ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores William Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Perhaps because its chilling narcissistic rage reminded so many sessions with so many couples trapped in something they felt they could neither comprehend, nor escape, nor endure. Alerted by Stanley Cavell to the theme of remarriage in The Winter's Tale, the author wants to use this play to introduce the image of re-marriage as a way of picturing the process of psychoanalytic therapy with couples. One might say that around the dilemma of re-marriage hover the tensions of the impact of beauty in the passionate intimacy with another human being. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare presents a picture of a father who is released from the grip of delusional jealousy only as he is faced with the reality of it as an attack on his son resulting in his death.
