ABSTRACT
The Tempest opens with a ‘Night Sea Journey’: a handsome lad shipwrecks on a desert island, starting his hero-quest. As the T-Shirt says, ‘Life’s a beach’: for Ferdinand, shipwrecked hero, literally true. Beaches, where the sea of unconscious meets islands of ego, are liminal places where we play: innocent child, sultry young surfer, relaxing parent, dozing grandparent. Play is free movement between ego and Self, Self and collective, between time-free and time-bound percepts, enacting our creative, transcendent function. In The Tempest, Shakespeare played out an internal drama, projecting what psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (1971) calls ‘selfobjects’ (symbolic self-representations) on to current events. The characters resemble Shakespeare’s ‘sub-personalities’ (Assagioli 1973:74-7, Redfearn 1985:88-100); aspects of his Self, reworkings of his developmental history and projections of archetypal, collective images.
