Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
There remain yet only one or two points to be touched upon and
explained. No discussion is needed for the fact that an outspoken
sadistic nature in Lady Macbeth leads her to walk in her sleep, indeed,
disposes her to it. We can easily understand also that this breaks forth
just at the moment when her husband sets out, that is, translated into
the infantile, when Macbeth, or in the deeper layer her own father,
dies. It is much more necessary to explain why immediately after the
deed she has no scruples in staining the chamberlains with Duncan's
blood and takes the affair so lightly, while later she is never rid of
the fear of the blood and is always striving in vain to wash her hands
clean. Here it must be again recalled that Lady Macbeth on the one hand
represents the actual wife of Macbeth, on the other hand the poet
himself and in two epochs of his life; Shakespeare first in his
unrestrained striving and then when he is brought low, shaken in his
very depths by the death of his father. Murder phantasies toward his
father came to him as a boy and then as a youth at the beginning of
puberty, and yet at neither time was he ill. The more mature man
however, borne down more heavily by life, met by the actual death of his
father, broke down under the weight of things. This explains in the last
analysis the change in the attitude of Lady Macbeth.
I do not know how far the reader is willing to follow me. Yet one thing
I believe I have proved, that also in Lady Macbeth's sleep walking the
erotic is not wanting nor the regression into the infantile.
CONCLUSION AND RÉSUMÉ
If now at the close of this book we bring together all our material, we
may with certainty or with the highest probability speak of sleep
walking and moon walking as follows:
1. Sleep walking under or without the influence of the moon represents
a motor outbreak of the unconscious and serves, like the dream, the
fulfilment of secret, forbidden wishes, first of the present, behind
which however infantile wishes regularly hide. Both prove themselves in
all the cases analyzed more or less completely as of a sexual erotic
nature.
2. Those wishes also which present themselves without disguise are
mostly of the same nature. The leading wish may be claimed to be that
the sleep walker, male or female, would climb into bed with the loved
object as in childhood, which both the folk and the poet well know. The
love object need not belong necessarily to the present, it can much more
likely be one of earliest childhood.
3. Not infrequently the sleep walker identifies himself with the beloved
person, sometimes even puts on his clothes, linen or outer garments, or
imitates his manner to the life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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