Hamlet on the Couch: What Shakespeare Taught Freud

Hamlet on the Couch weaves a close reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a large variety of contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological theory, looking at the interplay of ideas between the two.

Hamlet can be read almost as a psychoanalytic case study and be used to understand and illustrate a range of core psychoanalytic concepts. Covering such basic psychoanalytic concepts as identity, transference and countertransference, the ‘good-enough’ mother, the compulsion to repeat and the death ...