Macbeth: Authority and Progenitorship

Beginning with Otto Rank's seminal discussion of Macbeth in his 1912 Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage,1 psychoanalytic approaches to the play have emphasized the patricidal character of the regicide and the maternal-seductive function of Lady Macbeth, treating Macbeth as an Oedipus figure succumbing to his own oedipal fantasies. Critics adopting such approaches have failed to maintain a consistent level of description in their discussions—writers from Rank through Coriat to Jekels (the major proponents of the mother-seduction, father-murder interpretation2) shifted blithely from discussions of the characters as fantasy or transference figures to analyses of them as full, intending subjects (a shift which they never would have made in actual analytic treatment of either).

Recent psychoanalytic criticism of the drama has preserved this confusion. Victor Calef, for example, treats the play as an establishment and elimination of the oedipal child for the purpose of ending oedipal guilt, thereby tacitly positing a single intending, fantasizing subject; however, Calef goes on to treat the characters in this fantasy, incoherently, as themselves full, intending, fantasizing subjects.3 Similarly, Simon Lesser posits an intending, fantasizing subject of the play, but he makes that intending subject Macbeth himself, leaving obscure the relation between Macbeth as intending subject and Macbeth as character. Furthermore, this intending subject is not an invariable implication (an ‘implied author’ or narrator), but a real intentionality which the audience does not construe, but into which it enters—in a characteristically confusing phrase concerning Macbeth, Lesser remarks “we are often inside his mind.”4

If, in opposition to general critical practice, we construe Macbeth as a fantasy involving and relating imagos in the intention of a single fantasizing subject, we find in the play