Preface

The leitmotif of this issue of American Imago is imagination. That Steven Groarke's study of Charles Rycroft takes its epigraph from A Midsummer Night's Dream naturally prompted me to juxtapose it with Thomas R. Frosch's dazzling essay on Shakespeare's play. Rycroft “In and the Romantic Imagination,” Groarke, a scholar and psychotherapist undertaking clinical training at the British Psychoanalytical Society, shows how Rycroft, both implicitly and explicitly, drew on Wordsworth and Coleridge to articulate a vision of psychoanalysis that differed sharply from Freud's in key respects: in its valuing of illusion and “the creative imperative,” and in its conceptualizing of the primary and secondary processes not as manifestations of an “irreducible heterogeneity” in “our mental attitude towards reality,” but as “coeval, complementary, and continuous” modes of thinking and being in the world. Rycroft's reorientation of psychoanalysis has much in common with other luminaries of the British Independent tradition, such as Winnicott and Marion Milner, but Groarke highlights the intellectual rigor with which Rycroft propounds his essentially Romantic belief in the possibility of an “aboriginal mutuality” in the mother-child relationship, as a consequence of which the infant—and later the adult—“feels at home in a world that makes sense.”

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that I thought I knew very well, but from Thomas Frosch's disquisition on the theme of the “missing child” I learned many things that had eluded me before. It was eye-opening, for instance, to be reminded that Egeus—the name given by Shakespeare to Hermia's oppressive father, whose authority is curbed by Theseus—is in Greek mythology also the name of Theseus's own father, whose death (as Ovid tells it) Theseus inadvertently causes “when he forgets to signal his safe return to port and his father in grief jumps to his death into a sea thereafter called the Aegean.” Similarly, I had not previously encountered a