Word: freude
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...Country (by Henry Denker) concerns Sigmund Freud at 36, when, butting against the wall of medical opposition, he was also breaking through the wall of man's unconscious. It specifically concerns his early and famous patient, the young Viennese Elizabeth von Ritter: through opening the shutters of her mind, which had put fetters on her body, Freud released light that, expanding, would flood modern living and penetrate modern thought. Thanks to a sound union of play and production, A Far Country is very often engrossing...
...Country is historically Freud's play, it is dramatically Elizabeth's story. An attractive, mercurial, at once cool and responsive woman, Elizabeth lost the use of her legs after the death of her father and then her sister, walks on crutches and awaits-or, as Freud suggests, looks forward to-a wheelchair. At first she is mockingly certain that he can find no cure where a shoal of specialists have failed. Then she warms to him until-sympathizing, badgering, cajoling, but endlessly probing her mind-he probes too far; for she, meanwhile-talking, laughing, sparring, flirting, recollecting-blurts...
However factually accurate or clinically Freudian the play may be, it has a general effect of truth, of document and drama going hand in hand. What is vital to it is the portrait of Freud-dedicated, balked, often brusque-who is ably acted by Steven Hill; what is crucial is the delineation of Elizabeth, acted with extraordinary suppleness and intelligence by Kim Stanley. Indeed, under Alfred Ryder's controlled direction and inside Donald Oenslager's evocative set, the production is everywhere helpful...
...weakness of A Far Country is a structural clash between Freud's play and Elizabeth's story. Part of the trouble is that where, in another kind of Miracle Worker, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan are glued inside one consuming relationship, things are quite different here. Elizabeth is but a person, a case history, in the career of a personage, a revolutionizer of history. But trouble lies also in the stage itself which, unlike a book, cannot bring everything into focus by having everything-including Elizabeth's story-seen through Freud's eyes. Hence not Freud...
University of Illinois' Psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer agrees with Freud on the mechanism of anxiety's creation. But Mowrer differs on basic cause. To him the conflicts that cause anxiety are not so much animal and sexual as human and ethical. They involve the repression of moral strivings. Mowrer notes that anxiety arises when the person feared is also loved...