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Abstract
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Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale appears at first to be a serene blend of drama and comedy—a late romance balancing tragic rupture with lyrical restoration—yet it gradually reveals a turbulent psychological core beneath its formal elegance. The play follows Leontes, King of Sicilia, whose sudden, groundless conviction that his pregnant wife Hermione has betrayed him with his childhood friend Polixenes triggers a cascade of accusation, exile, and death. The necessity of this research arises not from a lack of commentary on The Winter’s Tale, but from an urgent need to reposition Shakespeare’s late drama within contemporary psychoanalytic discourse—where questions of trauma, accountability, and psychic repair have gained renewed urgency. This study pursues three interrelated research goals. First, it will analyze the dramaturgical representation of unconscious conflict in The Winter’s Tale, focusing on how Leontes’s jealousy arises autonomously—without deception or external evidence—and is articulated through linguistic rupture, bodily fixation, and rhetorical excess, rather than moral allegory or plot necessity. Second, it will trace the psychic trajectory from projection and splitting in Act I, through melancholic withdrawal during the sixteen-year gap, to the tentative emergence of depressive-position recognition in Act V, attending to how guilt, silence, and time function as structural rather than thematic elements. Third, it will examine how Shakespeare’s formal choices—the division between Sicilian severity and Bohemian lyricism, the suspension of action, and the choreography of the statue scene—serve not as generic conventions but as dramaturgical enactments of intrapsychic process. It will assess the play’s contribution to psychoanalytic literary criticism by grounding theoretical concepts (e.g., reparation, working-through, transitional phenomena) in close textual analysis, ensuring that interpretation arises from literary evidence rather than clinical analogy
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