André Green
Seductive Spells A Psychoanalytic Reading of Shakespeare Publication date : April 7, 2005
What, asks André Green, can we learn from Shakespeare about desire, seduction and love? What do his plays and poems reveal to us - men and women of the 21st century - about ourselves and about our most intimate, often unconscious, experiences? What is it that makes Shakespeare so modern? How can we link Shakespeare with Freud and psychoanalysis?
Green's acute and rigorous analysis of the plays and poems of the greatest writer of the English language provide the impetus for a deep analysis of love: natural magic and the role of illusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the spell cast by the unfamiliar and the power of idealisation in Antony and Cleopatra; learned magic and the power of dreams in The Tempest; and supernatural charm and the stratagems of the unconscious in the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle.
What is love, asks Green. Is it an extravaganza? A tragedy? A romance? A poem? Is it all of these things at once, as Shakespeare so admirably demonstrated and as the father of psychoanalysis was to show several centuries later?
This is a powerful study of the nature of love by one of France's greatest living psychoanalysts; it is also a brilliant demonstration of what literature still has to offer us.
André Green is a psychoanalyst and a former president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, of which he continues to be a member. He is the author of many highly regarded works, including La Causalité psychique, Les Chaînes d'Eros and La Pensée clinique.
Green's acute and rigorous analysis of the plays and poems of the greatest writer of the English language provide the impetus for a deep analysis of love: natural magic and the role of illusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the spell cast by the unfamiliar and the power of idealisation in Antony and Cleopatra; learned magic and the power of dreams in The Tempest; and supernatural charm and the stratagems of the unconscious in the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle.
What is love, asks Green. Is it an extravaganza? A tragedy? A romance? A poem? Is it all of these things at once, as Shakespeare so admirably demonstrated and as the father of psychoanalysis was to show several centuries later?
This is a powerful study of the nature of love by one of France's greatest living psychoanalysts; it is also a brilliant demonstration of what literature still has to offer us.
André Green is a psychoanalyst and a former president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, of which he continues to be a member. He is the author of many highly regarded works, including La Causalité psychique, Les Chaînes d'Eros and La Pensée clinique.