King Lear and the Psychology of Dying

Abstract

PONDERING THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS, certain choices-amongthree in literature and legend, Freud concluded that in King Lear Shakespeare had somehow pierced through the myth's defensive disguises to its original unpalatable meaning. The right choice-the third casket, the third womanis really death. While students of Shakespeare may well object that a straightforward identification of Lear's third daughter with death says once too much and too little about the loving Cordelia, many of them have nevertheless heard a ring of truth in Freud's formulation of the play's underlying action: Eternal wisdom, in the garb of primitive myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying. 1 In a sense, all tragedy addresses the necessity of dying. That is, regardless of whether or not the tragic hero is dead the end (Shakespeare's always are), tragedy's peculiar blend of dignity and defeat expresses our deeply paradoxical reaction to our own mortality. What that mortality means is that the highest human potential cannot be infinite, that death will inevitably undo our treasured, all-absorbing construction-the self. From one point of view, dying feels right. Man is a part of nature, governed, as our vulnerable bodies remind us, by nature's laws of growth and decay. Man is also a moral being with convictions of guilt and unworthiness, a far cry from the God he venerates. At the same time, it is impossibly wrong that the precious ego must submit like any oblivious beast to death's impersonal blotting-out. We cannot really imagine our own non-being, as Freud observed: at bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.2 Tragedy provides an objective correlative for this basic ambivalence of ours. Its inevitable downward course toward destruction embodies one reaction: death is right, death comes from inside us. Against this arc of tragic action develops that special dimension of the protagonist we call heroic, which by asserting the ever-expanding human capability protests implicitly that death is wrong, a disaster unfairly imposed by some