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Slawomir Mrozek is one of the leading Polish playwrights of the twentieth century. His plays are generally satirical in nature and focus on political and moral issues. Tango, written in 1965, is no exception to this scheme. The play deals with the nature of power and its uses as a political tool.
The purpose of this paper is to examine Tango from a Freudian viewpoint. The reading of a basically political play alongside Freud's theories of psychoanalysis may seem incongruous at first; however, Freud does address political issues. The particular example from which I will draw is his discussion of the position of man and society and the development of civilization out of man's primal past in Civilization and its Discontents (1930). The connections between Tango and Freud's later theories are noteworthy, and the play becomes much more meaningful when read in this light.
The process of applying Freudian psychoanalysis to a literary text involves finding the central fantasy in the work, which then sheds its meaning. In his book The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), Norman Holland states that psychoanalysis probes literary works "not so much for a central `point,' as for a central fantasy or daydream ... particular manifestations of which occur all through the text" (7). The central fantasy is one that is imbedded in the unconscious of all people. Unconscious awareness of the fantasy leads to a conscious understanding of what the work means when analyzed on an intellectual plane. A critic may reach a deeper level of understanding if he can uncover the basic fantasy entrenched in the work as well as in his own unconscious. Mrozek's Tango contains at its heart an Oedipal fantasy. One immediately may raise the objection at this point that there is only one son in the play, Arthur. Using Freudian analysis, however, we can postulate a nuclear family using all of the play's characters, not just the actual father, mother, and son.
Holland suggests that psychoanalytic observation shows that "even as adults we tend to respond to others as we responded in our first relations with other people, in other words, as we responded to our family" (46). Certain structural elements of Tango's script confirm this theory-especially those relating to the dynamics between family...