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Minds met and a collaborative paper was born. For a long time Florence Bonime had questioned the validity of psychiatric dissection of literary characters. She found in Marianne Eckardt a responsive listener who had, for an equally long time, objected to the inappropriate application of our psychoanalytic understanding to nonclinical matters. The present format evolved spontaneously: Part 1, a presentation by Bonime regarding some dramatic techniques which distinguish written characters from alive human beings who have acquired individuality from the spontaneous play of natural forces. Part 2, Eckardt's argument emphasizes the psychoanalyst's traditional attraction to, as well as misuse of, the dramatic medium.
“We tend to forget,” Albert Hutter wrote (1975), “that Hamlet is not a living being, that he exists only through language and our imaginative interaction with that language.” Hutter's statement is hardly arguable. No matter how many actors play the part, and no