Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
With Shakespeare also king and father come together. A remark of Lady
Macbeth shows that when she addresses herself to the murder of Duncan.
"Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done't." This
physical likeness signifies identity of individuals, as we know from
many analogous examples. The king therefore resembles the father because
he stands for her parent. Still one more point may be well explained
from her father complex. The Chronicle speaks of the overweening
ambition of Lady Macbeth. Now we know from neuropsychology that burning
ambition in later years represents a reaction formation to infantile bed
wetting. It is the rule with such children that they are placed upon the
chamber at night by father or mother. Thus we comprehend from another
side, with the so frequent identification with beloved persons,
precisely why the lady wanders at night with a candle in her hand. Here
again appears plainly the return to the infantile erotic.
Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting
only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms
of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen
at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband
will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father
murder, her hopes will never be fulfilled and she will never live in
quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of
endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on
the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death:
"Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content;
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy."
Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself,
now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she
begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In
her wandering she herself plays the rôle of father, who once approached
her with the lighted candle and then called to her, "Come, come, come,
come, give me your hand!" and bade her go to bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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