ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has from its very beginning been informed by theatre and the language of the stage. In Shakespeare’s dramas, characters develop—rather than simply unfold—as a result of reconceiving themselves. For the Greeks, the precondition of drama is the human struggle against the divine. Tragedy, then, is a case of rebellion against the gods in which the dramatist and the audience take the side of the rebel. Drama of character represents another shift in the central conflict, the conflict is between two conscious impulses, and the source of the suffering is between a conscious impulse and a repressed one. Thus it is only in neurotics that a struggle can occur of a kind which can be made the subject of a drama; but even in them the dramatist will provoke not merely an enjoyment of the liberation but a resistance to it as well.
