Main description:

This book brings the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on drama in the western dramatic tradition. Plays which are discussed in detail include works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, and Beckett among others. The authors seek to show that the subtle understanding of conscious and unconscious emotions achieved by psychoanalytic practice can

Contents:

Series Editors' Preface -- Preface -- Introduction: theatre, mind, and society -- Medea: love and violence split asunder -- Ion: an Athenian "family romance" -- Shakespeare's Macbeth: a marital tragedy -- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: further meditations on marriage -- What Ibsen knew -- Chekhov: the pain of intimate relationships -- Oscar Wilde's glittering surface -- Arthur Miller: fragile masculinity in American society -- Beckett: dramas of psychic catastrophe -- Psychic spaces in Harold Pinter's work