ABSTRACT
This chapter belongs to the tradition, established by Freud, of psychoanalytic criticism. Psychoanalysis provides enough proof of its scientific character, and ought to confine its efforts to the strict framework, defined by its own rigorous parameters, of psychoanalytic treatment. The view is well founded; the field of psychoanalysis will always remain the locus in which the exchanges between analyst and analysand unfold. In psychoanalytic treatment, the repetition compulsion again and again offers to disclose the meaning of a conflictual organization, which one can then approach in a fragmentary way. The spectator's pleasure will be compounded of his movement of identification with the hero and his masochistic movement. The psychoanalytic reading of tragedy, therefore, will have the mapping of the traces of the Oedipal structure concealed in its formal organization, through an analysis of the symbolic activity, which is masked from the spectator's perception and acts on him unknown to himself.
