It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing. There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are according to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation without exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with single causes. So manifold a chain of circumstances, those that lie near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play in most, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to assert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. Dream analysis at once proves this. One can almost always rightfully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpretations are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well motivated. We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depression under which he labored just at the time when he created his greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and even possibly--we know so little of his life--walked in his sleep? The poet always hastened to repress[43] whatever personal revelations threatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful deed, the king and father murder: "Consider it not so deeply. . . . . . . . . . These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad."