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The first in a new series from the publisher Karnac, this book by Margaret and Michael Rustin is the result of the authors' long experience of their passion and enjoyment of the theatre being put to the service of many years teaching in the field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The Rustins start from the consideration that
drama (both in its ancient and in its modern version) and psychoanalysis share the same passion for truth. A difference, however, exists: drama arrives at its truths by imaginatively constructing a fictitious world; psychoanalysis (like sociology) works by describing, categorising and clarifying the connections between phenomena.
This difference in method does not alter the essence of the change that drama and psychoanalysis work in their participators' inner worlds. ‘Catharsis’, the movement of the emotional transformations that drama arouses in the spectator, is very close to the ‘learning from experience’ of analytic work, as theorised by Bion. Special emphasis is given to the concept developed by the literary critic Raymond Williams: ‘structures of feeling’. This concept describes the tension between received ways of thinking and representation and actions and emergent aspirations that are not properly understood by the subject. According to the authors, the ‘structures of the mind’ connote the type of compromise between thought and emotion that every single writer creatively establishes within his work.
The space of the theatre is the space of the mind. Psychoanalysis and drama come together in their knowledge, and one can shed light on the ‘insights’ of the other and vice versa. The authors' objective is to show that the distinction between the various feelings and the understanding of the unconscious dimension of motivations today made available by psychoanalysis can illuminate and enrich our understanding of drama.
The dramatists considered are Euripides, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Wilde, Miller, Beckett and