Part 10 (2/2)
These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”
[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 Caesar.” 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 relations.h.i.+p of Brutus to Caesar by the circ.u.mstance that in the historical source, which Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed almost word for word, namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Caesar considered Brutus his illegitimate son. In this sense Caesar'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 Caesar merely calls out, 'Et tu Brute! Then fall, Caesar!' Shakespeare has set aside this son relations.h.i.+p of Brutus to Caesar, 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 circ.u.mstances 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, ”t.i.tus 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 subst.i.tute 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....”
There remain yet only one or two points to be touched upon and explained. No discussion is needed for the fact that an outspoken s.a.d.i.s.tic 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 p.u.b.erty, 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 a.n.a.lysis the change in the att.i.tude 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 ReSUMe
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 a.n.a.lyzed more or less completely as of a s.e.xual 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.
4. Sleep walking can also have an infantile prototype, when the child pretends to be asleep in order that it may be able, without fear of punishment, to experience all sorts of forbidden things, that is of a s.e.xual nature, because it cannot be held accountable for that which it does ”unconsciously, in its sleep.” The same motive of not being held accountable actuates the adult sleep walker, who will satisfy his s.e.xual desires, yet without incurring guilt in so doing. The same cause works also psychically, when sleep walking occurs mostly in the very deepest sleep, even if organic causes are likewise responsible for it.
5. The motor outbreak during sleep, which drives one from rest in bed and results in sleep walking and wandering under the light of the moon, may be referred to this, that all sleep walkers exhibit a heightened muscular irritability and muscle erotic, the endogenous excitement of which can compensate for the giving up of the rest in bed. In accordance with this these phenomena are especially frequent in the offspring of alcoholics, epileptics, s.a.d.i.s.ts and hysterics with preponderating involvement of the motor apparatus.
6. Sleep walking and moon walking are in themselves as little symptoms of hysteria as of epilepsy. Yet they are found frequently in conjunction with the former.
7. The influence of the moon in this moon affectivity is very little known, especially in its psychic overdetermination. Yet there is little doubt that the moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent, who every night came in loving solicitude to a.s.sure himself or herself of the child's sleep. Nothing so promptly wakes the sleep walker as the calling of his name, which accords with his being spoken to as a child by the parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic coloring like the staring of the hypnotizer to secure hypnosis. Other psychic overdeterminations appear merely to fit individual cases. It is possible finally that there actually exists a special power of attraction in the moon, which may expressly force the moon walker out of his bed and entice him to longer walks, but on this point we have no scientific hypotheses.
8. Furthermore it seems possible that sleep walking and moon walking may be permanently cured through Freud's psychoa.n.a.lytic method.
I know very well that this explanation which I give here, offers only the first beginning of an understanding. It will be the task of a future, which we hope is not too far distant, to comprehend fully these puzzling phenomena.
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