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Psyche and symbol in Shakespeare is one of those analytically-orientated studies of literature that create more mystification than enlightenment. The reason for this, it seems to me, lies in the fact that the author makes it his task to search out and uncover ‘the basic emotions’ (p. 2), to ‘interpret an archetype of response’ (pp. 1-2) and that he seems to believe this can be done by translating—or reducing—the infinitely rich and image-full vocabulary of Shakespeare down to a few archetypal entities.
As I feel personally out of sympathy with such an approach, it might be more useful if I confine myself to a few remarks which may be relevant to the general problem of literary criticism by analysts.
Dr Aronson criticizes, quite correctly, Freud's analyses of, for instance, Hamlet, because they leave the reader wondering whether the interpretations refer to Shakespeare's unconscious, to Hamlet's unconscious, or whether they are in fact Freud's own projections. And yet the same criticism could be levelled against Aronson himself, for he too, seems to impose on Shakespeare, or on his characters, his own assumptions, his own model of the psyche and indeed his own language and lore. And yet Brutus' ‘monstrous apparition’ or Macbeth's ‘floating dagger’ visions are surely infinitely more evocative and revealing than any reductive description of them as ‘archetypes’ or as ‘dramatizations of the unconscious’ (p. 25). Such descriptions drain the image of its very sap and power, and one's empathy is strangulated. Indeed such an approach is really the sort of ‘abstraction’ for which Morris Philipson has criticized both Freud and Jung.
But, we may ask, does such reductive interpreting perhaps advance our understanding of any particular work? I doubt it; because such interpretations are still in terms of content only; they take little account of process and of the dynamic interaction of the various constituents of the psyche, conscious as well as unconscious, infantile as well as ad