Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
[43] Otto Rank in his book, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage,"
furnishes a beautiful and convincing example of such repression: It
comes from a second drama based on a king's murder, "Julius Cæsar." I
quote from the author's words: "A heightened significance and at the
same time an incontrovertible conclusiveness is given to our whole
conception and interpretation of the son relationship of Brutus to
Cæsar by the circumstance that in the historical source, which
Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed almost word for word,
namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Cæsar considered Brutus his
illegitimate son. In this sense Cæsar's outcry, which has become a
catch-word, may be understood, which he may have uttered again and
again when he saw Brutus pressing upon his body with drawn sword, 'And
you too my son Brutus?' With Shakespeare the wounded Cæsar merely
calls out, 'Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar!' Shakespeare has set aside
this son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar, though doubtless known to
the poet, in his working out of the traditional sources. Not only is
there deep psychic ground for the modifications to which the poet
subjects the historical and traditional circumstances and characters
or the conceptions of his predecessor, but also for the omissions from
the sources. These originate from the repressive tendency toward the
exposure of impulses which work painfully and which are restrained as
a result of the repression, and this was doubtless the case with
Shakespeare in regard to his strongly affective father complex." Rank
has in the same work demonstrated that this father complex runs
through all of Shakespeare's dramatic work, from his first work,
"Titus Andronicus," down to his very last tragedy. I cannot go into
detail on this important point for my task here is merely to explain
Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but any one who is interested may find
overwhelming abundance of evidence in Rank's book on incest (Chapter 6).
It is not only that I have introduced Shakespeare's strong father
complex here to make comprehensible Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but
his own chief complex stood affectively in the foreground, and was
worked out, at the same time, as Macbeth.
This must have referred to Shakespeare as much as to his hero. Moreover
the writing and sealing of the letter at the beginning of the sleep
walking described by the lady in waiting seems as if Lady Macbeth had a
secret, a confession to make--in the name of the poet. I think also at
the end, when the everlasting brooding over her deed drives her to
suicide, she dies as a substitute for her intellectual creator, for his
own self punishment.[44]
[44] I also recall that it is in fact she who expresses Duncan's
character as father, "Had he not so resembled my father...."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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