Since its earliest appearance (in, let's say, 1900, with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams), psychoanalytic theory has undrgone constant change in both its status as a science (with its correlative applications in a clinical senses), and in its definition as a hermeneutical strategy. The fortune (and misfortune) of psychoanalysis has also had a direct bearing on its "uses" in literary theory. My aim in this paper is to try and outline some of these variations, as they have been formulated within the realm of Shakespearean Studies. I will focus on recent contributions that have, in my opinion, either already responded to, or that have at least voiced, an awareness of the limitations of "classical" psychoanalytic studies of literature. I wish to show that psychoanalytical criticism find its raison d'etre today in its capacity to interrogate crucial aspects of literature and culture, including their relationship, their linguistic and rhetorical dimention, and the textual paradoxes and double-binds that repeatedly surface in close and informed contemporary acts of reading. Besides the taditional Freudian approach, I can trace at least three important contexts of psychoanalytical criticism: "object relation theory", Lacanian "rhetorical-semiotic interpretations", and "post -structuralist readings". For each one of these approaches I will discuss different and significant interpretations of Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew. I also wish to show the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the latest developments in psychoanalytic literary theory.

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The stimulus to rethinking Elizabeth Gaskell's works in recent decades has come from feminist criticism. Feminists' interest in Gaskell, however, is not the aspect of Gaskell's unconscious incest narrative. Their responses to Freud's psycho-sexual theory are far from positive. Certainly, Freud puts special emphasis on the weight of a father's authority in culture. But feminist critics fail to perceive that Elizabeth Gaskell's early childhood trauma is associated with Freud's theory of secuality, the oedipal theory. It is precisely the nature of "unconscious thought" that we need to consider when we begin to read the novels of Gaskell critically. For example, "The Squire's Story" is a short story about Robinson Higgins' dissociative disorder. Yet, this story reveals the writer's understanding of human psychology through his wife, Catherine's confusion resulting from father-daughter covert incest. Beyond feminist criticism, a part of the psychoanalytic works of Freud provides a useful critical framework for analysing this novel. The purpose of this paper is to examine how to employ the unconscious mind to draw attention to the problems that Gaskell is concerned with. The importance of unconscious mental processes is presented here. Following the way in which character interact and the emotional conflicts between them, we can find Gaskell's own s7interpretation of Victorian England and her protest against patriarchal cruelty.

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The frontal approach to Emily Dickinson's poetry and the best way of reading it without distortion is to analyze poems from the viewpoint of Christian faith. Unlike some traditional biographies and some psychobiographical criticisms, this thesis suggests another psychoanalytical criticism in which we focus on the highly therapeutic aspect in the images of the poetry. In other words, we carefully look into the imagery and try to know how we are comforted and uplifted there or, from the moral and philosophy it offers, to know how we learn to live with ourselves and with the world around us. Dickinson's poetry indicates the attitude of seeking for true healing and comfort. This attitude sometimes becomes skeptical and a little cynical, so that, all the more, it can stand side by side with or draw very near to a person in affliction. This is obvious especially when the reader suffers from a beloved's death, and reads some of the poems with the theme of the bereaved. The speaker with frankness, without any showing off, states the sorrow and the question toward God, "Why should it happen?" Because of its attitude of the honest inquitry, the poetry becomes the testimony which warrants that there is still the truthful answer, solution, and ultimate healing.

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