Psychoanalysis and the Comedia: Skepticism and the Paternal Function in La vida es sueño

The essay advances a pragmatist approach to psychoanalytic criticism, one that eschews using psychoanalysis as a framework within which to read a text, preferring rather to consider it as a vocabulary in which to pose a question to a text or a literary tradition. In considering La vida es sueño, this approach leads the author to the question, "How does one found a moral order in a skeptical universe?" His analysis leads to the conclusion that what psychoanalysis can learn from Calderón is that, in the modern world, individual identity is founded on a sense of obligation to the law, which in turn is established in the individual through an acceptance of a fundamental skepticism with regard to the most basic issues of power and identity.