Sleep Walking and Moon Walking Part 10

Now for the grounds of her collapse. As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. Then her power of endurance gives way until her very soul fails utterly. As she says on the occasion of the first disappointment after Duncan's death:

"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."

Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the role of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, "Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!" and bade her go to bed.

Why however does not the ruthless Macbeth live down the murder of the king as he does in the history? I believe that we must here go still further back than to the Chronicle, even to the creator of the tragedy himself. There is a certain important crisis in Shakespeare's life, where according to the biography by George Brandes "cheerfulness, the very joy of life, was extinguished in his soul. Heavy clouds gathered over his horizon, we now do not know just what their source. Gnawing griefs and disappointments gathered within him. We see his melancholy grow and extend itself; we can observe the changing effects of this melancholy without clearly recognizing its cause. Only we feel this, that the scene of action which he sees with the inner eye of the soul has now become as black as the external scene of which he makes use. A veil of phantasy has sunk down over both. He writes no more comedies but puts a succession of dark tragedies upon the stage, which lately reechoed to the laughter of his Rosalinds and Beatrices."

This crisis came in the year 1601, when the earl of Ess.e.x and Lord Southampton, Shakespeare's special patron, were condemned to death because of treason against the life of the king. According to Brandes the depression over their fate must have been one of the original causes for the poet's beginning melancholy. Perhaps the death of Shakespeare's father, which followed some months later, made a more lasting impression with all the memories which it recalled. The dramas which the poet published about that time, Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth, have a common theme, they all revolve about a father murder. In "Julius Caesar," Brutus murders his fatherly friend, his mother's beloved ("And thou too, my son Brutus?"). Hamlet comes to shipwreck in his undertaking to avenge upon his uncle the father's murder, because the uncle, as Freud explains in his "Interpretation of Dreams," had at bottom done nothing else than Hamlet had wished in his childhood but had not had the self confidence to carry out. And Macbeth in the last a.n.a.lysis is ruined by the king and father murder, the results of which he can never overcome. We may consider this theme of the father murder, always presented in some new form, in the light of its direct precipitating causes, the actual death of Shakespeare's father and Southampton's treason against the ruling power of the state. It is not difficult to accept that at that time the infantile death wishes against his father were newly awakened in our poet himself and were then projected externally in a series of powerful dramas.

Perhaps the reader, who has followed me more or less up to this point, will stop here indignant: "How could any one maintain that a genius like Shakespeare could have wished to murder his father, even if only in the phantasies of childhood?" I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the a.s.sumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child.

We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite s.e.x, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same s.e.x, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. The child would be most delighted to "marry" the tender parent, as we heard above, and therefore feels that the other parent stands in the way as a disturbing rival. "If the little boy," says Freud in the "Interpretation of Dreams,"[40] "is allowed to sleep at his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father's return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child's experience has taught him that 'dead' folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return."

[40] Freud, _l. c._, p. 219.

Yet how does the child reach such a depth of depravity as to wish his parents dead? We may answer "that the childish idea of 'being dead' has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing.... Fear of death is strange to the child, therefore it plays with the horrible word.... Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as 'being gone,' not disturbing the survivors any more.

The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by traveling, estrangement or death.... If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die."[41] It may be conjectured, if we apply this to Shakespeare, that also this greatest of all dramatists repeatedly during his childhood wished his father dead and that this appeared in consciousness agitating him afresh at the actual decease of the father and impelled him to those dramas which had the father murder as their theme. Moreover the father's calling, for he was not only a tanner but also a butcher, who stuck animals with a knife, may have influenced the form of his death wishes as well as of their later reappearances in the great dramas.

[41] Freud, _l. c._, pp. 215, 216.

The evil thoughts against the father in the child psyche by no means exclude the fact that at the same time there are present with them tender impulses, feelings of warmest love. This is indeed the rule according to all experience and can be proved also with Shakespeare.

This other side of his childish impulse leads for example to the powerful ambition which we find as a chief characteristic of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as in truth of the poet himself. We know that when the latter was a boy his father became bankrupt. He had not only lost everything which he himself possessed, his wife's dowry and his position as alderman, but was also so deeply in debt at this time that he had to guard himself against arrest. Once more I let Brandes express it: "The object of Shakespeare's desire was not in the first place either the calling of a poet or fame as an actor, but wealth and that chiefly as a means for social advance. He took very much to heart his father's decline in material fortune and official respect. He held pa.s.sionately from his youth up to the purpose to reestablish the name and the position of his family.... His father had not dared to go along the streets, fearing to be arrested for debt. He himself as a young man had been whipped at the command of the landowner and thrown into jail. The small town which had been the witness of these humiliations should be witness of the restoration of his honor. Where he had been spoken of as the actor and playwright of doubtful fame, there would he be seen again as the honored possessor of house and land. There and elsewhere should the people, who had counted him among the proletariat, learn to know him as a gentleman, that is as a member of the lesser n.o.bility.... In the year 1596 his father, apparently at his instigation and with his support, entered a pet.i.tion at Heralds College for the bestowal of a coat of arms. The granting of the coat of arms signified the ceremonial entry into the gentry." The ambition of the small child is to become as great as the father, and so later that of the man is to exalt the father himself, to make him king. One sees how close and how very personal the theme of ambition was to Shakespeare.

Before I go on to a.n.a.lyze further what the poet has woven into his treatment of "Macbeth" from his own purely personal experience, we must first consider a technical factor which is common to all dramatists. It has been discovered that Shakespeare projected his own complexes into his tragedies, complexes which are in no way simple, but which show, for example, close to the hatred even as great a love as well as other contrary elements. He is fond of separating his dramatic projection into two personalities wherever his feeling is an ambivalent one, these two forms standing in contrast to one another. He splits his ego into two persons, each of which corresponds to only one single emotional impulse.

That is a discovery which of course was not made for the first time by psychoa.n.a.lysis. Minor, for instance, writes in his book on Schiller: "Only in conjunction with Carlos does Posa represent Schiller's whole nature, the wild pa.s.sion of the one is the expression of the sensual side, the n.o.ble exaltation of the other the stoical side of his nature.... Schiller has not drawn this figure from external nature; it has not come to him from without but he has taken it deep from his inner being." Otto Ludwig expresses himself similarly: "Goethe often separates a man into two poetic forms, Faust-Mephisto, Clavigo-Carlos."

It is plainly to be seen, if we apply our recognition of this fact to Shakespeare, that he has projected his ego affect into Macbeth as well as his wife, which gives numerous advantages. So far we have considered Lady Macbeth merely as a complete dramatic character, which she is first of all. Besides this nevertheless she surely corresponds to a splitting of Shakespeare's affect, for the poet incorporates in her his instincts for ruthless ambition. He has worked over the character already given her by the Chronicle for his own exculpation. It was stated previously that Macbeth in the first two acts is by no means the bloodthirsty tyrant of Holinshed and really stands far behind his wife in ambition. It is as if our poet, who plainly stands behind his hero, wished thereby to say, I am not capable of a father murder and would surely have put it off or not have accomplished it at all, if I had not been compelled by a woman's influence. Macbeth will go no further in the affair in spite of all favorable outward circ.u.mstances, but it is Lady Macbeth who forces the deed to completion. The final cause of every father hatred is rivalry in regard to the mother and so it was she, represented by Lady Macbeth, who in his phantasy would have urged the infantile Shakespeare to put his father out of the way. Here branches out another path for the sleep walking. We have so far spoken only of the father who comes at night to the child, but now Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep, seems also to represent Shakespeare's mother, who with the candle in her hand convinces herself that her darling child is sleeping soundly.[42]

[42] Going back into Shakespeare's own life gives further illumination and foundation for Lady Macbeth's behavior in the sleep walking scene.

The reader may already have secretly thought that those little tendernesses on the part of ordinary parents hardly enter into consideration in the case of a thane's daughter. It may be said in answer to this that Shakespeare often, as in the presentation of ancient scenes, put without scruple the environment of his own time in place of the historical setting. And according to the above he would be quite likely to utilize with Lady Macbeth recollections from the Stratford childhood.

It need not seem strange that I give a number of interpretations apparently so fundamentally different for one and the same thing. There is nothing on earth more complicated than psychic things, among which poetic creation belongs. Psychic phenomena are according to all experience never simply built up nor simply grounded but always brought together in manifold form. Whoever presses deeply into them discovers behind every psychic manifestation without exception an abundance of relationships and overdeterminations. We are accustomed in the natural sciences to simple motivation, on the one side cause, on the other effect. In the psychic life it is quite otherwise. Only a superficial psychology is satisfied with single causes. So manifold a chain of circ.u.mstances, those that lie near at hand and those more remotely connected, come into play in most, yes, apparently in all cases, that one scarcely has the right to a.s.sert that a psychic phenomenon has been completely explained. Dream a.n.a.lysis at once proves this. One can almost always rightfully take it for granted that several, indeed manifold interpretations are correct. It is best to think of a stratified structure. In the most superficial layer lies the most obvious explanation, in the second a somewhat more hidden one, and in yet deeper strata broader and more remote relationships and all have their part more or less in the manifested phenomenon. This latter is more or less well motivated.

We now turn back to Shakespeare and observe the great depression under which he labored just at the time when he created his greatest tragedies. Does it seem too presumptuous to conceive that one so shaken and dejected psychically should have slept badly and even possibly--we know so little of his life--walked in his sleep? The poet always hastened to repress[43] whatever personal revelations threatened to press through too plainly, as we know from many proofs. The poverty of motivation quite unusual with Shakespeare, just at the critical point of the sleep walking, seems to me to score for such a repression. We might perhaps say that the fact that the poet has introduced to such slight extent the wandering of Lady Macbeth, has given it so little connection with what went before, is due simply to this, that all sorts of most personal relationships were too much involved to allow him to be more explicit. See how Lady Macbeth comforted Macbeth directly after the frightful deed, the king and father murder:

"Consider it not so deeply.

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 relationship 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 relationship 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.