Following Freud’s lead, Rudnytsky and Spitz approach works of art as constituting psychoanalytical, or forbidden , knowledge. This collection of nine essays pursues the theme of forbidden knowledge in canonical works of the Western tradition, from the Hebrew Bible to Boccaccio’s Decameron and Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The papers posit that the canon must be re-visioned in order to recover the history of transgression. They offer wide-ranging meditations on the tragic dimensions of human experience and invite reflection on the significance of forbidden knowledge to Freud.