“Till destruction sicken”: The catastrophe of mind in Macbeth

Abstract

The author examines the tragedy of Macbeth from the vertex of its portrait of the effects of the hero's abandonment to the "blindest fury of destructiveness" (Freud, 1930, p. 121), using aspects of psychoanalytic thought to illuminate the theme. She affirms that Macbeth's immediate transformation in phantasy from loyal subject to future assassin threatens to flood his psyche with the uncontainable energy of destruction and thus to produce a psychic catastrophe. The remainder of the play is then examined as a representation of Macbeth's attempts to defend himself from that catastrophe: the only objects whose existence he can tolerate are those that cannot challenge his possession of the crown, which leads him to attempt to destroy all opposition. Since this is impossible, his alternative is to denude his mind of its perception of the reality in which the actions of others will inevitably produce future transformations which he is unable to control. The play's last soliloquy anticipates the final state, the repose of emptiness; it portrays a mind, emptied of emotion, looking at a world which it has denuded of meaning.

Psychoanalysis and The Arts: the Slippery Ground of Applied Analysis

“…In fact, despite Freud's advice, the illusion of the reality of a literary character may be so convincing as to push an analyst to reconstruct the childhood of an entirely fabricated character (Baudry 1984a;Tarantelli 2010). Nevertheless, the major objection to this particular approach rests-as it does for psychobiography-on the absence of the corrective effect of a living patient able to establish a transferential relationship and to free-associate.…”

“…As a consequence of the primacy given to the commentator's personal experience, it is paramount to keep in mind the diversity of possible readings of any example of culture (Cañizares 2010;Schafer 2010;Shustorovich and Weinstein 2010;Tarantelli 2010). The importance ascribed to the personal reaction of the viewer/reader runs parallel to the degree to which countertransference is taken into account in psychoanalytic clinical practice.…”