Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sichert, Margit

Titel

Theater als kollektive Therapie: Jean-Claude van Itallies "The Serpent"

Ist Teil von

• Amerikastudien, 2000-01, Vol.45 (2), p.163-174

Ort / Verlag

Universitätsverlag C. Winter

Erscheinungsjahr

2000

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Serpent is one of the most prominent examples of the revitalization of Ritual Theatre in the Sixties. With resort to Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty,” the play transforms Freud’s concept of individual therapy (complemented by the recognition of the collective unconscious in C. G. Jung’s depth psychology) into an attempt at collective therapy. The “recovery” of a society dominated by violence is to be achieved by retracing the traumas of the past, of its history, back to the mythical original trauma, which for van Itallie is to be found not only in Cain's first act of physical violence, but much more in the spiritual violence of the Old Testament God—the expulsion from Paradise. The destruction of the violence-engendering Old Testament myth is the goal of the play, is the foundation of the attempt at a collective therapy. This will be achieved through a rewriting, a revaluation of the values, a fusing of the Nietzschean Dionysus with the New Testament Christ—or as the Sixties prophet Norman O. Brown put it: Eros will defeat Thanatos. And this new interpretation and rewriting can also be seen as a part of the cultural revolution fostering the emancipatory movement away from the values of the father in a “fatherless” society (Mitscherlich).