Second Thoughts on “Second Chances: Freud and Shakespeare”

Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud” brings together Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips to trace the evolution of the concept of ‘second chances’ from Shakespeare straight through to the works of another Shakespeare scholar, Sigmund Freud. The phrase “second chance” appears 470 times on “PEP Web,” from the 1920s up to the present day. Greenblatt and Phillips take us back further still, 400 years ago, to Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale,” which they call a “template” for understanding second chances. They move on to Freud, inviting us to wonder about Freud’s paradoxical observation that people resist the ‘second chance’ they are given in psychoanalysis, though it is the aim of analysis.