This book brings the insights of psychoanalysis to bear on drama in the western dramatic tradition. The authors seek to show that the subtle understanding of conscious and unconscious emotions achieved by psychoanalytic practice can bring new ways of understanding classic works of drama.

This, the latest volume in the Tavistock Clinic Series, is a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of drama and psychoanalysis, written in the lucid and accessible manner that epitomises the Rustins style. These two well-known authors and psychotherapists explore in depth the extent to which psychoanalysis can illuminate and give fresh perspective to areas of drama, and how far this extends in the other direction. Concentrating on well-known playwrights including Ibsen, Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, this well-researched and fascinating book