The reader is entitled to know why this book was written. It was completed in my ninety-eighth year, after I had been a psychoanalyst for sixty-five years and a psychoanalytic teacher for fifty-eight years. Every day for an hour and a half I have been teaching a seminar in psychoanalytic theory and practice to younger therapists. Among my innovations is a course on “The Unconscious in Shakespeare's Plays”. Every student is asked to read the same play and report what he or she thinks was the unconscious reason it was written. To my own surprise, my students reported that this course has benefited their work and deepened their understanding of their patients.
Freud and other psychoanalytic pioneers were convinced that understanding the unconscious of an author was the key to his or her work. This is not the philosophy behind this book. Not every reader of Shakespeare is necessarily interested in what was unconscious in his work. There are other interests in Shakespeare's work, for example, Frank Kermode's study of Shakespeare's language, amongst others. The psychoanalytic interest is one of many, but it has its own contribution to make. Just as concerts emerge from the interaction of many instruments, so our understanding of Shakespeare is enriched by different approaches to him. Psychoanalysis assumes that creative writers have the need to both reveal and conceal their own inner conflicts in their works. They leave residues in their works that, if we pay attention, can become building blocks that reveal aspects of the unconscious.
What about the general reader who is not interested in what psychoanalysis has to offer? Some readers may not wish to know what was unconscious in a play nor in Shakespeare's unconscious; I assume they will not proceed beyond this point, but others may find that the questions raised add to the pleasure of reading Shakespeare or that it deepens their understanding of the plays; it is for those readers that this book was written.
There are certain similarities and differences between searching for the unconscious in Shakespeare's plays and a psychoanalytic hour. Typically, analytic patients consciously want the analyst to get to know them, but unconsciously they are also resisting. Analysts then urge patients to free associate. At this point a minor miracle takes place: as patients are free-associating, listening analysts understand something more than the patient thinks they are communicating. If we listen to a play in an analogous way, we can try to read a Shakespeare play as a coded message that we can learn to understand.
At this point I should explain why the same play evokes different interpretations from different psychoanalysts. Such variations have been used to disparage the analytic process as being unscientific but this need not be true. Conversely, if a consensus about the unconscious meaning of the play has been reached it may not mean that this is the best understanding of the play. The same is true for our clinical work. The narrative of any patient, if listened to by a group of psychoanalysts, would not evoke the same reaction in everyone.
All psychoanalysts have learned from Freud to listen to their patients’ narratives but at the same time they listen for more, for what patients are afraid to talk about and what they are avoiding saying. They listen to what makes patients guilty, anxious, what is repeated and much more. But above all, psychoanalysts listen to connections patients cannot make and to gaps in the narrative. When any of this is disclosed to patients it may evoke gratitude, anger, or disagreement. In many cases the result is a deepening of the analytic process.
A text, unlike a psychoanalysand, does not respond but as the text unfolds the interpretation is either confirmed or has to be given up. Psychoanalytic listening can be taught to the student only up to a point. When psychoanalysts listen they rely in part on what they have learned; on the other, they are listening to what the patient has evoked in them and that depends on the individuality of each analyst. An analytic interpretation is usually made at the crossroad to two ideas that the patient has not seen, but some crossroads are richer in meaning than others.
There have been many psychoanalytic studies of Shakespeare's plays and some of them have been referred to in this book. However, bringing together a number of plays as I have done has an advantage, because cross-reference between plays can become a clue to the unconscious connection that an individual play alone does not reveal. To cite one example, we are justified in concluding that Shakespeare's relationship to his mother's breasts suffered a disturbance at some point, otherwise he would not have written these passages in Coriolanus, Macbeth and King Lear:
| VOLUMNIA: | The breasts of Hecuba, When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword, contemning. (Coriolanus, I.iii.43–46) |
| LADY MACBETH: | I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. (Macbeth, I.vii.54–59) |
It is not customary to compare breasts to a bleeding forehead but it occurred to Shakespeare. We may not know why, but the comparison is striking. We are also reminded of Lear's curse of Goneril:
| LEAR: | Into her womb convey sterility, Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her. (King Lear, I.iv.233–238) |
We infer that some disturbance remained in Shakespeare's unconscious about his experience nursing. Volumnia expresses a disdain for nursing and that can lead us to compare her to Lady Macbeth's desire to be unsexed so that she will be unable to nurse. Goneril is cursed by her father not to have any nursing pleasure. Psychoanalysis cannot give us Shakespeare's biography but can throw light on unusual themes in his plays and their unconscious meanings.
Shakespeare wrote his plays for many reasons: to earn a living, to become known to the English aristocracy (including Queen Elizabeth and later King James) and to give his company a steady flow of new plays, amongst others. To a psychoanalyst there is still a further purpose: to resolve an intrapsychic problem that is disturbing the creative writer at the time. It is this need that this book refers to as the unconscious in Shakespeare's plays. It may be known to the author and not revealed to the audience or it may also be unconscious to the author, but will reveal itself to those who read or hear the play with interest in the unconscious.
Less creative writers are usually satisfied when they deal with one unconscious problem at a time, but truly creative authors weave together a number of unconscious conflicts in every play, making the task of the interpreter more difficult but also more of a challenge.
Creative writers also face another choice: they can create an original plot or find a plot elsewhere in literature and change it to serve their own purposes. Shakespeare employed both methods.
Freud has found that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus of every neurosis and some of Shakespeare's plays deal primarily with this complex; Richard III, Julius Caesar and Hamlet are examples. Freud also found that unacknowledged homosexual wishes could lead to paranoia; Othello and The Winter's Tale deal with the danger of paranoia; The Merchant of Venice deals with the danger of homosexual submission. The oedipal wish can also make it difficult for a father to let his daughter marry another man; this conflict appears in a number of Shakespeare's plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest and King Lear. Of these plays, King Lear goes the deepest and deals with Shakespeare's wish to regress and to convert his daughters into his mother. One of Freud's achievements was the realisation of the conflict between superego and ego, or the realisation that our morality can be in conflict with our identity. Measure for Measure deals with this problem.
I have written this book with three audiences in mind. First, as a model for psychoanalytic societies to include a course on the unconscious in Shakespeare's plays (which is also the title of this book); second, with the hope that it will find its way to students and teachers of Shakespeare, who will find that I have added something to the understanding of Shakespeare; third, that the book will add both pleasure and interest to those readers who already love Shakespeare.
The way Freud made his initial discovery of the Oedipus complex is well documented in the exchange of letters between Freud and Fliess (Masson, 1985). In a letter written on 15 October 1897, Freud informed his friend that he had discovered in his self-analysis being in love with his mother and jealous of his father, which he considered a universal event in early childhood. He went on to draw further evidence from Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. These two tragedies acted as midwives to Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex. Shakespeare influenced Freud but in what way remains a question.
We can see Shakespeare as an important ancestor of psychoanalysis if we acknowledge the significant role of self-knowledge in various plays. The command “Know thyself” has come down to us from Apollo's temple in Delphi but it was the contribution of psychoanalysis to transform self-knowledge into a therapy to cure emotional illnesses.
In The Merchant of Venice Antonio complains:
| ANTONIO: | In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn. And such a want-wit sadness makes of me, That I have much ado to know myself. (The Merchant of Venice, I.i.1–7) |
At the beginning of King Lear Regan assesses her father thus:
| REGAN: | ‘Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself. (King Lear, I.i.285) |
And of course there is Hamlet.
| HAMLET: | I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. (Hamlet, II.ii.280–283) |
It is depression, not anxiety, that had become such a burden to Shakespeare's characters and it is the puzzle of depression that prompts them to acquire self-knowledge. We are entitled to the hypothesis that Shakespeare struggled and feared depression and his creativity represented a victory over his depression, but The Tempest implies that eventually this battle was lost.
The way Shakespeare understood and used the unconscious emerges as an intriguing question demanding an answer. That the search for the answer should lead very often to an unexpended understanding of the play gave me a sense of serendipity.
Bloom used Shakespeare's astonishing capacity to understand the unconscious to deprecate Freud. He accuses the discoverer of the Oedipus complex of being its victim, forced even consciously to deny that it was Shakespeare from whom he learned the nature of psychoanalysis. In this book I will show that psychoanalysis has made it possible to understand an aspect of Shakespeare not available before Freud.
It has often been argued that Shakespeare's plays cannot be submitted to psychoanalytic scrutiny because the players cannot be put on the analytic couch and asked to free associate. However, another problem, of greater significance, has not, to my knowledge, been raised: Is a great playwright like Shakespeare engaged in creating real people? Or is it the prerogative of genius to be capable of going beyond the creation of ordinary men and women and creating people larger than life?
There are great writers—Anton Chekhov comes to mind—who have a sharp eye and give us characters more extreme than those we meet, but they are recognisable personalities taken from real life. Shakespeare is not one of these writers. He creates personalities that are not only greater than life but also possess qualities not likely to be found in real people.
Psychoanalysis is a theory about real people: how they function and how they can be helped to live a better life. Is psychoanalysis applicable to the men and women Shakespeare has brought to life, even if they do not exist in real life? To my surprise and perhaps also to the surprise of my readers, the answer is a qualified yes. Shakespeare's creations are not real people but their psychic structure is modeled on that of real individuals whom Shakespeare endowed with an unconscious. He allows us to overhear their soliloquies as they confront their preconscious and at times even their unconscious.
The difference between the psychoanalytic way of looking at a play and the non-psychoanalytic way became sharply delineated in chapter thirteen on Othello. It has frequently been asked what Iago's motive was for the systematic way he proceeded to arouse Othello's jealousy and bring about not only Desdemona's death but also to orchestrate the manner in which she was killed. Scholars tend to agree with and quote Coleridge's famous statement that Iago suffered from “motiveless malignancy”. By its very nature psychoanalysis cannot accept that anything is motiveless; we may not be able to find a motive but the emphasis on the unconscious demands that everything observed and particularly a sustained and most powerful drive such as that in Iago has a motive.
The next question is whether a dramatist of genius should give us access to the hero's motivation. Is a drama where the motive is withheld from the audience a greater or lesser work of art than one that ultimately supplies the answer? The value of the psychoanalytic interpretation of any play will be influenced by our answer to this question.
Freud first formulated the psychoanalytic approach to literature in 1908, eight years after the publication of his “Interpretation of Dreams”. In a short essay, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, Freud began by citing the question of Cardinal Ippolito D'Este to Ariosto, who wanted to know “from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material?” (Freud, 1908: p. 143). He noted that the writer typically cannot answer this question and concluded that the answer remains unconscious to the writer. Freud then made his first contribution by noting that “every child at play behaves like a creative writer” (Freud, 1908: p. 143) because children rearrange things in a way that pleases them while playing. The creative writer does the same thing as the child at play, but unlike the playing child the writing produced must evoke interest in the reader. When the child grows older fantasising replaces play with a basic difference: children are not ashamed of their play but adults are often ashamed to share their fantasies. Writers must disguise their fantasies well enough in their work or they will develop a writing inhibition. Freud concluded that a happy person does not fantasise; only unsatisfied wishes give rise to fantasies.
In a paper written in 1904 but not published in Freud's lifetime, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage”, Freud emphasised the similarity between the spectator at a play and the child at play. Freud had some harsh things to say about the spectator.
The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a “poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen”, who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel and to act and to arrange things according to his desires—in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. (Freud, 1942: p. 305)
I myself am not sure that Freud's heirs did him a service by publishing a paper he did not make public himself but what matters is that Freud brought theatre going close to fantasising. I am convinced that reading Othello, Macbeth or King Lear did more for me than make me identify with them. The opposite feeling, dissociation, may be at least as important.
Freud's next observation, that creative writers may create their own stories or rework a version out of material created by a predecessor, is relevant to Shakespeare's work. When Shakespeare departs from his sources it indicates that the sources did not meet his requirements and had to be changed. The creative writer can “split his own ego” and transform an inner conflict into conflicts between different personalities. Up to this point Freud derived creative writing essentially from fantasy and daydreams. Without referring to Freud directly, Ernst Kris, in “Prince Hal's Conflict” (1948), had the essay by Freud in mind when he stated, “Some great writers seem to be equally close to several of their characters, and may feel many of them as parts of themselves. The artist has created a world and not indulged in a daydream” (Kris, 1948: p. 506).
On the last page of his essay Freud raised a further problem: when fantasies are communicated they cause no pleasure for the listener (unless the listener is included in them). When creative writers present their fantasies they are so disguised that we are not repelled by them and instead experience pleasure. How writers accomplish this, Freud called, their “innermost secret”—what is essential in an “ars poetica”. To do so the writer “softens the character of his egoistic daydreams” and bribes us by offering us “fore-pleasure”. Writers succeed if they at least temporarily help us rework our inner problems. Pertinent criticism is that Freud's view fails to differentiate between the profound works of literature that contribute the very core of Western civilisation and the popular potboilers that become best sellers for some time but are soon forgotten.
What is characteristic of the insights of Shakespeare's characters is that they are never strong enough to prevent an impending catastrophe. If a psychoanalytic patient behaved like a Shakespearean character Freud would have described it as a “negative therapeutic reaction”. At this point drama and therapy part ways: what would be considered a therapeutic failure adds depth to a work of art.
If we are really successful in offering a psychoanalytic interpretation of a Shakespeare play we should arrive at a unifying theme that governs the work, and if we find it we will experience something akin to the eureka feeling and the whole play will gain new meaning. However, this is not always possible and that is the reason the same play can be interpreted differently by different analysts. In spite of the differences of psychoanalytic schools, a correct interpretation of a play carries conviction and is usually experienced as beautiful.
As I got deeper into this work I realised that I have not always sharply differentiated between two very different kinds of insight and I would like to share this differentiation with my readers. The first type of data I have collected are examples of how Shakespeare frequently endowed his characters with insight we now designate as psychoanalytic. A typical example is Angelo's insight in Measure for Measure Angelo, when he realises his sexual attraction to Isabella is based on aggressive wishes to “raze the sanctuary” (Measure for Measure, II.ii.171). This insight has no curative power to deter Angelo but it enhances our interest in his character.
The second type of insight sheds light on something Shakespeare himself did not realise. For example, I found that in the graveyard scene, Hamlet remembers a childhood homosexual love for Yorick before he can re-find his love for Ophelia. I believe this connection enriches our understanding of Hamlet, but did Shakespeare himself understand that Hamlet could re-find his love for Ophelia only after he allowed himself to remember?—that is, allowed a memory of a homosexual love to “return from repression”—how much he loved Yorick as a child? Probably not. I conclude that creative writers can transmit unconscious ideas of which even they are not aware to their audiences.
The first type of insight would be recognised by anyone familiar with psychoanalysis but the second may not, and in fact has not been realised earlier. Since we cannot summon either Hamlet or Shakespeare to answer the question, it will be the consensus of my readers that will eventually decide whether I have applied a personal, idiosyncratic interpretation to Hamlet or a valid additional understanding.
Shakespeare and Freud
In the third and last volume of Freud's biography, published in 1956, Ernest Jones stated, “The three great men in whose personality Freud seems to have taken the most interest, and with whom he perhaps partly identified himself, were Leonardo da Vinci, Moses and Shakespeare” (Jones, 1957: p. 428). Jones then goes on to point out that in each of these people there was a problem of identity; they all fit into what Freud called “family romance”. According to Freud, Leonardo had two mothers, one biological and one adoptive; Moses was an Egyptian; and the plays of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. This conviction amounted to an obsession in Freud's case. Jones offers no explanation about Freud's need to question the identity of his heroes but one immediately thinks of the possibility that Freud questioned whether he was the biological child of his own father. There is some evidence that he wished his older and more vigorous half-brother was his father.
In the essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” Freud revealed something about himself that may throw some light on this relationship to Shakespeare.
…works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture, less often of painting. This has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e., to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me. (Freud, 1914a: p. 211)
Freud is telling us, that when works of art exercise a powerful effect on him, he submits this impact to free associations. The awe that the work of art evokes in him also creates an anxiety that he tries to master. By contrast to Freud, I assume most mortals experience this awe as a privilege we have been granted: the privilege of experiencing the greatness of the artistic achievement. Perhaps Freud found it difficult to bear such awe because it seemed feminine to him and evoked a fear of homosexuality, but in this case we should remember that it was Freud himself who taught us that we all have bisexual wishes that are not apparent and should not be repressed but rather subjected to sublimation. The awe before a great work of art may turn out to be an example of such sublimation. The need to understand the secret of its impact may be a competitive feeling belonging to the Oedipus complex.
In the same essay Freud also refers to Hamlet.
Let us consider Shakespeare's masterpiece, Hamlet, a play now over three centuries old. I have followed the literature of psychoanalysis closely, and I accept its claim that it was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back by psycho-analysis to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of its effect was at last explained. (Freud, 1914a: p. 212)
There is something strange about this paragraph. He says the psychoanalytic literature on Hamlet convinced Freud that the “Oedipus theme” solved the mystery of the play for him, while in fact it was his interpretation of Hamlet's indecision that created this literature.
Freud goes on to explain:
Does Shakespeare claim our sympathies on behalf of a sick man, or of an ineffectual weakling, or of an idealist who is merely too good for the real world? And how many of these interpretations leave us cold!—so cold that they do nothing to explain the effect of the play and rather incline us to the view that its magical appeal rests solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and the splendour of its language. And yet, do not those very endeavours speak for the fact that we feel the need of discovering in it some source of power beyond them alone? (Freud, 1914a: p. 213)
Only after Freud unburdened himself of Shakespeare did he begin his discussion of Michelangelo's Moses. According to Freud, Shakespeare did not wish to imply that Hamlet was sick, ineffectual, a weakling or an idealist too good for this world, nor does Freud believe that the magical appeal of the play rests on the thoughts expressed and the splendor of the language. Shakespeare succeeded in evoking our sympathy for Hamlet because we unconsciously identify with both his oedipal wishes and the paralysis of action that they evoked.
Shakespeare discovered the power of the unconscious to determine our actions and even our whole destiny, but he did not name this power and differentiate the unconscious from the conscious. For one moment, in the physician's scene in Macbeth, Shakespeare did consider the possibility that the physician could “minister to a mind diseased” (Macbeth, V.iii.40) but rejected it by saying that when it comes to the mind “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself” (V.iii.45–46) or perform a self-analysis, as we would say today.
As to the relationship between Shakespeare and Freud and the finding of the Oedipus complex, the discovery could not have been made on the basis of Hamlet alone. Freud needed his clinical experience with neurotic patients, his self-analysis and his knowledge of both Oedipus Rex and Hamlet to make it. It was the unique combination that made the discovery possible.
As to the question of whether Shakespeare or Freud should be called the discoverer of psychoanalysis, my book leads to a new and interesting answer. If we wish to define psychoanalysis as stressing the significance of the unconscious on our lives, Shakespeare deserves a prominent place, while if we stress that psychoanalysis is a method of cure for mental illness then Shakespeare gets hardly any credit. I found the journey that led to this differentiation a very interesting one and hope my readers will share this experience.
So that the plays can speak to each other, I have divided this book into sections, but this division is not absolute. The chapter on Hamlet would also fit into the section on the Oedipus complex and The Tempest also belongs to the section dealing with the daughter as a replacement for the mother. Shakespeare seldom devoted a play to one theme. Plays not included would have added to the book but excessive bulk had to be avoided.