Dream Sequences in Shakespeare: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

This book takes a new approach to Shakespeare’s plays, exploring them as dream-thought in the modern psychoanalytic sense of unconscious thinking.

Through his commitment to poetic language, Shakespeare offers images and dramatic sequences that illustrate fundamental developmental conflicts, the solutions for which are not preconceived but evolve through the process of dramatisation. In this volume, Meg Harris Williams explores the fundamental distinction between the surface meanings of plot or argument and the deep grammar of dreamlife, applied not only to those plays known as ’dream-plays’ but also to critical sequences throughout Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

Through a post-Kleinian model based on the thinking of Bion, Meltzer, and Money-Kyrle, this book sheds new light on both Shakespeare’s own relation to the play and on the identificatory processes of the playwright, reader, or audience. Dream Sequences in Shakespeare is important reading for psychoanalysts, playwrights, and students.

Meg Harris Williams’ writings focus on the relation between psychoanalysis, literature, and aesthetic experience. She teaches internationally and is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic, an honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California, and Editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. Her books include: Inspiration in Milton and Keats; The Apprehension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer); A Strange Way of Killing; Five Tales from Shakespeare; The Vale of Soulmaking; Bion’s Dream; The Aesthetic Development; Hamlet in Analysis - A Trial of Faith; The Becoming Room; and The Art of Personality.