Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Accents on Shakespeare)-[Philip Armstrong].pdf

ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
General editor: TERENCE HAWKES
Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis
The link between psychoanalysis as a mode of interpretation and
Shakespeare’s works is well known. But rather than merely putting
Shakespeare on the couch, Philip Armstrong focuses on the
complex, fascinating and fruitful mutual relationship between
Shakespeare’s texts and psychoanalytic theory. He shows how the
theories of Freud, Rank, Jones, Lacan, Erikson and others are
themselves in large part the product of reading Shakespeare; and
that, in turn, their theories shape our interactions with literary
texts in ways we may not recognise.
Armstrong provides an introductory cultural history of the rela-
tionship between psychoanalytic concepts and Shakespearean
texts. This is played out in a variety of expected and unexpected
contexts, including:
• the early modern stage
• Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet
• Freud’s analytic session
• the Parisian intellectual scene
• the contact zone of pre-apartheid South Africa
• the virtual spaces of TV, PC, and cinema.
Philip Armstrong teaches at the University of Canterbury in
Christchurch, New Zealand. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Visual
Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze, and has also published
articles on New Zealand literature.
ACCENTS ON SHAKESPEARE
General editor: TERENCE HAWKES
It is more than twenty years since the New Accents series helped
to establish ‘theory’ as a fundamental and continuing feature
of the study of literature at the undergraduate level. Since then,
the need for short, powerful ‘cutting edge’ accounts of -
ments on new developments has increased sharply. In the case
of Shakespeare, books with this sort of focus have not been readily
available. Accents on Shakespeare aims to supply them.
Accents on Shakespeare volumes will either ‘apply’ theory, or
broaden and adapt it in order to connect with concrete teaching
concerns. In the process, they will also reflec