IN 1904 LONDON'S theater-going crowd thrilled to performance of Scottish novelist and playwright James Barrie's delightful musical, Peter Pan Or Boy Who Would Not Grow Up. Initially presented on December 27, 1904, it was published as short story Peter and Wendy in 1911 and as a play in 1928. Translated into many languages, tale of boy who flew from adversity continues to fascinate both children and their parents in numerous Broadway performances and in Steven Spielberg's 1991 motion picture, Hook. It is not known whether Sigmund Freud ever read Peter Pan or saw it performed in Vienna, Berlin, or elsewhere. Probably most brilliant man of twentieth century, Freud virtually single-handedly (or single-mindedly) created psychoanalysis, branch of human sciences most useful for individual self-understanding, creativity, and insight. does not mention play in his published works or correspondence. Nonetheless, Freud was as preoccupied with idea of man flying as feisty urchin in feathered cap. But for father of psychoanalysis, possibilities of human flight inspired neither joy nor celebration but fear. Freud's most recent biographer, Peter Gay, observes that he refused to leave Austria despite Nazi threat after Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, partly because he dreaded airplane travel. He had tried it once, in 1930, but would not again (Freud, 594). Similarly, renowned German Jewish psychoanalyst Erich Fromm emphasizes Freud's fear of traveling alone by railroad or on long trips, arguing that it reveals his abnormally strong mother attachment and dependence on others for approval, protection, and admiration: Traveling is often a symbol of leaving security of mother and home, of being independent, cutting one's roots (17-18). Fromm argues that Freud's theory of infantile sexuality and Oedipus complex, which reduced complex emotions between child and parent to innate drives and physical passion, as well as his travelphobia, were unconscious defense mechanisms by which Freud denied his overwhelming dependence on mother. According to Fromm, alleged premature waning of Freud's sexual potency and his insistence on intellectual sublimation rather than unrestrained exercise of libido indicated fear of sexual spontaneity. This anxiety, rooted in a mother fixation and exacerbated by an aversion to contraceptives, deprived him of full marital sexual gratification. Perhaps traumatic childhood experiences caused Freud's sexual inhibitions. Noting Freud's lack of passion for his wife Martha, Fromm depicts him as incapable of loving anyone. For Freud, romance was merely an ephemeral ego trip. According to Fromm, relationship to his wife, after ardor of first conquest had burned out, was apparently that of a faithful but somewhat distant husband (31). Like Philip Rieff, only negatively, Fromm judges Freud a prude who, though the great spokesman for sex, was a typical puritan. To him [Freud], aim of life for a civilized person was to suppress his emotional and sexual impulses, and at expense of this suppression, to lead a civilized life. It is uncivilized mob which is not capable of such a sacrifice (33). Depicting Freud as essentially a neurotic Victorian, Fromm claims that self-analysis failed to improve his gloomy marriage. had a relatively weak interest in women, and ... little sexual drive (28). Describing one of Freud's dreams, about a wilted flower pressed against a book's pages as a bookmark, Fromm renders following interpretation: He [Freud] lets [flowers] dry up, and makes it object of scientific examination.... made an object of science, but in his life it remained dry and sterile. His scientific-intellectual interests were stronger than his eros; they smothered it, and at same time became a substitute for his experience of love (28). Fromm argues that Freud's theory that civilization and culture were based on sexual repression defensively invoked his ascetic, inhibited lifestyle as a paradigm, rationalizing and extenuating his fear of sex and apathy toward eroticism. …

WILLIAM INGE HAS BEEN called first authentic Midwestern playwright (McClure, 4), but he can also be viewed as a significant voice the 1950s. Writing about small-town life in Kansas and Oklahoma, Inge embraced domestic realism at a time when domesticity itself was glorified--when Americans, perhaps in response to the Cold War threat, increasingly sought security through the home and family. Inge's major plays are especially revealing the 1950s in that they emphasize the traditional role mothers, as well as the power that mothers are capable wielding within a family. Indeed, critics such as Ralph Voss and R. Baird Shuman have pointed to the central importance mother figures in Inge's dramas and to the author's unresolved Oedipal feelings for his own dominating mother, Maude Gibson Inge. Yet Inge also devotes considerable attention in his plays to childless women--to wives who may have wanted to become mothers, but who for one reason or another have remained childless. Whether it was because Inge himself had no children (he was a homosexual who never married), or because his eccentric Aunt Helen was childless and became an intriguing personality to him (Voss, 86-87), Inge was keenly sensitive to the plight childless women during a period when motherhood was virtually mandated for them. Not only does Inge reveal the troubles caused by thwarted maternal desires, but he suggests that social pressures to have children have exacerbated the problem, leading childless women to view themselves as abnormal and inferior. present study will focus on four childless women in Inge's major plays: Lola Delaney, the wife the alcoholic chiropractor Doc Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba (1950); Helen Potts, the kindly neighbor the Owens family in Picnic (1953); Grace, the owner the dingy Kansas cafe in Bus Stop (1955); and Lottie Lacey, Cora Flood's garrulous sister from Oklahoma City in Dark at the Top the Stairs (1957). Ranging in age from thirty-eight to sixty, these characters generally fit the negative stereotype childless women that prevailed during the post-war era, a stereotype which, to some extent, still persists today. In order to understand Inge's dramas, one must appreciate the family-centered culture the period in which they were written. During the 1950s American women were taught to find fulfillment almost exclusively through marriage and motherhood. No matter what their background or educational training, women were expected to become diligent housewives and devoted mothers. As David Halberstam notes, a new definition femininity evolved after World War II: To be feminine, the American woman first and foremost did not work. If she did, that made her competitive with men, which made her hard and aggressive and almost surely doomed to loneliness. Instead she devotedly raised her family, supported her husband, kept her house spotless and efficient, got dinner ready on time, and remained attractive and optimistic; each hair was in place. (590) Women's magazines the day, as well as popular television programs like Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show, reinforced the notion that a woman's proper place was in the home, and that her chief purpose in life was to nurture children. This glorification motherhood was illustrated during an episode the I Love Lucy Show in 1953, when Lucy had a baby and two million more people watched the show than Eisenhower's inauguration the next day (Johnston, 204). In 1956 a Life Magazine article even claimed that of all the accomplishments the American woman, the one she brings off with the most spectacular success is having babies (Miller and Nowack, 155). During the baby boom the fifties, American women gave birth to over 76,000,000 babies--living up to the demands the feminine mystique which Betty Frieden so aptly described (Johnston, 219). …