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Emily Shortslef, New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains. Edited by James Newlin and James W. Stone, Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 76, Issue 1, Spring 2025, Pages 82–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quaf004
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Psychoanalysis, as think-pieces in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other journalistic outlets have observed, is currently having a renaissance. It’s a particularly opportune moment, then, for the appearance of New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains, described by its co-editors, James Newlin and James W. Stone, as the first major edited collection on psychoanalysis and early modern literature and culture in over two decades (2). Prefaced by a bracing introduction in which Newlin and Stone argue for a return to psychoanalysis in early modern literary studies, the volume’s fourteen chapters aim to demonstrate what psychoanalytically informed approaches can offer a field of scholarship dominated by historicist and empiricist methodologies, in which recent studies of the mind have more often engaged cognitive psychology and neuroscience than Freudian theory.
Two essays discuss the affinities between psychoanalytic clinical practice and the close-reading typical of literary interpretation. Nicholas Bellinson argues that Hamlet’s speeches, from the soliloquies in which he works through his inner conflicts to his enigmatic dialogues with other characters, anticipate the distinctive method of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Richard M. Waugaman, a clinical psychoanalyst, also takes up the analyst–analysand relationship; while literary scholars may balk at his Oxfordian views, they are unlikely to object to his belief that analysts and critics share a responsibility to listen closely to the idiosyncrasies of their patients’ and texts’ language.
