Sigmund Freud supposedly observed that poets and philosophers had discovered the unconscious before he did. In a similar vein, psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his essay “Fear of Breakdown,” offered the charming and unsolicited caveat: “If what I say has truth in it, this will already have been dealt with by the world’s poets.” Freud and Winnicott regarded as their duty the systematic elaboration of what poets had, in their view, divined only darkly.
If literary-minded people have often looked askance at psychoanalysis—for fomenting pinched and overdetermined modes of literary inquiry, or for didactically imposing its logic upon works of literature—it has equally, and manifestly, furthered our grasp of literature’s inner workings and enriched our storehouse of literary criticism. The Freudian stain upon the literary imagination cannot be rinsed away. What, then, is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?
Enter Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud (2024), cowritten by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips: a fresh injection of lifeblood into a conversation now very old. Phillips is a child psychologist in clinical practice, the author of many popular, bite-sized books on psychoanalysis, and the editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translation of Freud. Greenblatt is one of the most celebrated Shakespeareans alive, the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, and a pioneer of the New Historicist approach to Shakespearean criticism. The object of their study is the notion of the “second chance” in the plays of William Shakespeare, toward which they apply a range of psychoanalytic and literary tools. Although it hangs together with plain, lucid, unshowy language, Second Chances is nonetheless a recursive and self-conscious book: It is both about something and about the state of being about something.
If that sounds exhausting, Greenblatt and Phillips do not shy away from occasional brute schematizing. Their respective disciplines, they stress from the outset, assume distinct objectives. The telos of the artist is representation, while the telos of the analyst is change in the analysand. Yet these objectives share more infrastructure than one might suppose. The authors remind us that the Freudian aim was not necessarily a cure for sickness, but rather, in Freud’s language, a “certain tolerance for the state of being ill”—a reconciliation mediated through language. (Freud famously wrote that a primary goal of psychoanalysis was to transform “hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.”) One thinks of the dramatic effect of catharsis, the discharging of unbearable emotions through their aesthetic representation. “We have art so as not to perish from the truth,” as Nietzsche put it. Freud regarded himself as a scientist and system-maker to the last, yet the effort to unhitch him from his own self-image—to regard his scheme in precisely such literary-philosophical terms—is now customary to the point of being received doctrine in certain circles.
What is the notion of the second chance in the hands of Greenblatt and Phillips—and how does Shakespeare fit in? The concept is not a unified one. This is both a strength and a weakness. The looseness of the conceit allows for a wide-ranging romp through the plays. Yet one closes the book with a misty overall impression. At its most general level, “art enables us to rehearse the experience of loss and recovery,” they write, and “it is as if the longing for a second chance were so central to our existence as human beings that we contrive to reproduce that longing again and again.” The second chance, they continue, is the chance “to recover what had seemed irreparably gone.”
The authors resort often to the language of recovery. At first blush, this is a form of transformation that is actually a revival of a prior state. This is familiar Romantic territory: Meaning lies always in the rearview, in the prelapsarian wholeness one experienced as a child. Growing up, then, is a falling-away, a loss, a process of disillusionment that must be countered by a process of practical reillusionment (in the Freudian language, a process of sublimation). Second Chances offers this theory of the second chance only intermittently. On other occasions, it refers to the human pining for “alternative lives”—for a “service of unblocking” that would allow us to get out of our own way, unchain ourselves from the past, and enable forward motion into the wholly new. “To believe in second chances,” they observe, is “to believe...that some apparently lost potential can be recognized and realized.”
This is muddy conceptual terrain. Is the dream of the second chance an expression of our desperate wish to revive the “visionary gleam,” or a chance to begin radically anew? Do we want to recuperate the past or to cast off its ball and chain once and for all—do we, in the authors’ estimation, harbor fantasies of restoration, or of explosive breaks in continuity? Perhaps we wish to change in order somehow to preserve continuity: to return to our original course, the authentic self we had tragically squandered somewhere along the way. The correct answer, and one properly Freudian in spirit, can only be all of the above. The “second chance” encompasses each of these shades of meaning.
Greenblatt and Phillips hit their stride with their reading of Macbeth. Although Macbeth’s soliloquies grant us glimpses into what might be called his psychology, the play in which he finds himself
goes out of its way to make it impossible to reach any clear answers about why he destroys his own happiness. The words Macbeth speaks to himself as he nears the moment of his terrible act seem deliberately to collapse the interval and close off any alternative.... “I go, and it is done.”
Put another way, the tragic protagonist seeks to deny both his contingency and his agency. He convinces himself, through soliloquy, that it is too late for him to turn back, hence hastening the state of too-lateness he dreads. The case of Macbeth is particularly egregious: Macbeth “has irrevocably entered a life without the possibility of a second chance,” write Greenblatt and Phillips, by telling himself he has already effectively “done” what he is in fact about to do (“I am in blood / Stepped in so far...”). Although they concede that much in the play suggests his course has been fated, they are clearly at pains to position Macbeth as the primary architect of his tragedy.
At the center of the book are three plays: King Lear, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. King Lear, by demanding his three daughters love him unconditionally, “is virtually ensuring that [they] will be hypocrites,” although the favored Cordelia “retains the possibility of loving her father, as she puts it, according to her bond.” Over the course of the play, we witness Lear lose his other two daughters, his kingship, his dignity, and his mind. Cordelia eventually returns from France in an effort to save him, and Shakespeare dangles before us the possibility of reconciliation between father and daughter. He withdraws the possibility as quickly as he offers it up: Lear emerges in the play’s final moments, wailing in despair and hauling Cordelia’s lifeless body. He imagines he detects her lips moving—has breath possibly escaped from them?—but eventually must reckon with the horrible truth: “Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never....” (Has simple repetition ever been put to such unbearable use?) Lear’s production history, if nothing else, attests to the universal longing for the second chance: It was rewritten in the 1680s with a happy ending, father and daughter reunited and living to tell the tale.
Othello, too, self-authors his tragedy, foreclosing the possibility of the second chance. Consider his final words before smothering Desdemona in a fit of deranged jealousy:
Desdemona: Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight.
Othello: Nay, if you strive—
Desdemona: But half an hour!
Othello: Being done, there is no pause.
Desdemona: But while I say one prayer!
Othello: It is too late.
[He smothers her.]
Othello speaks of the impossibility of choice at precisely the moment when he has a choice: “Being done, there is no pause.” But at that very moment it is not yet done—he can pause!
This is largely a book about self-sabotage, even what Freud called the death instinct. Greenblatt and Phillips note that “psychoanalysis, which began as a cure for neurosis, quickly became an attempt to explain and address the sheer scale of people’s self-destructiveness.” Freud again and again noticed his patients “claiming to want to change, while unconsciously working very hard to hold on to their suffering”; indeed they often “recruited the analyst to help them not change.” It is one of Freud’s most discomfiting insights that some essential part of ourselves may not wish to get better. “We would rather be ruined than changed,” writes W.H. Auden in The Age of Anxiety, and would prefer to “die in dread” than “let our illusions die.” Or, as the authors write of Freud’s analysands, “they preferred their suffering to their opportunities.”
The Winter’s Tale is colored over with tragedy, but climaxes with the restoration typical of comedy. Queen Hermione, presumed dead, comes to life in the play’s final moments. Greenblatt and Phillips note that, although the Tale closes with festivity, there is nonetheless something dark in its topsy-turvy good cheer. One is left with the uneasy sense that second chances are a “wish-fulfillment fantasy akin to the longing for a loved one to return from the dead or for a statue to come alive.” Yet the implication need not engender pessimism: Though the play “represents this outcome as wildly implausible,” it “suggests at the same time that the hope for such an event is what makes existence bearable.” The authors continue: “Believing in the possibility of second chances makes us not merely clever animals but redemptive animals who can rescue themselves, and be rescued from, whatever is deemed to have gone wrong with their lives.”
But which is it? Does the belief in change and its aesthetic representation redeem us, or does the possibility—the actuality—of changing our lives, re-engineering them, taking responsibility for them, redeem us? The authors sometimes speak of the second chance in the practical terms of the child psychologist, at other times as an abstract human value, an idea we cling to in order to bear our condition. This is one of the tensions inherent in this project, which does not resolve by the book’s close. At its best, then, Second Chances leaves its reader in a state of free association—pondering a work that raises more questions than it can possibly be expected to answer.