Psychoanalysis is concerned with the vicissitudes of life: loss, grief, mourning, guilt and also with reparation and creativity, with death and rebirth, as is the work of Shakespeare.
A short collection from the British Psychoanalytical Society's Psychoanalytic Ideas series, this volume pairs analytic concepts with Shakespeare's plays. The essays range across six of his works: King Lear, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, The Tempest, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Across the collection, the reading treats characters and plots as studies in loss, grief, mourning, guilt, and the movement toward reparation and creativity.
The argument running through the collection is that Shakespeare stages the same internal predicaments that surface in the consulting room, and that his drama holds them with a precision analytic language often reaches for. Individual chapters take up grief and creativity, shame and guilt and forgiveness in King Lear, and the making of art in later life, closing on Prospero.
For clinicians, the essays offer worked examples of applying analytic thinking to dense dramatic material, and a vocabulary for the theatrical dimension of transference and staged inner conflict.
About the authors
Inge Wise
Inge Wise is a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and works as a psychoanalyst within the psychoanalytic tradition. She trained in marital and adult psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and she works in private practice while lecturing and teaching in the United Kingdom and abroad. She served as a consultant to a research project on adolescent identities in post-Communist countries. Her editorial work in the Psychoanalytic Ideas series includes editing the volume Adolescence (2000) and co-editing Psychoanalytic Ideas and Shakespeare with Maggie Mills.
Maggie Mills
Maggie Mills co-edited "Psychoanalytic Ideas and Shakespeare" (Karnac, 2006) with Inge Wise, part of the Psychoanalytic Ideas series. According to her publisher, she studied Jurisprudence at Oxford, trained at the Royal Free Hospital and worked as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the NHS before moving to private practice. She qualified as a psychoanalyst and became Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Syracuse. She helped found a Brixton psychotherapy service for women from ethnic minorities, worked with Newpin, and published on maternal depression, domestic violence and parent-child relationships.
Details
- 2006
- Karnac
- Karnac
- 154
- 9781855753341