Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (review)

If a reviewer were tempted to characterize the relationship between psychoanalysis and Shakespeare as a marriage, she would have to say that, according to Armstrong, this marriage cannot be saved. Nor should it, he argues, because its conceptual foundation is inherently shaky and its current uses in popular culture only replicate a retrograde normative sexual and social agenda. Given the context of the series in which it appears, Routledge's New Accents on Shakespeare, this position is predictable, but the book is nonetheless intelligent, provocative, and challenging and may well serve to reopen debate over this long-lasting but always vexed relationship.

Armstrong divides the book into two sections. The first, "Shakespeare in Psycho-analysis," treats Shakespeare as "both subject to psychoanalysis and a constitutive presence in psychoanalysis" from Freud's formulation of the Oedipus complex on. The second, "Psychoanalysis out of Shakespeare" deals with some widely disparate forms of contemporary interaction between Shakespeare and psychoanalysis: theories and representations of memory, psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare, psychoanalytic narratives in popular culture Shakespeare films. Armstrong begins by portraying A.C. Bradley's psychologistic reading of Hamlet as an "epistemological niche" for early psychoanalysis, in making Hamlet's character "an internal store of secrets to be discovered" (5, 17). Freud, Bradley's contemporary, anxious to provide empirical evidence to support his controversial theories, turned to Shakespeare as a source of cultural capital for the beleaguered, emergent field of psychoanalysis. Thus arose what Shoshana Felman has termed the inter-implication of Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, a kind of Möbius strip in which Freud's "discovery" of the Oedipus complex can be "confirmed" by Greek legend and Shakespearean tragedy, which then can be understood at their deepest levels only through psychoanalysis—for which Freud claims "an equally universal validity" (Freud, quoted in Armstrong, 20). This critique is cogent. But can any hermeneutic system find an Archimedean lever totally outside the culture in which it is produced—an axiom invulnerable to and independent of that culture's self-understanding? The value of a specific critical approach lies in what it enables us to see at a given moment rather than in a theoretical consistency capable of transcending that moment.

On what historicizing can do to or for psychoanalytic interpretation of Shakespeare Armstrong's own stance vacillates. In this first chapter, he envisions a process whereby "new historical [sic], cultural materialist and postcolonial approaches to reading Shakespeare have much to offer psychoanalysis—and perhaps something to gain from it, too" (49). But he never addresses criticism that has drawn both on psychoanalysis and on these approaches. Rather, he reserves for thorough examination a few explicitly psychoanalytic critics (including this reviewer). Many highly regarded and influential Shakespearean critics have appropriated psychoanalytic ideas, sometimes without identifying them as such, in a nondogmatic, strategic way to produce interpretations that have gained much currency. By the end of Armstrong's book, however, any hope for such fruitful interchange between psychoanalysis and other approaches has vanished.

Part I continues with a chapter on the centrality of Hamlet to Lacan's theory of subjectivity, in which Armstrong lucidly explicates the major concepts by focusing on Lacan's readings of four salient moments in the play. At the same time, Armstrong adeptly situates Lacan in the historical development of psychoanalysis and also gives an account of his shift to a concern with the "real" as opposed to the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" in his engagement with King Lear. Shakespeareans who aren't up on Lacan may find this chapter a useful introduction.

The familiar Freud-Lacan/Vienna-Paris trajectory is then interestingly derailed, "In Johannesburg," by an examination of Wulf Sachs's importation of psychoanalysis into a postcolonial context. Sachs, a Lithuanian-Jewish émigré, was a medical doctor whose ethnic origins and political sympathies led him to work among blacks in the slums of Johannesburg. He was also a pioneer in establishing Freudian psychoanalysis in South Africa during the...