My first thanks go to my students, who participated in the seminar that carried the title of this book. Their readings of the plays and their willingness to speculate about the role of the unconscious in each play became its foundation. The students arrived at their own interpretations of every play and then criticised my interpretations. They convinced me that reading Shakespeare's plays contributes depth to a therapist's psychoanalytic education.
My gratitude also goes to my wife, who read every chapter and made many valuable suggestions. I also profited from discussing my findings with my son Michael. Special thanks are due to my assistant, Karen Duda, who typed and retyped these chapters and shared her interest in this book.
I owe a very different kind of thanks to the Shakespeare scholars, whose books I read and consulted. I often disagreed with their conclusions, but their work helped me to reach a wider and deeper understanding of the plays. The books I regularly consulted were Shakespearean Tragedy (A. C. Bradley, 1904), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (H. Bloom, 1998), Shakespeare's Language (F. Kermode, 2000), Shakespeare After All (M. Garber, 2004), Will in the World (S. Greenblatt, 2004), Shakespeare's Philosophy (C. McGinn, 2006), and Shakespeare the Thinker (A. D. Nuttal, 2007).
It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the help I received from Dr. Catherine Haran (Mrs. Otto Kernberg). She was visiting her relatives in Ireland and mentioned this book, and they told her about a book published by J. C. Bucknill, M.D., FRC, written in 1861, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare. One of the aims of my book is to illustrate how differently psychoanalysis enables us to understand Shakespeare's plays and Bucknill's book is astonishing because it shows how deeply a psychiatrist writing before Freud understood Shakespeare.