Shakespeare The Shrink

June 23, 1999

Among many scholars it has become commonplace to acknowledge that Shakespeare preceded Freud by several centuries in understanding our guilts, resentments, angers, hungers, power-seeking, obsessions – our human condition. Harold Bloom, a lifelong teacher of Shakespeare, said in an interview, “I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare, but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud ... the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean ... what we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention, and for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it.”

Harold Bloom also writes in his massive work, SHAKESPEARE THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN (p. 17), “[Shakespeare] extensively informs the language we speak, his principal characters have become our mythology, and he, rather than his involuntary follower, Freud, is our psychologist.”

Years before I had Bloom’s scholarly comments before me, I sensed that Lady MacBeth dramatized guilt; Lear was willing to give much but not his power; Hamlet, whose inner life has been and always will be the inspiration as well as the enigma of innumerable PhD theses; Falstaff, the roisterer, cynical about many of our supposed prized values – the list could go on and on.

But it is not only in the presentations of Shakespeare’s men and women on stage that he-anticipated Freud, Adler, Jung and their compeers. But also, his words are specific. For example, Cassius talking to Brutus (JULIUS CAESAR, Act 1, Sc. 2) says:

“Therefore, good Brutus, be prepared to hear
And since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I your glass
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.”

Read that again, particularly, “Since you know you cannot see yourself So well as by reflection, I, your glass will modestly discover to yourself, that of yourself which you yet know not of.”

Even in Shakespearian Elizabethan cadence, this could be the opening remarks of a therapist today as he or she greets a client for the first time. Many, many years ago when I did a Senior paper on Carl Rogers’ therapeutic method, if I had quoted Cassius’ words to Brutus, I’ll wager that I would have received a higher mark.

I don’t know whether Shakespeare can be classified as a psycho-drama playwright and producer, psychologist, psychoanalyst, or all three, so I just called this piece, SHASKESPEARE THE SHRINK.

I recommend his many works. If you are alert and honest with yourself, somewhere in the plays and sonnets you will find yourself dramatized – hang-ups, neuroses, repressions and all.