Mirror to Nature

Margaret Rustin is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, and an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has pioneered and supported the extension of training in psychoanalytic observational approaches to training across the United Kingdom and in a number of other countries. Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic, and an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He has written widely on psychoanalytic approaches to culture and society, including on children's fiction ('Narratives of Love and Loss') and drama ('Mirror to Nature') both with Margaret Rustin. He is also author of 'The Good Society and the Inner World', and is a co-author/editor of the current 'After NeoLiberalism: the Kilburn Manifesto'.

• Series Editors' Preface -- Preface -- Introduction: theatre, mind, and society -- Medea: love and violence split asunder -- Ion: an Athenian "family romance" -- Shakespeare's Macbeth: a marital tragedy -- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: further meditations on marriage -- What Ibsen knew -- Chekhov: the pain of intimate relationships -- Oscar Wilde's glittering surface -- Arthur Miller: fragile masculinity in American society -- Beckett: dramas of psychic catastrophe -- Psychic spaces in Harold Pinter's work

The argument of the book, set out in its introduction and exemplified in its discussion of individual dramatists and plays, is that western drama has represented the central tensions of societies as crises in the relationships of gender and generation, through dramatic explorations of the inner life of families. This is the common theme which links the book's analysis of Medea, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream amongst others. The value of this book lies in the originality of its analysis of individual plays, and the subtlety with which it brings psychoanalytic and sociological insights together.