King Lear

Near the end of his reign, Lear sets his three daughters a test: those who declare their love most fully receive the most land. Goneril and Regan comply; Cordelia, the youngest, will not perform affection to order and is disinherited. Her plain answer sets in motion Lear's fall into exposure and madness on the heath, shadowed by the parallel ruin of Gloucester and his sons.

Freud's The Theme of the Three Caskets places Cordelia among the silent third figures who stand, finally, for death, and reads the play as an old man's difficult reckoning with mortality rather than with his children. For the clinician, several strands run together: the ageing man who takes declared affection for the real thing and mistakes reassurance for security; the narcissistic wound that opens when devotion is measured aloud; and Cordelia's refusal, a loyalty that declines to advertise itself and is punished for the silence.