SOURCE: MacCary, W. Thomas. “The Comedy of Errors: A Different Kind of Comedy.” New Literary History 9, no. 3 (spring 1978): 525-36.

In the following essay, MacCary presents a psychoanalytic and genre-based reading of The Comedy of Errors that emphasizes its classical comedic sources together with its narcissistic and egocentric themes.

We say that the human being has originally two sexual objects: himself and the woman who tends him, and thereby we postulate a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in the long run manifest itself as dominating his object-choice.

Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction”

Our comic tradition, since Menander, has been essentially romantic: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl and lives happily with her ever after. Much else, of course, happens in comedy from the fourth century b.c. to the present, but this “nubile” pattern of action focuses our attention. Even in plays where the...