Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
We will stop here at two factors which will occupy us again later, the
being in love with the parent of the opposite sex, and then the
resistance against the one of the same sex. Corresponding to the love,
every child in the period of innocence wants to "marry" the former. I
recall what a colleague told me of a dialogue between him and his little
five year old daughter. She began, "I want to get married."--"To
whom?"--"To you, Papa."--"I already have a wife."--"Then you would have
two wives."--"That won't do."--"Very well, then I will choose a man who
is as nice as you." And Freud relates (p. 219), "An eight year old girl
of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes
advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. 'Now I
shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I
beg you,' and so on. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet
four years old, ... says outright: 'Now mother can go away; then father
must marry me and I shall be his wife.'"
We will add just one more little experience to give us a broader point
of view. The interpretation of dreams, fairy tales and myths teaches us
regularly that the phantasies of the child, like those of all peoples in
their period, identify father with king or emperor. Naturally then the
father's wife becomes the queen. This fact of experience, which is
always to be substantiated, can be applied to Lady Macbeth and makes her
ambition at once transparent to us. I affirmed above that her lack of
sexual feeling toward her husband had its origin in the fact that she
had loved her father too much and could not therefore free herself from
him. Her sexuality had transformed itself into ambition and that, the
ambition to be queen,[39] in other words, the father's wife. So could
she hold fast to the infantile ideal and realize the forbidden incest.
The intensity with which she pursues the ambition of her life is
explained then by the glowing intensity of her sexual wishes.
[39] Holinshed's chronicle lays emphasis upon this: "She ... burned
with an inextinguishable desire to bear the name of queen."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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