The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays. By Martin S. Bergmann. London:  Karnac Books, 2013,  268 pp.

Shakespeare has played a seminal role in psychoanalytic history. Hamlet, Richard III, and the Macbeths were the models for some of Freud's most influential case studies and theories of human behavior. Freud's masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, mentions Hamlet; King Lear; Macbeth; Othello; The Merchant of Venice; Julius Caesar; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer's Night's Dream; Henry IV, Part I and Part II; Henry VI, Part 3; and Timon of Athens (Garber, 2004, p. 33).

In The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays, the late Martin Bergmann, the author of The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Technique, Generations of the Holocaust, and The Anatomy of Loving attempts to elucidate the buried emotional conflicts that led to Shakespeare writing his plays. Bergmann's book is a wide-ranging study of impressive breadth. He discusses sixteen plays and presents a clear account of traditional psychoanalytic theories of intrapsychic conflict and the oedipal complex, masochism, and paranoia.

The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays reveals possibilities and pitfalls in psychoanalytic criticism. In contrast to Harold Bloom, “who used Shakespeare's astonishing capacity to understand to deprecate Freud” (p. xx), Bergmann aims to show “that psychoanalysis made it possible to understand aspects of Shakespeare not available before Freud” (p. xx). The difference between a psychoanalytic approach and a nonpsychoanalytic one, in Bergmann's view, is illustrated in Othello. Whereas critics like Coleridge (1818) argue that Iago suffered from “motiveless malignancy” (p. 171), psychoanalysts strive to illuminate concealed motives.

The two main problems with Bergmann's book are revealed in the title—The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays. Bergmann defines the unconscious as the hidden intrapsychic problems that caused Shakespeare to write the plays. This formulation treats unconsciousness as a single, homogeneous entity. It is more accurate