_Ibsen_, the great psychologist, has described in masterly fashion the
transposition of sister love into boy love. In “_Little Eyolf_,”
Almers, the writer, suddenly loses the love for his wife and turns his
affection exclusively to his child. That child is called ‘little
Eyolf,’ like his sister, who had once put on boy’s clothes and called
herself ‘little Eyolf.’ The parents had expected a boy. Almers turns
his affection for the sister, which pervades the whole drama, into the
love for the boy. He has discovered for himself _the law of
substitution_ which corresponds to the changes spoken of in these
pages. Little Eyolf in fact is the dramatisation of the latent
homosexual fixation on the sister. Almers cannot split his
personality, he cannot be both homo- and heterosexual. This inability
to split his self, the root of all homosexuality, forms the background
of the whole drama. Rita cannot divide her personality any more than
Almers can do it; he must give his whole personality self. Almers
cannot divide wife and sister. He embraces his wife and thinks of the
sister (That sister, whom he calls his little and his big Eyolf. The
sister in trousers, who embodied his ideal, a woman in male clothes, a
bisexual being which need not be split up at all). “_Love of brothers
and sisters is the only relationship not subject to the law of
transformation._” _Rank_ (_Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage_,
1919, p. 654) and _Pfister_ (_Anwendung der Psychoanalyse in der
Pädagogik und Seelsorge_, p. 72) find the incest motive easily but
overlook the fact that the situation involves the outbreak of
homosexuality and its psychogenesis. It represents a flight from the
sister to man, a wavering homosexuality sublimated into love for the
boy. The drama contains numerous other familiar points well worth
careful analysis. For Almers, his wife, and his child, are the
representatives of the male, female, and infantile components which we
endeavor to synthetize in our character (_trinity_). Regression to the
infantile level sets in with flight from the world (flight to the
solitude of the mountain top). The solitary Ibsen, as road builder,
undertakes to construct a new highway which shall lead up to solitary
heights and does not observe that the road leads really straight back
to the realm of his youth. Somewhere in the vast expanse of his soul
the ‘dead child’ is floating around and staring with wide open eyes
into infinity. A child is killed in this drama. It stands for the
miscarried regression back to infantilism. Childhood is finally
subdued and forgetfulness once more drowns in the soul’s vast expanse
all gnawing and biting reproaches. The memories are all dead ... and
the next drama has for its theme: When the dead awaken. But in little
Eyolf they are already awake.... The dead, whom Ibsen carried in his
breast, the corpse to which Rita refers so often.... The child in him
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