Phantasmagoric Macbeth
This essay traces an isomorphic relation between Shakespearean drama and psychoanalytic theory, through various fantastic reconstructions of central events in Macbeth: regicide, infanticide, birth (especially Caesarean section), nurture, and hallucination. Macbeth is Shakespeare's dramatic vers...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
The University of Chicago Press
1986
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| In: |
English literary renaissance
Year: 1986, Volume: 16, Issue: 3, Pages: 520-549 |
| Further subjects: | B
Girard, René (1923-2015)
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| Online Access: |
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| Summary: | This essay traces an isomorphic relation between Shakespearean drama and psychoanalytic theory, through various fantastic reconstructions of central events in Macbeth: regicide, infanticide, birth (especially Caesarean section), nurture, and hallucination. Macbeth is Shakespeare's dramatic version of the dynamic relation of unconscious process to ordinary thought. In an historical period when fictions of supernatural agency, such as Fate or witches, were beginning to be challenged by emerging notions of individual pathology, Shakespeare re-imagined and re-presented the ambiguous interpénétration of fate and desire. Lady Macbeth's physician, observing in amazement her somnambulism, stands on the threshold of an historical shift from the theology of "possession" to the psychology of "obsession": the diagnosis of "hysteria" is gradually moving from soma to psyche. The play's uncanny insistence on the mysteries of sexuality and (de)generation suggests a consanguinity between the dynamic of conscious and unconsicious, and the dynamic of sexual difference: an analogy explored with equal energy and rigor by both Shakespearean and Freudian models of physchic representation. |
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| Item Description: | BN: 16, HN: 3 |
| ISSN: | 1475-6757 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: English literary renaissance
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1986.tb00920.x |