This collection of thirty essays offers a landscape view of how the fertile relationship between theatre and psychoanalysis is realized within practice as well as scholarship in contemporary French theatre. The book's ambition to give a truly interdisciplinary perspective is realized through the diverse background of its contributors, which comprise psychoanalysts, theatre scholars and practitioners. Several papers are written as a dialogue: for instance in ‘Le manteau du rêve’ (The Coat in the Dream), psychoanalyst Yves Depelsenaire talks to director Myriam Saduis about her drawing on psychoanalysis as one important tool for her artistic work, as well as a means through which she discovered and developed her vocation as director.
The book principally focuses on the cultural period within Western theatre that runs parallel to the birth and development of psychoanalysis, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Freud and Lacan are the only two psychoanalysts whose thinking permeates the book, perhaps not surprisingly, given the French academic milieu in which it was produced.
The first section, entitled ‘La psychanalyse et son double’ (Psychoanalysis and Its Double), explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and theatre as each being the double of the other. In a conversation with theatre scholar Christiane Page, director Stéphane Braunschweig reflects on theatre as exploration of the ‘opaque’ side of ourselves, a Lacanian concept indicative of the process through which we discover our own unconscious by entering the imaginary world of another.
The second section, ‘Plaisir du texte, jouissance du signifiant’ (Pleasure of the Text, Jouissance of the Signifier), considers the work of playwrights such as Feydau, Pasolini, Ibsen and even Picasso, whose theatrical piece ‘Le désir attrapé par la queue’ (Desire Caught by the Tail) is analysed from a Lacanian perspective in Hervé Castanet's essay. Ibsen, whom Jean-Louis Barrault called ‘the Freud of the theatre’ (p. 102), is given particular consideration, being the object of three papers: alongside Rose-Paule Vinciguerra's more traditional psychoanalytic reading of Hedda Gabler's unconscious motivations, two separate conversations, one with actress Anne-Lise Heimburger and the other with director Jonathan Châtel, explore the contributions of psychoanalysis to performances of Little Eyolf.
The third section, ‘L'autre scène: Rêve et désir’ (The Other Scene: Dream and Desire), draws on Freud's definition of the dream as ‘the other scene’ (p. 170), to reflect on the commonalities between psychoanalysis, dreaming and theatre. In his essay titled ‘Un rêve extérieur’ (An Outside Dream), Jean Loup Rivière contends that both dreams and theatre transport the viewer to another scene without making her move. While such a scene is a view from the inside, it is also the exteriorization of the viewer's inner psychic processes. The remaining papers are dialogues with theatre directors, who reveal how their knowledge and experience of psychoanalysis influence aspects of their creative work. Among these, Daniel Mesguish contends that if Freud had not invented psychoanalysis, we would have to say that theatre is psychoanalysis.
In the fourth section, ‘Lacan, lecteur de théâtre’ (Lacan, Reader of Theatre), several essays explore Lacan's approach to theatre as a tool for learning about the unconscious, by discussing the Lacanian interpretations of characters such as Hamlet and Ophelia and of Genet's controversial play The Balcony. Pierre Naveau applies a Lacanian perspective to the interpretation of the tragic dimension of ‘being’ in Beckett's most famous plays.
In the final section, ‘Tumultes contemporains’ (Contemporary Turmoils), several psychoanalysts write about the theatre of Edward Bond, Howard Baker, Romeo Castellucci and Angélica Liddell. Moreover, the actress and clown Laurence Poueyto talks about her experience of spectators’ response to her clown performances as a mixture of identification and detachment which, she contends, refer not only to the character of the clown, but also to the actor who plays it.
The book is one of the most varied collections of essays on theatre and psychoanalysis that have appeared in print. Many papers are dedicated to the contributions that psychoanalysis offers when applied to the creative process of a particular artist or to the ensemble work of rehearsals, which go well beyond the more conventional use of psychoanalysis for the interpretation of characters. Dip into the book for a particular paper or read it as an encyclopedia; it is a valuable resource for theatre scholars and practitioners curious about psychoanalysis. Intermediate French required.
