ee 3-29 fee, ae The Psychoanalytic Reading of King Lear King Lear provides fertile ground for the application of psychoanalytic literary theory. This essay will discuss how some _of the _major_psyehoanalytie concepts may be used in order to elucidate Lear’s abnormaLbehaviour. Lear's madness will be viewed through the lens of Freudian and Lacanian ideas as well as the object relations theory. While analysing the play, an object relations theorist, would interpret the protagonist's destructive behaviour as symptomatic of The lack of appropriate boundaries between his self and the people who surround him. According to the object Telations theory, the infant initially views itself asa part of its mother, The separation of the baby’s self from that Of the mother is always a painful process triggering frustration and fear. If the mother provides the baby with the sense of continuity and_stability, it manages to develop the Paap gee meeenieoen independert ond balers ida However, if the necessary range regarding their independence. Lear's behaviour may be symptomatic Of the lack of sufficient maternal care in the infancy, which in turn tainted his attachment to other people with unhealthy emotions. As Harold Bloom put it: "Love_isno healer in The Tragedy of King Lear; indeed, it starts all the trouble, and is a tragedy in itself... Maternal love is kept out of, the tragedy" (484), The yearning for fusion with his daughters and the rage at the thought of theis. having independent lives constitute two emotional poles between which Lear_is fluctuating throughout the play. It is already evident in the scene in which Lear asks his daughters to express their love for him. What he expects is not the respect and gratitude that children should normally feel for a loving and generous father, but rather a complete devotion. Goneril and Reagan recognize his abnormal desire and-cunningly suggest that they are willing to fulfill Lear's fantasy, Their speeches Construct Lear as the center of their lives and the only object of affection For example, Reagan stresses that the only thing she needs is Lear's love: ‘4 profess myself an enemy to all other joys” (1.1 8). ‘Asa result, Lear is content and endows them with power and wealth. Cordelia is disgusted by the hypocrisy of her sisters. She declares that she loves the father “accordingto [their] bond”(1.1 9) E and makes an observation that in the normal course of life, some of her love will belong to her future husband: ‘You have begot me, bred me, loved me: 1 Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you, and most honor you. . Why have my sisters husbands, if they say sale ‘ They love you all? “Abra Bes of kine Lean i = O Me shen f dfilibng his Con, Ait fem, Sbnormalitios ane dywaptans aes: ytd of toalicdng clap inte Bercy hace i bos fire he, Elacha Compras, QBirharitiog Cortalin, whiow he lve ; GQ taspe dh Katp Pane hos? ye ee +. ) llI wed, Haply, when | shal “That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty: Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all. (1.1 10) i jis fantasy of her Leat is outraged at Cordelia’s assertion of independence, because it defies his fantasy Providing him with the sense fusion which he experienced in his babyhood “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery”(1.1 11). The story of King Lear when analysed from the Freudian perspective may be viewed as the enactment of Oedipal situation in which the male infant experiences sexual attachment to the Mather. From the onset, Lear_is presented as baby and his daughters as mother_ figures, When Lear is about to distribute the kingdom among his daughters he hopes: SELES about to distribute the kingdom among his d To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburthen'd crawl toward death, (1.1:6) Itis "as if he had regressed to the posture and position of a child” (Garber 653). After Lear handed down his power to Goneril and Rea gan, the Fool observes the inversion of natural family relations through which daughters became mothers fur her’: E’ersince thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; { for when thougav’st them the rod, and put'st down thine own breeches, ‘Then they for sudden joy did weep. (1.4.16) The play. abounds in_sexual_undertones which point to the Le “daughters turned mothers”, The speeches of Goneril and Reagan in Ac with expressions indicative not of a father-chiild bond, but rather of lover Describing their affection, they use expressions incestuous desires for his ct I, Scene 1 are saturated 1S’ passion, alluding to a sexual act e.g, ‘A love that makes breath poor”(I.1 8) ‘which evidently Jeayes Lear satisfied. Cordelia’s speech, on the other hand, makes it clear that this kind of love will be reserved for her husband and refuses to yield to Lear's incestuous demands. The attitude of Kent after Lear's fit of fury directed at Cordelia may be interpreted as the intervention of the father-figure, who at the Oedipal stage prevents the Possibility of incest between the mother andthe child. In his essay, enti a . edipal situation in ee Psychopathology of Shakespeare's King Lear" Paunch describes the ree ses the term "Lear Complex" to identify "a kind of a reverse Oedipus frome daaeas oe being sexually attracted to his own daughter" (358) mothers” Reagan and sae ofvview, the factthat Lear’s perceives his “daughters turned Goo sexual terms, could be interpreted his failure to enter the Symbolic ‘ the sexual desire fe P distanced through the use of | jesire for the mother is repressed and the mother’s body is. At the end of Act 1, scene 1 Cordelia tells her sisters: “[ know you what you are/ And like a sister am most loath to call,/ Your faults as they are named”. When Goneril defers Lear’s wishes he addresses her in highly sexualised language with epithets such as “small ‘small fault” (,fault meaning ,,vagina) and makes reference to her womb and “organs of ‘ncrease"(2.4 63). Cordelia, on the other hand, is represented by a highly metaphorical language which idealizes her and lifts her above the physical, material realm. After Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia, he tells hi “Thou art a soul in bliss”(4.7.153) and imagines the spiritual pleasures of their future lives together; We two alone will sing like birds in the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, Ill kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, ‘And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh, (5.1 159) The attitude of Reagan and Goneril towards Lear may be interpreted as the assault on his mascilline identity. Aer giving up the power over the land, which in patriarchal society was identified with masculinity, Lear wishes to retain some of his manliness by exerting rule over his knights, This description in which Goneril and Regan haggle over Lear’s retinue paints his hundred knights as'the extensions of Lear and his masculinity: Men so disordered, so debauched and boldith their manners. That this our court, infected with their m ; ous inn. Shows like a riot Epicurism and lust . Makes it more like a tavern OF a brothel ‘Than a graced palace. The shame itself doth speak For instant remedy - --- ‘A little to disquantity your train. --- (1.4.121-122) tration and Lear se sterp to derive Lear fis nights ean De see 8 SUES SAT aus aa = Shamed / That thou hi pata shake my manhood thus” (14.123). 2S to the overwhelming influence of his two daughters, who behave like dominating mothers, hen seems to be gradually losing his masculinity and his behaviour becomes more ‘and more feminised. He experienses hysteria (which until the early modern era was regarded a8 A exclusively wo Gmotion caused by “wandering womb”) and, breaks into tears when confronted with the cruelties of Goneril and Reagan. This feminisation inspires great anxiety in him, which is evident in the following passages, = SS If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts Against their father, fool me not so much To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger, ‘And let not women’s weapons, water-drops, Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,,.. No, I'll not weep. Ihave full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, Orere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad! (2.4 72- 3) Freudian and Lacanian readings of the play are supported by considerable textual evi E i ty evidence. The play. abounds in sexual innuendo, which may be viewed as the allusion to Lear's incestuous ead fis Tailure to enter the Symbolic Order. Object relation theory, on the other hand, provides a convincing explanation of psychological processes underlying Lear’s need to control his daughters and his féar of abandonment, /Aout te machina > am uncypocted power erevent that. Games bitinatiion taut famed tie zi S According to.J Aohnson, King Lear i . most accompli Coleridge tela held both by critics and theatre-goers to be Shakespeare's Splitting up of his foremost acti : realm among his d foremost action of the opeiing scene; Lear's an ac = laughters, we a Maction clumsily synthetic init, but = Heh epoca is allows with disastrous rigor, Let the first scene of this play duped by pees ee fe se lost, and let itofly be understood that a fond father had been Previously and deservedh anon aos a a a the part of two daughters to disinherit the third, undiminished. and be perfoer Been ae Il the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest q : é 2 , eee Shakespeare S greatest play, in Coleridge's view, consists in the astonishing four de force ed em epee W's influential lingo is able to win from us acquiescence in the originating reason of ae ¥ in spite of its impossibility. But, although the language of the play can, in fact, create Maceted effects, can it be that Shakespeare's greatest play is an artistic breakdown, that it lacks unity? Can it be that the poet who conceived of his art as ‘holding a mirror up to nature’ could rest content with an arbitrary action as the motor of a play which had brought his genius to its greatest stature? I do not wish to assert that Coleridge's insight of the play is universally held by critics and scholars. However, less piercingly defined variants of it are to be found among contemporary scholars. One view is that, having rejected the biased and individual reasons of the earlier 'King Lear' from which he worked, Shakespeare offers no cause at all for Lear's division of the kingdom, that Shakespeare made Lear's action lucid onty in so far as it was headstrong and arbitrary (Hunter, 1972). But Shakespeare has Lear reveal that his action is motivated: ‘Meantime we shall express our darker purpose’, This ‘darker purpose’ is only slowly revealed in the unfolding of the play; it is a ‘darker purpose’ than Lear knew. King Lear despite its political theme, is a tragedy of family li flafoxony1765) believed the soul of the lay to be Lear as father, 'Lear would move our compassion but [ittle, did we not rather consider the injured father than the degraded king’. The relationships between a father and his daughters, a father and his sons. and of sisters and of brothers are at the heai wy(Snider, 1887). Shakespeare uses Lear's insanity as a mechanism for stripping away the self-absorbed illusory aspects of royalty in order to try to lay exposed what is necessary to the human stipulation. It is this very narcissistic misapprehension, which Shakespeare was concerned 3 to penetrate, that many critics have found obligatory to conserve in their glorification of Lear.Lear’s exercise of political authority has often received observation, but the disaster of Lear's exercise of parental power has largely been passed over in stillness. It is in the further analysis of the play as a tragedy of familial relations that Lear's _darker purpose ‘is to be found. Freud(1913) did not do fairness to Lear's daughters or to Lear's relations with them. Freud takes it for granted that Lear's agreement with them even if tragically misguided can be fully comprehended in terms of Lear's failing struggle to recognize decline and death. This perception is sound as far as it goes. But Freud treats Lear's daughters merely as abstractions as envoy representatives of the fates from whom Lear cannot escape and not as thespian characters in their own right. Freud's interpretation of the daughters as fates is conflicting with Cordel efforts to save and protect her father and with the fact that Lear is indirectly accountable for eerie death. Freud passed over what is in my opinion a crucial psychoanalytic perception of the play and its central and secondary themes and characters a perception that reveals the play's dramatic unity. Freud was not alone in treating Lear's daughters as abstract symbols, although this treatment is more usually limited to Goneri and Regan who, not infrequently, have been treated as 'personifications of lack of appreciation rather than as plausible, if horrifying personalities. Although Coleridge showed that Shakespeare had taken pains to avert evil in Edmund 5from passing int ‘ ‘0 utter monstrosity’, he aoe an Regan. They h Ys he pt any similar understanding of thecharacterizations of Violate theit proper fi They have been sen as animals and suicide’ i imund, a lust which ends in murder to be explain: language. 0; : S| a a es 4 Z itp Contrary, Shakespeare has Lear treat his d gi ler refusal to entertain his knights, he curses scheming, evil, devi » evil, devi eRe ae poo but women, nonetheless, The academic denial of compassion to Goneril al to the psychological refutation that they really are Lear's daughters. This denial, as we shall see, is part of af , a failure to come to terms wi i i : ; swith the'psychosomatic meaning of the opening scene of the play which, as a conse i : es oe quence, is experienced as lacking in verisimilitude. The play opens with a me a t€te-A-téte between Kent and Gloucester. We learn that Lear eaially esteems a s ' any and Cornwall; whilé Gloucester discloses that he is embarrassed of one of his ‘0 sons, his bastard son Edmund, despite the fact that nature has given him physical and mental strengths at least equal to those of the lawful son, Edgar. As the action of the play unfolds we become conscious that Lear has been sightless to the serious differences in the characters of his sons-in-law: Albany civilized and weak, Cornwall frail and cowardly but brutal. Similarly, we find out how unreliable Gloucester's ruling is. In the attendance of Edmund he speaks cleverly, sensually, yet degradingly of Edmund's mother and the circumstances of his beginning. Because of his illegitimacy, he has underprivileged Edmund of any steady, continuing liaison to himself and the advantageous influence of a father on a son. Out of shame, he has maintained Edmund in a condition of exile from himself, and informs Edmund and Kent that this deprivation is to continue. and Regan in Shakespeare's laughter Goneril very much as a woman when, her with barrenness. Shakespeare treats them as Gloucester: He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again, The King is coming Lear's appearance in Act I Scene 1 is announced by Gloucester in combination with this rather atrocious dismissal of his son. Moments later we will hear Lear's scarcely disguised though comatose insults to Goneril and Regan and his enraged, brutal disowning of Cordelia. The themes of the sub-plot and the major plot of the play are tied jointly at the outset by Shakespeare. With the sure psychological nature of the great dramatist, Shakespeare taps into the reason of free associations in his use of contiguities and juxtapositions, such as this one, while at the same time elaborating his themes according to the logic of historical exposition. Unconscious, implicit conatiohs and meanings are incorporated with aware, explicitly elaborated themes. Coleridge, shrewd psychologist, that he could be, was susceptible to the provocation and denunciation inherent in Gloucester's treatment of Edmund. He saw that it could stimulate in him a desperate, vengeful, rage which could subvert his ambitions, through the choice of aggressive means for their gratitude. As Coleridge puts it, ‘all the kindly counteractions to the roguish feelings of shame, which might have been derived from co-domestication with Edgar and their common father, had been cut off by his nonattendance from home, and foreign edification from boyhood to the present time, and a scene of its continuance, as if to prevent all risk of his interference with the father's views for the elder and legitimate son ...' (p. 336). To which one might add that Gloucester's approach to Edmund deprived the son of any affection for his father and, thus, of the positive side of the ambivalence that could have helped him to accept and identify with his father's authority and, hence, with the authority of just law and self-restraint. His lack of any legitimate hope of advancement equal with his capacities neutralized in him the anxiety that might, otherwise, have imposed some restraint on him in his choice of means. Coleridge has demanded of us that we seek an understanding of the evil in Edmund, without forgiving the evil he does, and that we value the dilemma of Edmund's insolent prayer by which he steels himself in his plan to have Edgar exiled and not himself, "Now gods stand up for bastards!', Edmund is exposed to unbearable feelings of sibling jealousy. Edmund's ambitionsmount as 2 pefresh opportunities present themselves, but his first intention was bred out of sibling jealousy: to turn the tables on his legitimate and preferred brother. re well then,Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund to As to the legitimate. Fine word 'legitimate'! Well, my ‘legitimate’, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate, I grow, I prosper (1.2, 15 - 21). If the sub-plot is, in fact, dramatically bound to the main action by recurrence of theme with disparity, we would expect to find something of this ‘preference and rivalry’ in the relations of Lear and his daughters. With few exceptions, the critics have found the sub-plot of the play to be necessary toit precisely because it does imitate the characters and actions of the main story. Johnson defends the place of Edmund in the play for the chance it afforded ‘the poet of combining perfidy with treachery, and connecting the evil son with the wicked daughters, to impress this vital ethical, that villainy is never ata stop, that crimes guide to crimes, and at last terminate in ruin’. The duplication of plots, according to Bradley, ‘startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no aceidents er merely individual sree tions, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad vn (p. 262). But while entirely agreeing with the critics concerning the theatrical and artistic importance of it cannot be believed that the nature of this relationship has the relation of the sub-plot to the main story, buon either adequately or completely understood. Indeed, it has been partly misunderstood in so far as it has involved the dehumanization ‘of Goneril and Regan and the idealization of Lear. What is this fateful, malignant influence? Where does it spring from? Why invoke Satan or the gods or unredeemed animosity? What if the poet's combining of treachery with perfidy includes the fathers as well as the son and daughters? After all Gloucester is not so ‘unsuspicious' as Bradley would have him, otherwise how could Edmund have so easily aroused doubts and fear of Edgar in his father? May not similar disastrous flaws Emerge in Lear's relations to his daughters, if, indeed, the two plots do reflect each other as it is agreed they do? Like Gloucester, Lear is deceived by his faithless daughters and repudiates his true daughter. Moreover Lear is energetic while Gloucester is only imprudent. Lear invites Goneril and Regan into the reat stances in which they lie to him with false promises of fidelity. Gloucester submits to dishonesty; Lcar invites it. By means of these repetitions with variations, Shakespeare holds a reflect up to the a ns of Lear and his daughters, that dramatically illuminates without verbalizing it, the ‘ the division of his kingdom. Coleridge went half way toward graspin, this critical structural relation within the play in his scrutiny of the character of Edmund but was a then stopped short by his own idealization of Lear and corresponding derogating terror of Goneril and Revan. Let us then extend Coleridge's insights into the temperament and motives of Edmund to Goneril and Regan and sce what understanding of'the main story and its great protagonist this vantage ciated For Lear's handling of Goneril and Regan in Act I-is no less provocative than Gloucester's eae aad Edmund. If Edmund was driven by green-eyed rage against his brother to take by sham what hi ae Bere ty ee pete Gerer| and Regan Vlcar ike his ret choi Cordelia over her sisters honestly and harshly clear. é patie cholesitbr, characters and ac nature of Lear's ‘darker purpose’ in ae our joy, Although our last and least, to whose young love The vines of France and milk of BurgundyStrive to be interested; what can you say to draw A third more opulent than your sisters? (1,1, 8286). And again, | loved her most, and thought to set my rest On her kind nursery (I.1, 123 - 124). Goneril and Regan have-been placed in a state of stern disgrace by their father. They are invited to vie with each other for the richest segment of their father's gift in the knowledge that they must lose to his beloved Cordelia. Could it be that the dishonesty and coldness they exhibit comes from their own chilling recognition that nothing they can do or say could win for them an equal place in their father’s heart? The propensity of some critics to hold that the play has no past -only the dubious present of Act I Scene | from which the tragedy follows, can be understood as the consequence of the refutation that Lear is the father of Goneril and Regan as well as of Cordelia. If her father's love provided a fruitful soil in which her goodness could grow, then the absence of authentic fatherly’ feeling must have been the sterile ground from which the deceit and hate of Goneril and Regan have sprung. In fact, one of Lear's tragic flaws revealed in the opening scene is his command for a show of love so narcissistically invested that he is filled with rage at Cordelia's refusal to obey. When one attends to the psychology of the relations between and among Lear and his daughters, the scene's roots in the past come clearly intoevidenc e: it is a fateful repetition at the end of Lear's life of character forming episodes in the past. In this connation one must underline once more Freud's astonishing psychological pur blindness to this dimension of the play, ‘the relationship of a father to his children, which might be a fruitful source of many dramatic. Situations isnot med to futher eocoune (e200 other, that is, than as emblematic representatives of the Tee Fates. Freud saw with perfect lucidity the oedipal theme in Shakespeare's Hamlet. But from his reading of King Lear this consciousness is entirely not present, even explicitly denied. However, in 1934 Freud corrected this earlier misreading of the play is devoid of abandoning his figurative construal, in a letter to Bransom cited by Jones. Freud treats Cordelia's silence and her repudiation of her father's demand as.a response against her love for him her hol seats (p. 487). But there is also a potency and nerve; a hope to be free of Her puerile attachment to her father, 'to love him according to her bond’ so that she can leave him to love a husband. Lear's rage, which causes him to let loose the series of events leading to the last scene of obliteration, is a reaction to Cordelia's perfectly healthy, civilized and truthful refusal of Lear's demand for an affirmation that she love only him. Shakespeare's language is fe direct, unambiguous and extraordinarily powerful in its affirmation of a basic touching truth, Haply when Ishall wed, That lord whose hand rust take away my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty. Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, To love my father all (1.1, 100— 104). Shakespeare confirms Cordelia in two ways: by having Kent, who is utterly sincere and entirely loyal to esr cate ta Co et aren oy arene loves her for her own sake ‘after Burgundy rejects her because she has misplaced herdowry and has been disowned by her royal fath "These are the very values and truths which make life worthwhile in the face of an indifferent Tae e ai death values for which Lear gropes in his madness, Lear's recklessness is not merely that he decided to split his realm and resign his supremacy 2) and power to his daughters and their husbands, nor is it purely that he fai emotional disorder on his daughters without knowing what he was doing. Lear declares that one of no" the purposes for dividing his kingdom is so, ... that future strife pone ey May be prevented now (1.1, 44 ~45). %