ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis views the encounter with the "couple" as the most important psychic event. In the various permutations of these actions in the theatre of the mind, the common denominator is the splitting of the parental couple and the denial of the generation gap. Psychoanalysis has discovered the connection between adulthood and infancy, between past and present, between the way we have emotionally experienced the parents as a couple and the type of relationships we establish as adults. By attributing the constellation of negative feeling to the bastard brother, Shakespeare seems to have understood the relationship between the internal world of the adult and infantile experiences. The acceptance of the simple fact—a couple that gets together and makes babies—is not easy. In particular situations, tremendous feelings of exclusion, envy, and jealousy are made tolerable only through the phantasy of creating or destroying new couples that represent the original parental couple, in fact, could not be controlled.
