This book presents a new account of the complex relationship between psychoanalytic theory and
the key tragic dramas by Sophocles and Shakespeare in which it has often sought exemplars and
prototypes. Examining the close historical and theoretical connections between Freud's
interpretative appeal to tragic drama and his professed abandonment of the 'seduction'
hypothesis in 1897 the author explores the ways in which otherness has subsequently been
simplified out of both psychoanalytic theory and the dramatic texts it endeavours to
comprehend. Drawing on Jean Laplanche's critical reformulation of the seduction theory the
book offers close rereadings of Oedipus Tyrannus Julius Caesar and Hamlet in order to outline
an approach to tragedy which takes account of the constitutive priority of the other in the
itinerary of the tragic subject. By reopening the theme of seduction in relation to these key
literary dramas the book aims to generate a better understanding both of the function which
psychoanalysis has called upon tragedy to perform and the radical modes of otherness within
tragedy for which psychoanalysis has hitherto remained unable to account.
