The Merchant of Venice

July 27, 1999. Freud recognized guilt not only as essential to civilization but as its greatest problem. We cannot find our own authority without in the end taking it from those who give us life. Guilt inevitably is closely linked to the experience of loss. Melanie Klein showed that guilt becomes more bearable through growth of love and capacity to repair, while making even clearer the terrifying nature of primitive persecutory guilt and its relation to destructiveness. The projection into another group of this dark edge, suffused with sadism, badness, inferiority, and evil, makes for a sadomasochistic bond that may continue over many generations. Curiosity is attenuated as certain realities become too dangerous to get to know. A capacity for empathic identification with members of the other group is damaged. Attempts to limit or repair damage tend to be repeatedly undermined. Hatred for whatever wrongs the group might actually be responsible for becomes fused into a hatred for existing, which crucially is often normalized socially and politically. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? No matter, if extermination and eradication have become the good.

A few weeks before Fleisher's article and Rebecca Bach's commentary appeared in this journal, a remarkable new production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Trevor Nunn, opened at London's Royal National Theatre. Stimulated by it, my own thoughts on the structure of Shakespeare's play show both similarities and differences when compared with the interesting points made by Fleisher and Bach. The play opens with Antonio's melancholia, soon followed by Bassanio's determination to resolve his debts, find love, have it all, by winning Portia, a beautiful, intelligent heiress. To put on a show, Bassanio turns to his merchant friend and admirer, his other half, who is so besotted with him that he can deny him nothing, The other side of this idealization is the sadomasoc