SOURCE: "The Psychological Continuum," in Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, pp. 324-37.

In the following excerpt, Holland surveys the patterns of psychological criticism typically applied to Shakespeare's plays.

The Psychological Continuum

Freud, in describing human personality, used the latest and richest version of the metaphor that Plato, Augustine, More, Bacon, Campanella, and many others before him had used: the city. Freud suggested that we think of the human mind as like the Rome he enjoyed so much. At the deepest level lies the primitive village of the Latin tribes. Erected on it are the cities of the republic and the empire. On their ruins, in turn, rose the city of medieval Christendom and from it the Rome of modern Italy. And yet the avenues clogged by the traffic jams of today follow the path worn down by the solitary herdsman of antiquity—indeed, his choice of route...