The writer proposes that the interplay between the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis & literature can illuminate understanding of the transference & countertransference at large in an analytic treatment. Writing about the work with a 21-year-old woman who had been persistently sexually abused as a child & who developed anorexia in her adolescence so severe that her life was endangered both by the illness & by attempts at suicide, the author finds his reading of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” a powerful informant of the work. (11 refs)