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The publication of this book should remove any lingering doubts as to the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to Shakespearean scholarship. Shakespeare pointed Freud to some of his key insights about the mind. In turn, psychoanalysis has helped illuminate the astonishing complexity of Shakespeare, arguably the greatest creative writer in history. Carolyn Brown calls psychoanalysis “one of the largest bodies of criticism of Shakespeare,” and one that has “produced some of the most probing analyses of Shakespeare's texts” (p. 10). So Shakespeare should remain a major topic in applied psychoanalysis. As Brown writes:
Psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare in this period [until the 1980s] rely primarily on Freudian theory and offer amazingly insightful interpretations of characters and actions that stumped readers for many years. They illustrate the richness of Shakespeare's knowledge of the human mind and show that Freud will always provide a gateway into the depths of his characters. [p. 39]
Clinical psychoanalysis can be enriched by the close study of Shakespeare's works, just as its insights can likewise inform our reading of Shakespeare. For example, Shakespeare seemed to know just how often we cope with unwanted traits in ourselves by projecting them onto others. This may be one reason he fashioned his plays as what Hamlet famously termed “mirrors,” so we would see ourselves reflected in his characters. Seeing oneself reflected in the mirror of an unappealing character potentially