ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is the most formal and the most unstructured of the artistic disciplines. Both psychoanalysis and the theatre provide a determinedly neutral but also clearly circumscribed repetitive situation and favour the expression of internal feelings and relationships, which cannot at the beginning be plainly defined but are clearly understood as the products of an interaction between the participants. This chapter suggests that there is a demonstrable synergy between psychoanalysis and theatre in that each of them starts with an absolutely bare stage and a situation in which the protagonists can project their internal worlds in any number of ways on to that stage. It provides the psychoanalyst has added to all this by providing a key—however imperfect—to the workings of that internal theatre of the protagonists that Joyce McDougall described and that enables us to suggest an extra dimension to our understanding of the work of art in whatever discipline.
