SOURCE: "Hermia's Dream," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Holland is an American educator and critic who employs a Freudian psychoanalytic approach to literature and emphasizes the subjective nature of our response to literature. In the following excerpt, originally published in 1979, he analyzes Hermia's dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream, relating it to the play's ambivalent treatment of love.
