not interpret Shakespeare any more usefully by applying Freud’s map of the mind or his analytical system to the plays….
For many years I have taught that Freud is essentially prosified Shakespeare: Freud’s vision of human pychology is derived, not altogether unconsciously, from his reading of the plays.
If you extend Shakespeare to include the whole “Western Canon”, then I think Bloom may well be right. Psychoanalysis is a theory of the mind as developed by a highly ambitious man thoroughly at home with all of Western literature from the classical to the modern. As we now know, its supposed grounding in the therapeutic situation, in the rigours of scientific endeavour, is entirely spurious. Freud didn’t cure anyone, or come to his conclusions through the hard work of trial and error. The analytic situation was merely the backdrop for what was really going on: myth-making on a grand scale.
Which explains why among all Freud’s followers, the literary establishment are the most entrenched. It’s just the sort of theory they’d appreciate, because it’s true home is not science, but, precisely, Western literature. That’s why they feel so at home there. It’s Western intellectual and literary thought, as at the end of the 19th century, condensed into one all-encompassing theory. To use it to explain Western literature, as generations of academics have done, following Freud’s example, is to hold up a mirror and believe you’re seeing through a window. It’s an echo chamber for the best that’s been thought and written in Western culture, from sex to death and all points in between. Those who devour Freud’s writings so eagerly do so because they want so badly to believe it all. How wonderful to have such a deeply satisfying theory that gets you from biology to culture in just a few short steps, throws in Sophocles to Shakespeare, Goethe to Nietzsche on the way, and explains it all in what seems to be such a rigorously scientific manner.
What a pity it’s none of it true.
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