Issue 43 (Spring 2010) Pages – 111-119

This paper situates Frank Wedekind’s play, Spring Awakening, in a Freudian-Lacanian framework. The masked man who makes his appearance towards the end of the play is said to be a mediator between life and death for the adolescents, just as the preface written by J. Lacan suggests that the masked man serves as one of the names of the father.

I am basing my talk today on a play by the German, Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), called Spring Awakening.1

Written in 1891, it created a scandal for the twenty-six year old playwright and it took sixteen years for German censorship on the drama to be lifted and then with crucial concessions…..