ABSTRACT
"All the world's a stage," in Latin, Totus mundus agit histrionem, was inscribed at the original Globe Theater four hundred years ago. The word histrionic, from the Latin histrio meaning acting or story, has a different derivation from hysteria, that once mysterious emotional state of "acting ill," that Freud first explored en route to his discovery of the Unconscious. Hysteria is derived from the Greek hysteros, meaning uterus. The close association of histrionic and hysterical in our minds, and our nosology (Slavney, 1990, p. 78), even if etymologically coincidental, serves as a starting point for this essay on how drama and psychoanalysis have mutually influenced one another from the earliest days when Freud first turned his attention to the dramatic nature of hysteria. Psychoanalysis, in its exquisite privateness, ultimately deals with family conflicts internalized and transformed by unconscious fantasies whereas drama, in its communal publicness, deals with family conflicts played out upon the stage. Each mirrors and reflects truths about the human condition from different points of view.
