On June 12th we will be hosting a workshop on Shakespeare’s late play Pericles, entitled, ‘Uncanny Shakespeare: Distance and Reconciliation in Pericles’. In this blog we reflect on the long standing partnership between the Freud Museum, The Faction, and The University of Bournemouth’s Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice (CESJ), in which we have been exploring the affinities between Freud and Shakespeare.
In partnership with the award-winning theatre company The Faction and Bournemouth University’s Centre for the Study of Conflict, Emotion and Social Justice (CESJ), here at the Freud Museum we have been exploring the affinities between the creator of psychoanalysis and the great English playwright. Freud was fascinated by the works of Shakespeare. The ‘man from Stratford’ was his most quoted author apart from Goethe and he often credited him with a psychological insight that seemed to prefigure the findings of psychoanalysis. If the ‘Oedipus complex’ has become a staple of pop-psychology, Freud also compared Sophocles’ tragic hero to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose fantasies of incest and patricide suffered the fate of repression. The famous ‘philosophical’ soliloquies were not so much reflections on the meaning of existence, but symptoms of repressed desire; the brooding hero, ‘sickled o’er the palm of thought’, was trapped in the conflict of unconscious Oedipal longings: ‘thus conscious doth make cowards of us all’.
In the Summer of 2023, we brought the bard’s great Jacobean tragedy Macbeth under the Freudian microscope, by focussing on the theme of shame as a driver for violence. Surprisingly, Freud devoted more ink to Macbeth than he did to Hamlet. In ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Analysis’, he zoned in on the figures of the eponymous regicide, Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth describing them as two halves of a divided psyche. Exploring scenes from the play in the workshop, guided by Professor Candida Yates and Professor Roman Gerodimos, it soon became clear why Freud had viewed Macbeth as such fertile ground for psychoanalytic exploration. Under the directorship of the Faction’s Mark Leipacher, the play was distilled down to its essence, a two-hander, alive with uncertainty, tension and extreme emotional states. As audience members we were brought to the limits of human interaction, to humiliation, despair and rage. We were encouraged to think of new shades of meaning, to encounter the plasticity of Shakespeare’s language and play with possible interpretations, framed by the principles of a psychosocial environment. The outcome of the workshop was experienced as cathartic, not through some restoration of the status-quo after an affect-ridden roller-coaster ride, but more in the feeling of fresh insight gained through the generation of shared meaning, both ‘fair and foul’.
As part of the reflective process after the event we recorded a podcast that was released in the Freud in Focus series, the material from which was turned into a documentary film entitled ‘Stepped in Blood’, directed in Roman Gerodimos, which has won the Award of Merit in the Public Service Programming / PSA category at the IndieFEST Film Awards.
This Summer we are tackling one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. If Macbeth allowed us to plumb the depths of shame driven lived experience, Pericles offers a different perspective on the human condition. By concentrating on notions of distance and reconciliation, we will encounter a destabilising and uneasy textual effect. The Faction’s innovative approach to the play, allows for an amplification of the theme of distance; Pericles is set across the Mediterranean, and scenes from the play will be performed both in the language(s) of the places in which they are set, and in the ‘original’ Shakespearean English. This unique production invites us to engage with communication at its limits; Just what are we hearing when we are addressed in an unfamiliar language? How can meaning be expressed bodily? When does sound become language? Key to these questions is the theme of the Freudian Uncanny, that which is familiar can also become unfamiliar, a change of perspective can open up a plethora of possibilities. It also teaches us to allow a space for uncertainty, to experience the power of ‘not-knowing’, and that being able to bear the burden of doubt, rather than pronounce judgement, can offer us a vision for a more tolerant society in the face of so much contemporary polarisation.
All of these themes, along with themes of displacement and alienation will be discussed in a workshop environment, in response to the scenes performed, and the audience will be part of the shared meaning making process. It feels fitting that this workshop should be held in Freud’s garden, a place of refuge for one of the most humane thinkers of the 20th century, who had escaped the tyranny which had enveloped his homeland, to live (and die) in freedom.
