Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare: Cruising the Canon

 

David Begelman 

Psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare’s plays seem to me to represent misdirections and diversions from a proper assessment of the canon. Psychoanalytic interpretations of the motives of, say, Hamlet and Iago, may actually fail to do what they purport to do: explain the behavior of a central character in a play. On one interpretation, Hamlet procrastinates avenging his father’s death because his unconscious Oedipal fantasies would surface uncomfortably close to consciousness were he to murder his uncle outright; Iago’s hatefulness supposedly camouflages his homosexual desire for Othello or Cassio or both. That a generation of scholars could take these lucubrations seriously is the thing to be explained, not two of the most skillfully drawn personalities in all of literature.

Latent or unconscious homosexuality, as this is held to motivate the villain in Othello, seems to have exhausted its panoramic grip on American letters, not to mention the preoccupations of academics, notably professors of literature and philosophy.  Many of them in the past fastened onto it as a protean explanatory rubric. Perhaps one reason for its diminished role is the recent drift toward abandoning outdated ideas about the Other, including persons who maintain diverse life styles. Accordingly, repressed homosexuality in literature and the theater seems to have run its morbid course up to a point in time when everyone stopped being anxious about the possibility that the alleged condition was his or hers.  

American plays in which homosexuality is an ingredient theme, like Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, are often those in which the motive  is not repressed, but suppressed, affording little opportunity for the psychoanalytically inspired to do their thing. Big Daddy Pollitt, in the powerful second act of William’s play, forces his son Brick to face the erotic, and not especially unconscious, desire for his dead sports pal. Brick returns the lesson in truth-telling by informing Big Daddy he is dying from colon cancer. The father, furious that his condition has been kept from him, exits shouting that everyone—except his tortured son—is a liar. The “odor of mendacity” on Big Daddy’s plantation is relieved only by revelations that for father and son have been too searing to face prior to their explosive confrontation.   

Of course, perhaps a case might be made for psychoanalysis “explaining” Shakespearean characters were we to harbor some unusual sense of the term “explanation” for what psychoanalysts do with fictional characters. Freud likewise fancied he explained real individuals like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in his 1910 and 1914 monographs. Yet it only stands to reason that a theorist who can boldly declare, as he did in Totem and Taboo, that Moses was an Egyptian, deserves more in the way of skeptical reception.

Psychohistorians, following Freud, tend to put the cart before the horse. We cannot use psychology to recreate history before deferring to historians as fact finders. Psychology of whatever persuasion can only elaborate on established history. In addition, in Totem and Taboo Freud postulated that real life Oedipal dramas of wishing to kill the father and sexually possess the mother are actually throwbacks to a very real past, and were inherited from the experiences of our primordial ancestors. Such a formulation incorporates a discredited theory of genetic transmission, Lamarckianism, allowing for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It rose to prominence in Soviet Russia, where Stalin’s handpicked agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, put forth a theory on a similar wave-length. Not all Soviet howlers were in the purely political arena.

On April 21, 1896, when Freud presented the first of his three “Seduction Theory” papers to the Viennese Medical Society, Richard Von Krafft-Ebing who chaired the meeting was moved to observe that the theory “sounds like a scientific fairy-tale.” The comment has been spun by psychoanalysts as the voice of a medical sensibility unprepared for a pioneer well in advance of his time. Freud himself characterized the reaction to his paper as “an icy reception from the asses.”  When he abandoned the theory mere months after announcing it, later retractions by psychoanalysts of their attitude to the dismissive judgment of Krafft-Ebing and his colleagues were nowhere in sight in the turgid prose of Freud’s insular circle. 

The Welsh scholar, Peter Swales, has demonstrated that some of the patients in Freud’s caseload were none other than himself disguised as paying customers, so that the honesty of the founder of psychoanalysis also comes under a cloud. For those of you who fall asleep at lectures, but can be roused to alertness when a National Enquirer-type tidbit is offered for consideration, should know that Dr. and Mrs. Sigmund Freud on vacation signed in at a European hotel and shared the same room. Except the woman was not Marthe Freud, the doctor’s wife, but Minna Bernays, his sister-in-law. So much for bourgeois physicians of flawless integrity. Of course, ad hominem arguments are no substitute for dispassionate criticism of theory, even if from time to time they are more fun. 

For what it’s worth, my hunch is that these so-called explanations have a moral, as well as a scientific thrust. To hold that the artistic products of the two great Renaissance painters can be explained by positing unresolved Oedipal feelings seems to be a backhanded way of demoting artistic achievement down to a nasty level of shared instincts. For me, the theory degrades creative achievement by consigning it to the ranks of mundane processes. To narrow the distance between me and Michelangelo would appear on the moral plane to demote him or elevate me. Were psychoanalysts to protest that all their theory seeks to do is to scientifically explain, not demote, creative genius, my response would be: “That may be the scientific aim of the formulation; but what is its moral aim?”

Psychoanalytic theory and its offshoot, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, are currently in disrepute as viable avenues of explanation and treatment. In my business, the treatment of troubled persons, psychoanalysis is largely an anachronism. I say “largely” here because patients do sometimes improve in this kind of psychotherapy. But they also improve in alternative forms of therapy, with a significant contribution of what we in the trade call “non-specific factors.” Suggestibility is a relevant component here, although behavior change in treatment is invariably attributed to its effect, as if the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc were too much of a temptation for the enchanted to avoid.

The business of evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapy is a tremendously complicated task for researchers. Effectiveness has to be the statistically significant advantage of any treatment approach over the advantage of receiving no treatment at all. Several studies, although not all, report dismal findings in this regard. The prestigious New York Psychoanalytic Institute many years ago undertook a study on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. The results were so embarrassing to the profession, authorities at the Institute immediately suppressed the data. Evidently, for their ranks the truth not make you free.  

Ironically, the principal impetus for contemporary disenchantment with the house that Freud built comes from humanities scholars, many of whom who were once its staunchest supporters. I refer here to the commentary of philosophers like Adolph Grünbaum, Frank Cioffi, and Colin McGuinn, and others like Frederick Crews, Peter Swales, Max Scharnberg, Malcolm Macmillan, Allan Esterson, Stanley Fish, Hans J. Eysenck, Robyn Dawes, Frank J. Sulloway, Sebastian Timpanaro, Rosemarie Sand, and others too numerous to mention. Their disenchantment mirrors the nearly universal although less publicized disdain for psychoanalysis in the austere corridors of experimental psychology. Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, characterized Freud’s theory as a “stupendous confidence trick.” I cannot emphasize too strongly the power of this recent commentary. It is impressive and far reaching, and not the idle chatter of a few jaded souls.

One more point before we take up the plays. There seems to be a contemporary bias for “getting to the bottom” of a psychological problem, a trend that has been an unfortunate aftermath of psychoanalytic theorizing. When overemphasized—as it is these days—one can sense the overreach of a strictly motivational psychology. The charm of Freud’s theory in my opinion hinges on the belief that for every pattern of overt behavior there has to be a tacit narrative making it coherent in some scripted or literary way. This is probably why the theory has had such an appeal for humanities scholars. They are only too willing to popularize formulations that create subterranean texts with a motive structure all their own, differing from the features of overt behavior. It is as if at every step the ordinary reasons and motives for our behavior had to be deconstructed on pain of being regarded as superficial. The tacit literary script is seen as explaining the manifest one.

Allow me to refer you to one aftermath of this kind of thinking. I see a number of patients who have diagnosable panic disorder. The condition is characterized by unpredictable anxiety episodes and can incapacitate the patient, sometimes to the point of being housebound. The retreat maneuver is called agoraphobia, which is not as its Greek etymology would suggest, a fear of open spaces, but a fear of an anxiety attack in those places in which the episode previously occurred. Favorite sites for first occurrences are expressways, shopping centers, and restaurants. Housebound patients have agoraphobia in spades: they can have, or imagine they can have, an attack any place outside the home site to which they have unfortunately retreated. There are other forms of anxiety, but panic disorder is an unusually debilitating form of the condition. It can be treated with medication (usually a regimen of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibiter like Prozac or Zoloft, a tricyclic antidepressant like Imipramine, or anxiolytics like Xanax, and a cognitive-behavioral therapeutic approach involving desensitization strategies or flooding paradigms). Sometimes one or another of these modalities will do the trick. Panic disorder is democratic, while it affects more women than men, its sex-linked aspect is not as strident as it is for eating disorders (female), stuttering (male), self-mutilation (females), or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (male). Its sometime victims have been the actor Phillip Bosco, the singer Carly Simon, the great operatic tenor Franco Corelli, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

The hitch is that there is a significant percentage of patients who refuse medication, not because they are enamored of wholistic health or natural rather than synthetically manufactured compounds, but because they “want to get to the bottom of the problem.” By this they mean they want to explore to the underlying psychodynamics of their condition, rather than rely on synthetic palliatives like medication. Note: medication is only a band-aid in their minds, whereas something akin to an underlying system of repressed impulses or conflicts, the unconscious narrative, is the real culprit. I sometimes remind them that patients with panic disorder react catastrophically to injections of Sodium Lactate, whereas the procedure has no effect on anxiety-free controls. In addition, there is a high concordance rate in identical twins for the disorder, and a familial risk. Doesn’t that suggest that the problem may lie in processes wholly outside the arena of unconscious motives? By the way, the fact that the root cause of panic disorder may be in the physiological realm does not preclude versions of cognitive therapies aimed at altering thinking about the condition. After all, changed thinking about a condition also has a physical representation in the nervous system. What won’t work is psychobabble about unconscious motives—for good reason. Panic disorder isn’t motivated; it just happens to people. The generalization remains true even for those episodes of the condition that are triggered by stress-related factors.

Hamlet’s World

I should like to quote at length a passage from Ernest Jones’ Hamlet and Oedipus to illustrate the kind of formulation of which I speak: 

Hamlet’s attitude towards his uncle-father is far more complex than is commonly supposed. He of course detests him, but it is the jealous detestation of one evil-doer toward his successful fellow…for the more vigorously he denounces his uncle the more powerfully does he stimulate to activity his own unconscious and “repressed” impulses…His own “evil” prevents him from completely denouncing his uncle’s, and in continuing to “repress” the former he must strive to ignore, to condone, and if possible even to forget the latter…In reality his uncle incorporates the deepest and most buried part of his own personality, so that he cannot kill him without also killing himself…Only when he has made the final sacrifice and brought himself to the door of death is he free to fulfill his duty, to avenge his father, and to slay his other self—his uncle  (Jones,  1949, p. 100).

There are several peculiarities in this short exposition of one influential psychoanalyst’s approach to the play. First, I cannot fathom why Jones says that Hamlet’s “own ‘evil’” prevents him from denouncing his uncle, or in “repressing” instincts he has to ignore, condone, or even forget his uncle’s evil deed. Hamlet denounces his uncle at every turn in the play, and he is hardly given to either ignoring, condoning, or forgetting the idea his uncle murdered his father at any point beyond the initial scene when he encounters the ghost for the first time. Quite the reverse. But if the so-called Oedipal conflict were the operative subtext of Hamlet’s character, would not Jones’ formulation lead to the expectation that Hamlet would indeed either condone or forget what his father’s ghost had revealed to him on the battlements of Elsinore Castle?

 To illustrate the suspiciously comprehensive texture of psychoanalytic theorizing, suppose I were to author a play about a prince who learns that his uncle had murdered his father and married his mother within a month after his father’s death. His immediate temptation is to kill his uncle, but the more he thinks about this, the more he lapses into a lassitude about his plans, continually forgetting about having formulated it, and at other times coming up with reasons why his uncle’s act might have been politically justified. What would the psychoanalysts say? Why, that I had just written a play about a hero whose behavior can be explained by his repressed Oedipal fantasies—exactly the same explanation that Jones fashions to explain the behavior of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a character who does the opposite of the hero in my play. And here we have an excellent illustration of what psychoanalysts tend to do with any scenario. It is always reduced to the same equation no matter what the manifest scenario. Formulations that explain everything explain nothing. Just what scenario might it be that would, on Sir Karl Popper’s criterion of scientific legitimacy, count as falsifying psychoanalytic interpretation?

The above point was driven home for me when, years ago I was invited to the home of an analyst for a summer weekend. A sign above the front door of his cottage on Fire Island read “Oedipus Rex.” My host was a chess player, and during a match with him I had the occasion to remark that Dr. Reuben Fine, another psychoanalyst, had authored a paper on the Oedipal fantasies inherent in chess. My host scoffed at the very idea, since for him Oedipal fantasies cut across all kinds of behavior, so it was no news it should make a similar appearance in chess. If white plays P-K4, the player is unconsciously preoccupied with the father figure, with the intent of murdering him; if he plays P-Q4, he is preoccupied with the mother, possibly to sexually possess her after murdering the father figure; if he plays N-KB3 or N-QB3, he is intent on bypassing or repressing his unconscious preoccupation with Kings and Queens. All these moves are popular ones in chess because they are dictated by rules governing the opening game. That is, there are strategic reasons for the moves in question, and these have absolutely nothing to do with the unconscious psychology of players, unless we mean by this their unverbalized, albeit rational decision-making based upon certain rules of the game.

Jones goes on to develop his thesis of Hamlet driven by the incestuous idea of sexually possessing his mother. His explanation for Hamlet’s being able to kill Claudius at the end of the play bears scrutiny:

 

There are two moments in the play when he is nearest to murder, and it is noteworthy that in both the impulse has been dissociated from the unbearable idea of incest. The second is of course when he actually kills the King, when the Queen is already dead and lost to him for ever, so that his conscience is free of an ulterior motive for the murder (Jones, 1949, p. 100).

 

            Jones implies that the unconscious wishes responsible for Hamlet’s delay in killing his uncle Claudius no longer activate inaction after his mother Gertrude dies from poison. How is such an assumption derived, even from the psychoanalytic formulation? If the Oedipal conflict is the chief player in Hamlet’s unconscious, whence the deduction it is less instrumental because of the real demise of the mother figure? In other words, why should Gertrude’s death have any bearing at all on Hamlet’s weakened inhibitions to avenge his father? Jones here fudges deductions that reconcile Hamlet’s murder of Claudius with the hypothesized reasons for his being unable to do so—right up to the point he actually follows through with the deed.

In the play there was an actual attempt on Hamlet’s part to kill his uncle—thus refuting the psychoanalytic stress on unconsciously derived delay, although Jones fudges the point in a like-minded way. This is the scene in Gertrude’s chamber when Hamlet stabs an intruder hiding behind an arras:

 

How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat dead. Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool: farewell: I took thee for thy better (Italics mine—DAB)

 

          Polonius is, at the Danish court, an adviser who appears to be the closest to being a prime minister. There is no “better” above him as far as social station is concerned except royalty, like Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude. The implication is clear: Hamlet thought he was killing Claudius, mistaking Polonius for him. Jones’ spin on this, a convoluted explanation of why Hamlet’s Oedipal conflict prevented him from killing his uncle prior to his mother’s actual demise, is as follows:

…Hamlet did not have the king in his mind when he struck this blow…After all, he had just left the king engrossed in prayer, and the latter could hardly have rushed in front of him to the bedroom. The words that have given rise to the common misunderstanding (“I know not. Is it the king?”) are surely to be read as a response to his mother’s alarm, combined with a typically irrational “wish-fulfilment” that his task has by a lucky accident been accomplished. “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell: (insert: for a moment) I took thee for the better” comes then when he realizes the impossibility of his previous thought (or wish). Soon after this the ghost appears, which would have been superfluous had Hamlet seriously intended to kill the king, and Hamlet admits his recalcitrance (Jones, 1949, p. 37).

This will never do. The appearance of the ghost (whom Gertrude, unlike her son, does not see) in no way underscores that he goads Hamlet on the supposition the latter has lost completely the intention to avenge him; he comes as a reminder to expedite the matter, since getting on with it should move ahead expeditiously, and give no sign of “blunted purpose.” The ghost announces his visitation is only to “whet,” not recreate, that purpose.

            Furthermore, both Hamlet and Polonius exit at the end of Act III, Scene iii, leaving the king in prayer. There is no indication of a specific passage of time after this that would make it implausible for Hamlet to assume it was Claudius who was hiding behind the arras. (And who else would one assume was thus situated in Gertrude’s bedchamber?) Hamlet arrives there after calling from within: “Mother, mother, mother!” and the interval of time between his entrance here and his exiting from the king’s presence is left unspecified. It could be minutes, hours, even days.

            Jones has it that Hamlet is passionate and decisive when it comes to most other matters, but dilatory when it concerns avenging his father’s death:

Hamlet is a man capable of very decisive action, with no compunction whatever about killing. This could be not only impulsive, as in the killing of Polonius, but deliberate, as in arranging for the death of Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz…He shows no trace of hesitation when he stabs the listener behind the curtain, leaps into the grave with Laertes or accepts his challenge to what he must know was a duel, or when he follows his father’s spirit on to the battlements, nor is there any lack of determination in his resolution to meet the ghost…On none of these occasions do we find any sign of that paralysis of doubt which has so frequently been imputed to him…the whole picture is not, as Goethe depicted, one of a gentle soul crushed beneath a colossal task, but one of a strong man tortured by some mysterious inhibition (Jones, 1949, pp. 37-39).

            Jones’ thesis then, is that Hamlet is a passionate and decisive person in every respect, although a hero overcome “by some mysterious inhibition” when it comes to avenging his father. Our only task now is to show why the psychoanalyst has not persuasively demonstrated any mysterious inhibition to execute revenge. In fact, there is no evidence in the text for any such thing. The idea that there is was, of course, first formulated by Coleridge. It predates psychoanalytic speculation about Hamlet although the latter appears to be a spin on the older formulation. In the Olivier film of the tragedy, the action is preceded by the actor’s voice announcing that “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.”

Hamlet is banished from Denmark by the king after the killing of Polonius. He is sent to England with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern carrying royal letters to the English king requesting him to assassinate Hamlet. The secrecy of the mission is in part determined by Hamlet’s popularity with the populace, making it impolitic for Claudius to move against Hamlet on Danish soil. After Polonius’ death, Hamlet is obviously on the defensive, with little opportunity to exact his revenge on the king who is himself alerted to the danger to his person that Hamlet poses. One can, without bowdlerizing the text, imagine a palace guard around Claudius, a natural response of royalty to perceived danger. It is not long after his trip home that the fencing match with Laertes is arranged, and Hamlet on that very occasion exacts his revenge. We are thus faced with explaining the alleged “mysterious inhibition” of our hero prior to the death of Polonius.

Without belaboring themes of the play that have been reworked endlessly by other Shakespearean scholars, allow me to point out that an overriding one is the playwright’s preoccupation with appearance versus reality. That is, characters in the play frequently question what is real or unreal. The critic Maynard Mack in The World of Hamlet referenced what he calls the interrogative mood of the play. Hamlet’s killing Polonius, for example, is a crisis point in the action that puts the hero on the defensive because he misinterprets who lurks behind the arras. Hamlet’s very first speech in Act I, scene ii begins with a world play on the theme:

                                             Queen:   If it be,

Why seems it so particular with thee?

                                   Hamlet: Seems madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’

The theme is taken up with other characters, and, indeed, is registered in the very atmosphere of the play. Especially noteworthy is Hamlet’s reflection on the reality of the ghost in his soliloquy in Act II, scene ii: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” This speech is important in its registering a legitimate doubt about the meaning of the ghost’s appearance. Hamlet detested his uncle Claudius even before the appearance of the ghost on the Elsinore ramparts: “So excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr.” The ghost’s revelations that Claudius was both a murderer and an adulterer, resonate with Hamlet’s already established intimations: “O my prophetic soul!” meaning that he suspected something underhanded about his uncle, if not the actual sins the ghost enumerates.

            A psychoanalyst may conjecture that Hamlet’s doubts about the ghost is simply the temporizing effect introduced by the unconscious Oedipal conflict, but such a slant ignores the Elizabethan spin on matters theological, especially when it came to ghostly visitations. Hamlet’s doubts about the ghost were the entirely legitimate ones driven by the early modern thinking about the wiles of the Devil:

       …The spirit that I have seen

       May be a devil, and the devil hath power

             T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps

       Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

 As he is very potent with such spirits,

                                        Abuses me to damn me.

Are these reservations about the ghost the transparent rationalizations for inaction the psychoanalysts would have us believe? Or are they the very real doubts Hamlet should harbor, given the thinking about the Devil that was dictated by the theology of an age?