Macbeth
Two people get what they wanted and cannot survive having it. Freud used Lady Macbeth for those wrecked by success.
Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
A soldier hears a prophecy that he will be king, and his wife reads it as an instruction. Together they murder a sleeping guest, take the crown, and then spend what remains defending a throne that returns nothing to them. The first killing does not settle anything; it requires the next. Sleep leaves them. The marriage that planned the act cannot contain what follows.
Behind Freud's 1916 paper on people who fall ill at the moment of getting what they long wanted, this is the case he reaches for. Guilt here is not remorse a person elects but a symptom that takes the body: a hand that will not come clean, a mind barred from rest once the deed is done. The play tracks ambition costed in advance and paid long afterward, and a couple functioning as one unconscious enterprise, each holding the part the other cannot. It leaves a clinician with a picture of conscience operating without the person's consent.
About the author
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet who worked in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. He is known for his tragedies, among them Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, and for the range of his plays across comedy, history, and romance. His characters carry an unusual depth of interior life, which is part of why they still hold attention. Freud returned to these tragedies repeatedly, drawing on Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth in his own writing.
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