Criticizing the Inner Mind

...By understanding and revealing the "unconscious content" of the play, the critic may help the director stage it in a way that heightens the effect of that content upon the audience...

...His credentials for the task are impressive: By training a teacher and critic of English literature, he is the author of two previous books (on Restoration comedy and on Shakespeare) and has received intensive training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute...

...In the romantic comedies, girls often disguise themselves by dressing as men...

...Nevertheless, there remain significant differences between the vocabulary and techniques of critics who employ relatively conventional methods of interpretation, and psychoanalysts who bring the specialized knowledge of their profession to literary criticism...

...is this seeming transvestism evidence of Shakespeare's latent homosexuality, or merely a convention of presentation...

...But can one...

...Like a dispenser of multi-lingual dictionaries on the Tower of Babel, in Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare Norman Holland mediates between the competing groups...

...While many existing studies of Shakespeare the man may contain insights of this sort, psychoanalysts have all but ignored affective criticism as such...

...Since there were no actresses in Shakespeare's theater, all female roles were played by boys in disguise to begin with...

...he goes on to ask...

...This leaves the psychoanalytic critics one more mind to deal with, the audience's, and Holland thinks that here they might make their most valuable contribution by revealing the psychodynamics of art's "affect...

...Hamlet may indeed desire his mother, but it is not possible to assume that he does...

...The works, says Holland, "tell more than any document can about the infantile wishes still active in his unconscious, and one can infer the actual infantile situation...

...Holland answers the first of these questions affirmatively, but points out that analysts who use this method to locate Shakespeare's supposed homosexuality through the Sonnets or his Oedipal conflicts through Hamlet often ignore factors which may also account for these elements in his works: Literary conventions, for example, have a major role in determining what goes into the plays...

...The first approach, leading to something more like biography than criticism, was the favorite preserve of Freud himself...

...When the psychoanalytic critics turn to the works themselves, still more problems appear...

...The critic of affect assumes the role of the stage director: Involved with what the play means to its audience, he can mediate, as the director does, between the audience and the author...

...Lady Macbeth's...

...The concluding section, "Psychoanalysis, Shakespeare, and the Critical Mind," illustrates the ambitiousness of Holland's endeavor and is the best part of the book...

...The real value of Holland's book may be in leading them to this promising approach, and if psychoanalytic criticism can provide us with fresh and stimulating new productions of Shakespeare's plays, it will surely need little justification on any other grounds...

...More traditional literary critics usually deal with literature itself, with the words on the paper or the play on the stage...

...Through the insights of their discipline, psychoanalytic critics are able to "translate the insights of ordinary critical analysis into the language of our inner mind...

...Holland indicts Ernest Jones on several counts of critical malfeasance, not the least of which is his deducing from facts not given in the plays: "As a child Hamlet had experienced the warmest affection for his mother...

...His psychology is what Shakespeare wanted it to be...

...The summaries, which include various interpretations of Shakespeare's mental personality, abstracted from hints in the plays and poems, and an alphabetically ordered survey of psychoanalytic criticism of each of the works, are cogent and smooth...

...His unconscious emerges from these studies as positively pedestrian...

...Thus he has mastered both vocabularies and is well qualified to speak to both groups...

...Since these characters personify abstract qualities of lawlessness and disorder, they have no psychological motives in the ordinary sense of the word for what they do on stage...

...Shakespeare's...

...His book, however, is addressed to a larger audience: It is for all, a note to the reader explains, who are interested in psychoanalysis, Shakespeare, and "humanistic thought in general...

...And such critics as W. H. Auden, F. L. Lucas, Samuel A. Tannenbaum, and J. I. M. Stewart have made even more systematic use of that theory...

...Statements like this are not so much mistaken as irrelevant, most modern critics would hold, for Hamlet had no childhood...

...it seems to have contained the usual twists and turns we should expect in a man of conventional upbringing and habits, but no dramatic surprises...

...The other major tragedies are also well represented, of course, since they offer the greatest opportunity for the study of individual character...

...Like many of his followers, he was interested in Shakespeare the man and was fond of using the plays as evidence for constructing a clinical picture of Shakespeare's unconscious...

...Nonetheless, much of the conclusion is devoted to the weaknesses of the application of psychoanalytic techniques to literature...

...It contains, among other things, a masterful survey of the critical and esthetic problems which arise when the armament of psychoanalysis is brought to bear upon literature and literary artists...

...And if so, why should one want to...

...In his study of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud gave us a startling, fascinating portrait of a man psychically atypical in the extreme, but the verdict on Shakespeare is that "he enjoyed remarkably good mental health...

...And the author's speculations on such formidable problems as the nature of the creative process, the basis of dramatic catharsis, and the essential difference between comedy and tragedy are better arguments for the psychoanalytic approach than is provided by most of the psychoanalysts themselves...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HORWICH Department of English City College of New York Psychoanalysis has been influencing, even revolutionizing, the study of literature, and particularly of Shakespeare, for many years...

...Holland puts the ratio of hits to misses at about one to three for psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic criticism alike...

...The audience's...

...of the comedies, The Merchant of Venice is easily the most popular, perhaps because it was the subject of Freud's important essay, "The Theme of the Three Caskets...

...Apart from Freud and Jones, the names of Otto Rank, Ernst Kris, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Theodore Reik, K. R. Eissler, Hans Sachs, and Robert Fleiss turn up regularly, together with the critics mentioned earlier...

...indeed, he inveighs against the sort of superficial "reading knowledge" of Freud which passes for expertise among cocktailparty intellectuals...

...Without the heightened sensitivity to the hidden content of words and images which psychoanalytic theory has provided, books like William Empson's Seven Types of A mbiguity and Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us would hardly have been possible...

...Holland accepts the assumption that knowledge about Shakespeare's unconscious is a good thing to have...

...It is the plays, the products of that unconscious, which are the mark of his genius...

...He is not a man but a character in a play, which is, in Holland's words, "an ordered and structured work of art, not like everyday reality...

...But we might well ask whether such information really is valuable...

...The reader may, with Holland's blessing, skip around in these chapters as his interest dictates...

...That his book is technical, and demands a good deal of prior knowledge on the reader's part, Holland freely admits...

...In this connection one thinks of Ben Jonson's "humour" characters who were consciously constructed according to a theory of psychology very different from Freudian psychoanalysis, and of Iago's affinities with the allegorical Vices of medieval drama and narrative...

...Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare is largely an annotated reference work consisting of capsule summaries of almost everything psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic critics have written about Shakespeare and his works, and preceded by an introductory section in which the contributions of Freud alone are evaluated...

...But he handles his own erudition reasonably well, and despite a few lapses into jargon, he is no more arcane than, given the subject, he has to be...

...Turning to the criticism itself, we find that Hamlet has excited by far the most comment, including Ernest Jones' Hamlet and Oedipus, perhaps the best-known examination of literature by a psychoanalyst...

...psychoanalysts deal with men's minds, and Holland feels that most of their difficulties as critics of Shakespeare stem from a confusion over whose mind they are to explore...