her mother's. But to a child, as to
an adult, looks are no mere vanity; they are symbols of a
deeper comparison. When she hears her father say she'll
*never* be as lovely as her mother, it means to her that there is
something awful about her. Not to be like her mother rouses
a terror of something unseemly that goes far deeper than the
skin. At once her naive pleasure in seeking praise, her naive
pleasure in appearing before people to sing her little song,
becomes an exposure to ridicule. In the middle of her song
she chokes and gasps and runs out of the room in inarticulate
terror. Thus the illness of a woman of forty begins under
our eyes in the exquisite forgotten agony of a little girl of four.
Through the intervening years her great gifts have only
served to postpone the inevitable day of reckoning.

There is in the play another moment of deep intuitive wis-
dom, namely, in the moment's pantomime which portrays the
agonizing wordless conflict at the time of her mother's death.
This mother had first been adored simply and happily, but

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PREFACE

she had come to mean something wonderful which the child
could never hope to approximate, and her presence thereafter
could only serve to remind the child of some mysterious and
shameful secret about herself. This mother dies, leaving the
conflict-laden child silent, dry-eyed, troubled and speechless.
Then suddenly out of the depths, her innocent need arises
to heal herself by becoming that lovely creature, and a few
moments later when the sad father comes to seek his little
daughter, to comfort her and to be comforted, he finds her
posturing before a mirror in her mother's blue evening cape.
He turns on her in a fury of uncomprehending hate, from
which she flees in wordless terror. This is a moment of cruci-
fixion which seals her fate.

From then on, to be beautiful is to be damned by the hate
of the father she loves. Beauty becomes something only to be
offered up in sacrificial expiation. She is condemned to lone-
liness and a haunting fear of exposure. In her fantasy her
body is distorted into a thing of shame and iniquity, and she
must clothe it and hide it by her wits. Such a spirit engenders
defeats; and inevitably she meets small disappointments in the
crushes and infatuations of school and high school. These de-
feats, actually imposed on her life by that which is already
distorted in her own nature, mean to her the confirmation of
her deepest dreads, so that she turns from young men in fear
and anger. Love becomes possible to her only when it can
bring to her aid the protective love of a parent. Such love
from an older, fatherly figure lifts the curse of that moment
of grief and guilt and pain when her response to her moth-
er's death brought down on her the fury of her father's anger.
This is why she entered into her love affair with the elderly

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PREFACE

publisher; and this is why she atones for her guilt by giving
up all strivings for beauty in herself, and by masking her
jealousy of other women by devoting herself to making them
beautiful and herself plain.

As a case history this is wholly accurate; and at the same
time it could be the document of almost any human life. It is
out of just such seemingly minute episodes that the deepest
human tragedies may grow. Furthermore, as the scenes un-
roll themselves backward to childhood, the resolution of her
difficulties is clear and moving.

As a portrayal of psychoanalysis itself there are a number
of technical flaws to which the analyst might object. He
would sometimes criticize the analyst's technique, for asking
too many questions, for asking some questions that were too
directly suggestive, and others that were bound to evoke too
severe a reaction. It will be recalled that at one point he pre-
cipitated his patient into such a storm of rage and fear that
for a time she ran away from the treatment. In real life this
probably could have been avoided. Although our analyst
might reply that at best this was a touch-and-go situation, that
the woman was on the edge of a major collapse, that there-
fore he had to take heroic risks, and that if he had proceeded
more cautiously he never could have broken through her
shell. About this one cannot be dogmatic; but one can say
that the procedure as it is portrayed is more active, more di-
rectly challenging, more provocative, than would be character-
istic of the ordinary analytical situation.

Similarly, one would have to object that the results were
achieved too swiftly. Lasting therapy cannot be reached in
such a short space of time, and in the real world this woman

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PREFACE

would not yet be out of the woods. From the point of view
of scientific accuracy this is a wholly valid criticism; but to the
writer of this preface it is not a serious flaw in the play. In or-
der to give the impression of a longer period of treatment, the
author could easily have introduced an interval of weeks or
months between the acts. While this would have given a more
literal version of the analytical procedure, the essential spirit
of what was done and how it was achieved would not have
been basically altered thereby. We can allow the author his
condensation in time as the license due a poet.

Finally, one might question the dreams. In a sense they
are not dreams at all, but rather a series of rococo fantasies
built around a core of valid dream ideas. Just such secondary
elaborations as this, however, are encountered frequently in
the dreams and fantasies of children, without altering their
underlying significance.

This, then, is the story; and the ordinary playgoer leaves
the theater under a spell, knowing that he has been through
an experience which comes only rarely. Furthermore, he
often goes back to see the play repeatedly, with a deepening
pleasure and understanding. This is not to be explained
merely by the showmanship of the author-producer-director,
nor by the brightness of the lyrics, nor by the haunting
subtlety of the music, nor by the superlative virtuosity of the
cast. It is because he has been awakened to a realization that
subtle and powerful psychological forces play beneath the
surface of his own life and of the lives of those around him.
This awakening cannot fail ultimately to have profound social
and cultural significance. It may even come to pass that some
day we will no longer be quite so odd about unhappiness.

xiv

“DR. BROOKS”

April 22, 1941.

Dr. Lawrence Rubic,
7 East 41st Street,
New York, N. Y.

Dear Larry:

I really have no basic criticism of your paper - for as I understand your thesis, it is not only tenable but it is fully in accordance with facts. The objections that I had to your first paper remain with me and I feel that they are also valid with regard to the second paper.

It seems to me that you misunderstood Freud's original thesis on somewhat etiological grounds. When Wernicke introduced the term *Zwangsvorstellung* he had in mind *Zwang*, that is a state of involuntary, inevitable action. Failure to carry out that action would cause discomfort. When Freud introduced the term *Wiederholungszwang* he had in mind a biological phenomenon of intensive and widely extensive normalcy. The death and life in-ABSTRACT were not made either dependent on or derivatives from this biological phenomenon. It would seem that you are in perfect agreement with Freud, but for some reason you seem to assume, inferentially at least, that Freud had only pathology in mind and particularly compulsion neurosis when he spoke of *Wiederholungszwang*. Such an assumption is quite obviously incorrect. The repetitive core of which you talk is also the rythmicity of bio-psychological phenomena and I have been for some years making notes to prepare a paper which would revise the standard nosology of psychoses on the same basis as you attempt to do with neuroses in general.

I wish therefore you could make very explicit that repetitive compulsion (*Wiederholungszwang*) never had anything to do with pathology as such and that Freud by way of psychological considerations merely stumbled upon a universal biological phenomenon like peristalsis or automatic muscle cell contractions which color also pathological reactions in the same manner as the chemistry of sugar combustion remains the same be it in a normal person or diabetic - the chemistry is the same, the carrying out of its laws is different.

As always,

December 23, 1940.

Dear Dr. Zilboorg:

I could not send you simply the Season's Greetings
because besides just remembering all those to whom
one feels closer I have for you a feeling of deep
gratitude, which, of course, neither the size nor
the elaborateness of a card could express.

Frankly speaking the holiday atmosphere is more
annoying than pleasing because of the conflict of
emotions that it arouses

As the end of the year approaches, looking retro-
spectively at myself I see the enormous difference
between myself of a year ago and today - the
difference is really striking and almost unbelievable.
I have gained so much internal freedom that contact
with people seems to establish itself most naturally
and on entirely different basis than heretofore.
At this moment, Zosia, to whom I am dictating this
letter, is nodding her head in full accord. Sub-
consciously, from this sentence on the letter will
be written, in spirit, most probably by both of us.
Because she had such a strong belief in the cure I
was undergoing, she certainly shares the feelings
of gratitude that I have for you. This firm belief
of hers resulted in a little "bossing", which I do
not mind, as after all I have my own ways and means
of gaining my point.

Furthermore, I should like to tell you that in the
course of this year my outlook on many of the
questions that we used to discuss has changed con-
siderably. The opinions based on a romantic out-
look on life have faded away and a new outlook seems
to be forming itself on a much more realistic basis.
I remember when you once told me that I am like a
fallen leaf - well, it seems to me that in the
protective shadow of your personality the leaf is
no longer a fallen one but has gained new life.

Dr. Gregory Zilboorg,
14 East 75th St,
New York, N. Y.