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For anyone interested in psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, this book is a delightful read. After a series of analyses of a selection of characters in Shakespeare's plays, Krims makes a foray into that increasingly attractive and popular realm among analysts of reported self-analysis. In reading Shakespeare at this moment in his life, he states, Much Ado about Nothing “was therapeutic in the strictly psychoanalytic sense of the word for I had learned something new and helpful about myself, something I had not known before. The text had analyzed me!” (p. xv).
In this collection of mainly previously published papers, Krims writes throughout in an engaging, straightforward, non-technical style. For those interested in the process and rationale for applying psychoanalysis to literature, he presents a persuasive, carefully worked out set of principles:
“Although we cannot apply the psychoanalytic method to texts as we do with real people, we can apply psychoanalytic theory—the body of knowledge derived from the psychoanalytic method—to enhance our understanding of texts.” He also says that although we do not have the free associations of the characters or authors, “if we accept that unconscious processes are dynamically active, and that authors' intuition enables them to represent the mind in all its depth and complexity, then it follows that unconscious processes must also be represented somewhere in the sequence of words that authors mark down on the page…. If we employ close reading of the text—we reduce the danger of personally motivated diversions derailing scholarly literary criticism” (p. xvii). Finally, Krims acknowledges that he works in the tradition of literary criticism introduced by Norman Holland, one of the first and most extensive psychoanalytic writers in the field of Shakespeare studies. This is the psychological form of what is designated reader-response criticism (Tyson, 2006), in which the important meanings of a text are to be found in an analysis of the