The Wish to Be Hated: Richard III's Villainy in Pursuit of the Bad-Enough Object

Richard III's legendary villainy, in addition to its obvious role in furthering his ambition for power, arguably had deeper psychological roots: motives embedded in the developmental unfolding of his complex relationship with a severely traumatized and rejecting mother. The theoretical formulations of Ronald Fairbairn are used to show that Richard's villainy preserved and perpetuated a specific object-tie to his mother, that of being her demonized and despised “child of hate,” and that many of his victims, especially women, served as maternal surrogates in his lifelong quest to replicate his maternal “bad-enough object.” Similar patterns of severe relational disturbance pervade many of the mother-son dyads portrayed in Shakespeare's other plays, a repetitive theme that may well be linked to the playwright's own mother's history of severe loss and depression during his infancy and its impact on her ability to provide her son with bountiful emotional nurturance. A collateral issue is also addressed—the narcissistically embedded bonding difficulties between parents and their disabled children, whose visible impairment is said to give rise to greater adjustment problems than does the medical severity of the condition itself.