You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
After having spent six weeks reading and re-reading K. R. Eissler's recent book on , I arrived at the last International Psychoanalytic Congress in Vienna unable to think about its content but preoccupied with how it had been done. My puzzlement about this astonishing feat of scholarship and creativity was relieved while I was reading my Congress paper, a clinical report about the analysis of a genius. This patient had confided the secret of such successes to me: work harder than anyone else!
In spite of this illumination, I have undertaken to write a commentary on Eissler's Discourse without making the effort to familiarize myself with the immense critical literature on Hamlet. On the one hand, I trust Eissler's erudition and scholarly reliability, i.e. the thorough and judicious integration of the relevant critical work into the fabric of his book. On the other, I have learnt from him that such a task is endless, so that my available energies should be invested in other ways.
My preparation has been a period of glorious reading, that of the plays of Shakespeare. Fortunately, it has been possible to review the psychoanalytic contributions to the study of his works by turning to Prof. Norman Holland's superb survey (1966). That is all the work required to turn an homme moyen cultivé into an instant expert…. In any case, I do have the advantage of having, within the past two years, studied each of Eissler's