Freud - Complete Works (512 page)
I had an opportunity of obtaining
an insight into a woman’s history, which I propose to
describe as typical of these tragic occurrences. She was of good
birth and well brought-up, but as quite a young girl she could not
restrain her zest for life; she ran away from home and roved about
the world in search of adventures, till she made the acquaintance
of an artist who could appreciate her feminine charms but could
also divine, in spite of what she had fallen to, the finer
qualities she possessed. He took her to live with him, and she
proved a faithful companion to him, and seemed only to need social
rehabilitation to achieve complete happiness. After many years of
life together, he succeeded in getting his family reconciled to
her, and was then prepared to make her his legal wife. At that
moment she began to go to pieces. She neglected the house of which
she was now about to become the rightful mistress, imagined herself
persecuted by his relatives, who wanted to take her into the
family, debarred her lover, through her senseless jealousy, from
all social intercourse, hindered him in his artistic work, and soon
succumbed to an incurable mental illness.
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On another occasion I came across
the case of a most respectable man who, himself an academic
teacher, had for many years cherished the natural wish to succeed
the master who had initiated him into his own studies. When this
older man retired, and his colleagues informed him that it was he
who was chosen as successor, he began to hesitate, depreciated his
merits, declared himself unworthy to fill the position designed for
him, and fell into a melancholia which unfitted him for all
activity for some years.
Different as these two cases are
in other respects, they yet agree in this one point: the illness
followed close upon the fulfilment of a wish and put an end to all
enjoyment of it.
The contradiction between such
experiences and the rule that what induces illness is frustration
is not insoluble. It disappears if we make a distinction between an
external
and an
internal
frustration. If the object
in which the libido can find its satisfaction is withheld
in
reality
, this is an external frustration. In itself it is
inoperative, not pathogenic, until an internal frustration is
joined to it. This latter must proceed from the ego, and must
dispute the access by the libido to other objects, which it now
seeks to get hold of. Only then does a conflict arise, and the
possibility of a neurotic illness, i.e. of a substitutive
satisfaction reached circuitously by way of the repressed
unconscious. Internal frustration is potentially present,
therefore, in every case, only it does not come into operation
until external, real frustration has prepared the ground for it. In
those exceptional cases in which people are made ill by success,
the internal frustration has operated by itself; indeed it has only
made its appearance after an external frustration has been replaced
by fulfilment of a wish. At first sight there is something strange
about this; but on closer consideration we shall reflect that it is
not at all unusual for the ego to tolerate a wish as harmless so
long as it exists in phantasy alone and seems remote from
fulfilment, whereas the ego will defend itself hotly against such a
wish as soon as it approaches fulfilment and threatens to become a
reality. The distinction between this and familiar situations in
neurosis-formation is merely that ordinarily it is internal
intensifications of the libidinal cathexis that turn the phantasy,
which has hitherto been thought little of and tolerated, into a
dreaded opponent; while in these cases of ours the signal for the
outbreak of conflict is given by a real external change.
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Analytic work has no difficulty
in showing us that it is forces of conscience which forbid the
subject to gain the long hoped for advantage from the fortunate
change in reality. It is a difficult task, however, to discover the
essence and origin of these judging and punishing trends, which so
often surprise us by their existence where we do not expect to find
them. For the usual reasons I shall not discuss what we know or
conjecture on the point in relation to cases of clinical
observation, but in relation to figures which great writers have
created from the wealth of their knowledge of the mind.
We may take as an example of a
person who collapses on reaching success, after striving for it
with single-minded energy, the figure of Shakespeare’s Lady
Macbeth. Beforehand there is no hesitation, no sign of any internal
conflict in her, no endeavour but that of overcoming the scruples
of her ambitious and yet tender-minded husband. She is ready to
sacrifice even her womanliness to her murderous intention, without
reflecting on the decisive part which this womanliness must play
where the question afterwards arises of preserving the aim of her
ambition, which has been attained through a crime.
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
. . . Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!
(Act I, Sc. 5.)
. . . I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
(Act I, Sc. 7.)
One solitary faint stirring of
reluctance comes over her before the deed:
. . . Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done
it . . .
(Act I, Sc. 2.)
Then, when she has become Queen
through the murder of Duncan, she betrays for a moment something
like disappointment, something like disillusionment. We cannot tell
why.
. . . Nought’s had, all’s
spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
(Act III, Sc. 2.)
Nevertheless, she holds out. In
the banqueting scene which follows on these words, she alone keeps
her head, cloaks her husband’s state of confusion and finds a
pretext for dismissing the guests. And then she disappears from
view. We next see her n the sleep-walking scene in the last Act,
fixated to the impressions of the night of the murder. Once again,
as then, she seeks to put heart into her husband:
‘Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear
who
knows it, when none can call our power to
account?’
(Act V, Sc. 1.)
She hears the knocking at the
door, which terrified her husband after the deed. But at the same
time she strives to ‘undo the deed which cannot be
undone’. She washes her hands, which are blood-stained and
smell of blood, and is conscious of the futility of the attempt.
She who had seemed so remorseless seems to have been borne down by
remorse. When she dies, Macbeth, who meanwhile has become as
inexorable as she had been in the beginning, can only find a brief
epitaph for her:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
(Act V, Sc. 5.)
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And now we ask ourselves what it
was that broke this character which had seemed forged from the
toughest metal? Is it only disillusionment - the different aspect
shown by the accomplished deed - and are we to infer that even in
Lady Macbeth an originally gentle and womanly nature had been
worked up to a concentration and high tension which could not
endure for long, or ought we to seek for signs of a deeper
motivation which will make this collapse more humanly intelligible
to us?
It seems to me impossible to come
to any decision. Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
is a
pièce d’occasion
, written for the accession of
James, who had hitherto been King of Scotland. The plot was
ready-made, and had been handled by other contemporary writers,
whose work Shakespeare probably made use of in his customary
manner. It offered remarkable analogies to the actual situation.
The ‘virginal’ Elizabeth, of whom it was rumoured that
she had never been capable of child-bearing and who had once
described herself as ‘a barren stock’,¹ in an
anguished outcry at the news of James’s birth, was obliged by
this very childlessness of hers to make the Scottish king her
successor. And he was the son of the Mary Stuart whose execution
she, even though reluctantly, had ordered, and who, in spite of the
clouding of their relations by political concerns, was nevertheless
of her blood and might be called her guest.
The accession of James I was like
a demonstration of the curse of unfruitfulness and the blessings of
continuous generation. And the action of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
is based on this same contrast.
The Weird Sisters assured Macbeth
that he himself should be king, but to Banquo they promised that
his children should succeed to the crown. Macbeth is incensed by
this decree of destiny. He is not content with the satisfaction of
his own ambition. He wants to found a dynasty - not to have
murdered for the benefit of strangers. This point is overlooked if
Shakespeare’s play is regarded only as a tragedy of ambition.
It is clear that Macbeth cannot live for ever, and thus there is
but one way for him to invalidate the part of the prophecy which
opposes him - namely, to have children himself who can succeed him.
And he seems to expect them from his indomitable wife:
Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males . . . .
(Act I, Sc. 7.)
¹
Cf.
Macbeth
, Act III, Sc.
1:
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding . . .
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And equally it is clear that if
he is deceived in this expectation he must submit to destiny;
otherwise his actions lose all purpose and are transformed into the
blind fury of one doomed to destruction, who is resolved to destroy
beforehand all that he can reach. We watch Macbeth pass through
this development, and at the height of the tragedy we hear
Macduff’s shattering cry, which has so often been recognized
to be ambiguous and which may perhaps contain the key to the change
in Macbeth:
He has no children!
(Act IV, Sc. 3.)
There is no doubt that this means: ‘Only
because he is himself childless could he murder my children.’
But more may be implied in it, and above all it might lay bare the
deepest motive which not only forces Macbeth to go far beyond his
own nature, but also touches the hard character of his wife at its
only weak point. If one surveys the whole play from the summit
marked by these words of Macduff’s, one sees that it is sown
with references to the father-children relation. The murder of the
kindly Dun can is little else than parricide; in Banquo’s
case, Macbeth kills the father while the son escapes him; and in
Macduff’s, he kills the children because the father has fled
from him. A bloody child, and then a crowned one, are shown him by
the witches in the apparition scene; the armed head which is seen
earlier is no doubt Macbeth himself. But in the background rises
the sinister form of the avenger, Macduff, who is himself an
exception to the laws of generation, since he was not born of his
mother but ripp’d from her womb.