Abstract
This chapter explores the origins and functions of hallucinations in early modern literature and psychology, arguing that in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Macbeth visual and aural disturbances operate as self-reflexive tools for thought that reveal the seer’s mind to itself. More than mere illusions, visions can provide a form of consolation, a spur to action, or a means of processing grief. The chapter also examines delusions that result from mental fixation, an early modern cognitive disorder with symptoms resembling PTSD. It argues that an understanding of mental fixation explains the therapeutic aspect of vengeance in Renaissance plays: through vengeance, the revenger engages with the traumatic remembered material that has caused the mental fixation, dislodging the powerful phantasms that have hijacked the imagination.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rachel O’Hare, Laurence Publicover, Tamsin Badcoe, Ian Calvert, Jane Wright, Ian Burrows, and Kaara Peterson for their invaluable comments and advice on this chapter.
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Dawson, L. (2021). Daggers of the Mind: Hallucinations, Mental Fixation and Trauma in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Early Modern Psychology. In: Powell, H., Saunders, C. (eds) Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52659-7_10
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