William Shakespeare has undergone psychological analyses ever since Freud diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. But now, two psychologists propose to turn the tables by telling how Shakespeare himself understood human behavior and the innermost workings of the human mind. Psychology According to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn About Human Nature From Shakespeare's Great Plays, is an interdisciplinary project that bridges psychological science and literature, bringing together for the first time in one volume, the breadth and depth of The Bard’s knowledge of love, jealousy, dreams, betrayal, revenge, and the lust for power and position. Even today, there is no better depiction of a psychopath than Richard III, no more poignant portrayal of dementia than King Lear, nor a more unforgettable illustration of obsessive-compulsive disorder than Lady Macbeth’s attempts to wash away the damned blood spot. What has not been revealed before, however, are the many different forms of mental illness The Bard described in terms that are now identifiable in the modern manual of disorders known as the DSM-5. But, as the book shows, the playwright’s fascination with human nature extended far beyond mental disorders, ranging across the psychological spectrum, from brain anatomy to personality, cognition, emotion, perception, lifespan development, and states of consciousness. To illustrate, we have stories to tell involving astrology, potions, poisons, the four fluids called “humors,” anatomical dissections of freshly hanged criminals, and a mental hospital called Bedlam—all showing how his perspective was grounded in the medicine and culture of his time. Yet, Will Shakespeare’s intellect, curiosity, and temperament allowed him to see other ideas and issues that would become important in psychological science centuries later. Many of these connections between Shakespeare and psychology lie scattered in books, articles, and web pages across the public domain, but they have never been brought together into a single volume. So, here the authors retell of his fashioning the felicitous phrase, nature-nurture for Prospero to utter in frustration with Caliban and of how the nature-nurture dichotomy would become central in psychology’s quest to understand the tension between heredity and environment. But that was still far from all, for they discovered that his work anticipated multiple other psychological tensions. For example, in Measure for Measure, he made audiences puzzle over which exerts the greater influence on human behavior: internal traits or the external situation. And in Hamlet, he explored the equally enigmatic push-pull between reason and emotion in the mind of the dithering prince. Aside from bringing together The Bard’s known psychology, the book is unique in several other respects. It reveals how his interest in mind and behavior ranged across the full spectrum of psychology, including topics that we now call biopsychology and neuroscience, social psychology, thinking and intelligence, motivation and emotion, and reason vs intuition. Further, we show how the psychological concepts he used have evolved over the intervening centuries—for example, the Elizabethan notion of sensus communis eventually became “consciousness” and the old idea of the humors morphed into our current understanding of hormones and neurotransmitters. We also note that some of Mr. Shakespeare’s concerns seem especially timely today, as in the subplot of queer vs straight issues complicating the story of Troilus and Cressida and in Shylock’s telling of prejudices inflicted on ethnic minorities.

When the death of Iron Queen Sarelin Brey fractures the realm of Elira, Lysande Prior, the palace scholar and the queen's closest friend, is appointed Councillor. Publically, Lysande must choose the next monarch from amongst the city-rulers vying for the throne. Privately, she seeks to discover which ruler murdered the queen, suspecting the use of magic. Resourceful, analytical, and quiet, Lysande appears to embody the motto she was raised with: everything in its place. Yet while she hides her drug addiction from her new associates, she cannot hide her growing interest in power. She becomes locked in a game of strategy with the city-rulers - especially the erudite prince Luca Fontaine, who seems to shift between ally and rival. Further from home, an old enemy is stirring: the magic-wielding White Queen is on the move again, and her alliance with a traitor among the royal milieu poses a danger not just to the peace of the realm, but to the survival of everything that Lysande cares about

Shakespeare's plays are usually studied by literary scholars and historians and the books about him from those perspectives are legion. It is most unusual for a trained philosopher to give us his insight, as Colin McGinn does here, into six of Shakespeare's greatest plays—A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. In his brilliant commentary, McGinn explores Shakespeare's philosophy of life and illustrates how he was influenced, for example, by the essays of Montaigne that were translated into English while Shakespeare was writing. In addition to chapters on the great plays, there are also essays on Shakespeare and gender and his plays from the aspects of psychology, ethics, and tragedy. As McGinn says about Shakespeare, "There is not a sentimental bone in his body. He has the curiosity of a scientist, the judgement of a philosopher, and the soul of a poet." McGinn relates the ideas in the plays to the later philosophers such as David Hume and the modern commentaries of critics such as Harold Bloom. The book is an exhilarating reading experience, especially at a time when a new audience has opened up for the greatest writer in English.

Representations of the mind have a central place in Shakespeare’s artistic imagination, as we see in Bottom struggling to articulate his dream, Macbeth reaching for a dagger that is not there, and Prospero humbling his enemies with spectacular illusions. Phantasmatic Shakespeare examines the intersection between early modern literature and early modern understandings of the mind’s ability to perceive and imagine. Suparna Roychoudhury argues that Shakespeare’s portrayal of the imagination participates in sixteenth-century psychological discourse and reflects also how fields of anatomy, medicine, mathematics, and natural history jolted and reshaped conceptions of mentality. Although the new sciences did not displace the older psychology of phantasms, they inflected how Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians thought and wrote about the brain’s image-making faculty. The many hallucinations, illusions, and dreams scattered throughout Shakespeare’s works exploit this epistemological ferment, deriving their complexity from the ambiguities raised by early modern science. Phantasmatic Shakespeare considers aspects of imagination that were destabilized during Shakespeare’s period—its place in the brain; its legitimacy as a form of knowledge; its pathologies; its relation to matter, light, and nature—reading these in concert with canonical works such as King Lear, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Shakespeare, Roychoudhury shows, was influenced by paradigmatic epistemic shifts of his time, and he in turn demonstrated how the mysteries of cognition could be the subject of powerful art.

In Shakespeare and Jung - The God in Time literary critic and philosopher James Driscoll presents original arguments for the existence and nature of God. He traverses the boundaries of art, philosophy, psychology, and religion to draw on Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and A. N. Whitehead to define and illuminate the interconnections of God and time. Time's irreversibility and continuous creation of novelty makes it the medium and engine of order, value, and meaning. Time connects and differentiates all, thereby making reality relational and allowing for feeling, thought, art, and science. Shakespeare, the writer with the greatest insight into human nature, dramatized the primacy of time in our lives. Time is the de facto God of Shakespeare's worlds. Shakespeare anticipated our own age when time began to displace eternity as the ground of reality. Jung gave us a new map of the psyche and terminology to explore more deeply the human condition, bound as it is in time, and the nature of deity. Driscoll carries Jung's insights further into the three paradigmatic revelations of the Western Godhead: The Book of Job, the Gospels, and Shakespeare's King Lear. Shakespeare the artist grasped the dynamics of the Western Godhead giving us a singular revelation of its dominant archetypes, Yahweh, Job, Prometheus, and Christ. The archetypes of the Western Godhead shaped the development of art, science, and technology and energized the ideals of progress and freedom. The West advanced rapidly in science, the arts, and human rights because of the unique archetypal dynamics of its God in Time.

Using Shakespeare's insights into life, the authors have written a self-help guide on such topics as "Finding Romeo--Recognizing Love When You See It" and "Lear's Blindness--How Not To Be Old Before Your Time."