ABSTRACT
On 13 September 1908, while visiting London, Freud walked into the National Portrait Gallery and lingered before what there passed for a portrait of Shakespeare. ‘Not an English face’, he confided to a manuscript now usefully edited by Michael Molnar;1 and he reminded himself that he had once heard the dramatist’s name derived from the French ‘Jean Pierre’. ‘A typical head’, he continued,2 like those of Homer, Socrates, and some distinguished philologists and archaeologists Freud had met in Vienna. Shakespeare, then, belonged to a world wider than his native country; a universal genius, whose work had woven itself into Freud’s life ever since he had been given or lent his first copy of the plays when he was just eight years old. Scholars such as Ritchie Robertson and Graham Frankland have left Englishspeaking readers in no doubt about the solace, refreshment, and inspiration Freud found in imaginative literature; and what the present chapter seeks to do is to trace some of the ways in which Freud continually used Shakespeare to reveal something of his own most pressing concerns.
