Freud and Shakespeare

Sigmund Freud based his psychoanalytic theory of the "Oedipus complex" partly on his reading of the play, Hamlet, conjecturing that William Shakespeare's conflicted feelings about his family had influenced the play's portrayal of Prince Hamlet's psycho-sexual conflicts about his family. Later in life, however, Freud decided that the play had not been written by an actor and businessman from Stratford-on-Avon, as is traditionally believed, but by a nobleman named Edward de Vere who had adopted "William Shakespeare" as a pseudonym. One result of this, Freud thought, was that psychoanalytic theory might have to be modified, perhaps transformed, to fit a changed identity for the world's greatest author. Edward de Vere had a very different life than William Shakspere's (as the actor's name was usually spelled), and Freud thought de Vere's life reflected and elucidated the plays and poems much more than the actor's life. Would a different life and personality for Shakespeare reveal new and different things about the human mind? This book examines Freud's and Shakespeare's works to address that question. In particular, it looks at the relationship between Freud's ideas about the conscious and unconscious mind, and Shakespeare's ideas about man and nature in his works with wilderness settings, including the long narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, and the plays, Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, Timon of Athens, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Shakespeare writes about animal minds as well as human ones, but they didn't play a part in Freud's psychological ideas, although, as a Darwinian evolutionist, Freud believed that the human mind had originated from animal minds, not from divine creation. So Shakespeare's insights into non-human life might indeed have changed Freud' ideas significantly.