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Publisher’s Note

The intricate relationship between psychoanalytic theory and theater has become a source of passionate fascination for both psychoanalysts and literary critics. The works of André Green, Norman Holland and, on purely clinical and theoretical grounds, Joyce McDougall’s come immediately to mind. Theater offers an “imaginal” space within which the imaginary becomes embodied as stage, plot, and character. That is due mainly to the theatrical presence defining itself as absence. It is precisely this intermediary zone of presence as absence that constitutes the truth of the imaginary in theater. The psychoanalyst regards this intermediary zone as extremely compelling and fertile for analytic research.

As its subtitle makes clear, French psychiatrist Yves Thoret’s La Théâtralité is a Freudian study. It is not, however, Thoret’s aim to return to the psychoanalysis of characters in plays. He focuses on the relationship between theatrical stage and fantasy, between theatrical performance and primal scene(s). He identifies the sites where theater and Freudian thought crisscross each other and reflects upon their main features. In turn, he skillfully demonstrates how a deeper understanding of Freud’s concepts may well reside in a greater appreciation of dramatic works such as Sophocles’ [End Page 992] Oedipus the King (the master text of Freudian psychoanalysis), Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear and The Winter’s Tale. What distinguishes Thoret’s work from similar efforts is the intellectual rigor he brings to his task by rethinking many Freudian concepts in the context of reciprocity between theater as a genre and psychoanalysis as theory and practice. He infuses this reciprocal context with a considerable theoretical, psychoanalytic, and clinical culture as well as a genuine comprehension of theater as an art. This combination of converging horizons makes it possible for theater to embody Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Perhaps one may translate théâtralité as “theatrics,” namely, all matters pertaining to theater. Thoret traces the origin of théâtralité in the works of Nicholas Evreinov, Roman Jakobson, Michel Bernard, and Roland Barthes. He proposes his own definition of it as “the quality that permits, through diverse mechanisms and effects, the transformation of a theatrical representation, bringing together text, performance and spectacle in a theatrical production” (15). Therefore, it is a contextual treatment of theatrics and psychoanalytics that Thoret wishes to effect. Two metamorphic components of theater specifically guide his undertaking: The actor’s passage on the stage from “one being to another,” in which the actor “lends himself to the character” he plays; and the theatrical performance that suspends reality, allowing our fantasies to be experienced as a mode of transference.

It is our common knowledge that aesthetic appreciation did not find a prominent place in Freud’s thought, e.g., he had no interest in music. Nonetheless, he had a keen appreciation of theater. Thoret appropriately offers a study of Freud’s predilection for theater and his penetrating analysis of the interweaving strands in theater and psychoanalysis. He expands on Freud’s interest in theater by highlighting the role that the intensely affective visual experience or the stage plays in Freudian theoretical formulations. In the extensively detailed chapter “Les Scènes Primitives,” Thoret moves from the well-known concept of “primal scene” to its plural form, emphasizing the salience and the variety of “scenic” psychic experience buried in the unconscious. Thoret takes his cue in this operation from Freud himself, who uses the term “primal scenes” in referring to latent elements subjacent to the hysterical symptom.

Thoret accords centrality to the unconscious visual dimension of the “primal scenes” and their correlative “sexual scenes.” He regards them as significant and signifying psychical experiences. These scenes occur on a psychical stage in infancy. They offer him an immensely fruitful concept in placing the “scenic” features of theater at the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis. He discerns the subtle atemporality of these unconscious scenes, which allows Freud to discover the notion of fantasy and its function. In turn, this discovery enables Freud to replace the reference to a traumatic experience by resorting to the evocation of real, imaginary or mythic scenes. In each case, it is the visual feature of the fantasy observed or witnessed that underscores its specific psychic significance. Enfolded in the unconscious, [End Page 993] the ensemble of these various scenes and their metaphoric and metonymic associations produce what Freud considered to be primal fantasies. These primal fantasies write the plots that are acted out as scenes on the stage of each psyche or “theater of the mind,” to borrow McDougall’s terminology. Therein lies our perpetual sense of unconscious psychic dramas unfolding in our conscious everyday life. Thoret justifiably distinguishes between the spectator of a theatrical scene and the witness of a primal scene. The adult spectator admits: “I believe what I see is true; I know it is false.” The child witnessing a primal scene, however, has to tell himself or herself: “I know that it is true; I believe it is false” (44).

In a related chapter, “Les Personnages de la Catharsis,” Thoret continues to explore the common psychical space within which psychoanalysis and theater function. Beginning with the Aristotelian concept of catharsis as “purgation” and “purification” of emotion Thoret goes on to elaborate on such notions as the cathartic pleasure, its rhetoric and its connection with masochism. He establishes a web of cathartic moments in the dramatic portrayal of mythical characters such as Oedipus and Prometheus. The theatrical illusion allows the spectator to experience the cathartic moments as instances of attenuation of suffering and anxiety. The spectator finds pleasure in the knowledge that it is really someone else who suffers. The spectator’s enjoyment of theater is strongly sadomasochistic. Masochism, however, is the dominant element in the pleasure the theater affords to the extent that it derives at once from an evocation of pain and sexual pleasure. Masochism becomes then an inversion of the sadistic impulse in the spectator’s encounter with theater. Nonetheless, Thoret rightly observes that the cathartic effect of theater is obliterated if the spectator suffers too much.

The commonalities between psychoanalysis and theater lead Thoret to a discussion of the foundational place Sophocles’s Oedipus the King occupies in Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality as the “Oedipus complex.” He captures all the intricacies of this Freudian concept by introducing us to Oedipus’s emblematic double character, the Sphinx. A multifaceted, chthonian figure, the Sphinx interposes itself between incest and parricide. Thoret observes that the Sphinx is a remainder and reminder of all our “most ancient reveries” (63). Thoret closely examines the emergence of the Oedipus myth in Freud’s thought and in Freud’s auto-analysis. He shows how, guided by the Oedipus myth, Freud then conceptualized his own childhood incestuous feelings and their attendant parricidal yearnings as a complex concrete universal. Freudian psychoanalysis issues forth from the enormous psychical ramifications of the double taboos of incest and parricide and their mythical representatives: Oedipus and the Sphinx.

Thoret finds many other examples of intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis and theater in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, King Lear and The Winter’s Tale. Again, he takes Freud himself as his guide in forays he makes into the psycho-esthetic domain where psychoanalysis and drama overlap. He intends [End Page 994] to show how Freud’s theoretical formulations find their dramatic expressions in these plays. Freud’s conceptualizations appear to be given flesh and blood in these dramas. Or one may claim that Freud theorizes exactly on the basis of such dramatic insights. Thoret discusses Freud’s discovery of Lady Macbeth as a particular neurotic type known to him through his clinical work: the successful person who feels a failure, in this case, by identifying with the object of her destructive ambition: the slain king, Duncan. She provides a model for the neurotic by her two overwhelming and unreconcilable feelings: “her remorse and her desire have the same object” (108). Freud had characterized the concept of “fate compulsion” (Schicksaltzwang) as the psychical alibi of tragic heroes such as Oedipus and Hamlet. Alternating between clinical, theoretical, and esthetic commentaries on the play, Thoret extends the concept of fate compulsion to Macbeth. For him, Macbeth simultaneously exemplifies strong tendencies toward “omnipotence and vulnerability characteristic of the pervert” (91).

Thoret also perceives a modified reenactment of parricide, in the guise of regicide, in MacBeth. He further sees the banquet scene in the play as an “aborted” effort to partake of the totemic meal to absolve all involved in Duncan’s murder, specifically Macbeth. Freud described the totemic meal of the primitive horde in Totem and Taboo as an act of violence against the tyrannical father and the subsequent ritual of eating the totemic meal as a means of acquiring his powers.

He finds similar correspondences between Freud’s theoretical formulations and Shakespeare’s works in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale and adds a chapter on Freud and the stage. It is instructive to see how Thoret artfully superscribes theoretical narratives over dramatic ones to show how King Lear exemplifies the Freudian concepts of the function of the intermediary zone between the ego and the preconscious and the role they play in “reality-testing.” He demonstrates how King Lear regresses to the anguish of a child in distress who, feeling completely helpless and at the mercy of outside forces, falls into the void before conception.

In each chapter of Théâtralité, it is precisely the psycho-esthetics of theater that attract Thoret’s attention. Inspired by Roman Jakobson’s structuralist theory of poetic function, he devotes a whole chapter to it, which he titles “La Fonction de La Scène.” He then analyzes the functions of surprise and the unpredictable in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale and the choices theatrical unpredictability provides. Freud’s reflections on the “three casket” theme in The Merchant of Venice and the choice it offers between life and death serve as a foundation for Thoret’s own further theorization of the psychoanalysis of choices whose generative matrix is theatrics.

Thoret brings to Théâtralité formidable enthusiasm, much intellectual vitality and a genuine ability to formulate difficult concepts fully but concisely. These qualities make this work accessible to readers interested in [End Page 995] psycho-esthetics as well as the specialists who find the interrelations between psychoanalysis and theater increasingly fruitful.