Shakespeare’s Murderers

Centuries before psychoanalysis was born, William Shakespeare was analyzing the root causes of male violence and giving detailed, intimate, almost microscopic second-to-second descriptions of what goes on in the minds and hearts of violent men. 

 

When, as a young prison psychiatrist, Jim Gilligan was tasked with creating mental health programs to help reduce violence in extremely brutal Massachusetts prisons in the 1970s, he drew from an unlikely source - the plays of William Shakespeare. “Because of my familiarity with Shakespeare's plays, I realized the violent men I was seeing in prison, they just walked right out of Shakespeare's plays. I saw Othello, I saw Richard III, I saw Timon of Athens. He understood these guys and helped me to understand them.”

 

In this episode, Elle talks with American psychiatrist Jim Gilligan, who pioneered extremely successful violence prevention programs in American prisons, and his co-author law professor, moral philosopher and writer David A.J. Richards, about their new book Holding a Mirror Up to Nature: Shame, Guilt and Violence in Shakespeare, about the psycho-social forces behind why murderers murder, and how we all may be living in a Shakespeare play.