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Irwin Rosen's “The wish to Be Hated” makes a significant contribution to our psychoanalytic understanding of Shakespeare's Richard III by considering the importance of Richard's relation to his hateful mother, the Duchess of York.
Rosen argues that Richard's vicious character is molded less in response to his deformed body—with its withered arm, hunched back, and uneven legs—than in response to his mother's filicidally motivated rejection of him. He cites compelling research demonstrating that the psychological effects of a child's physical abnormalities are minimized when the mother responds to the child lovingly, but that when the mother hates her child because its defect destroys her dream of mothering an ideal—Kohut would say, when she experiences its imperfection as a stain on her own archaic narcissism—the damage to the child's psyche is severe. This idea—entirely consistent with the words of the play—speaks powerfully to our understanding of Richard, his mother, and their relationship.
Persuasive too is Rosen's referencing Freud's discussion of Richard as “the exception” in “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (1916) to explain the ease with which he murders (or orders murdered) his brother Clarence, his nephews (the princes in the tower), his new wife Anne, her former husband and father-in-law, and five others. Freud believes that as an “exception” Richard justifies his crimes with the thought that Nature has unjustly dealt his innocent infant self the cruel blow of his deformity. Becoming king as he sees it—regardless of the treachery he must employ to do so—merely evens the score.
Kohut, I think, would see Richard's murderous cruelty somewhat differently. He would argue that Richard's moral sense—we know he has one because his dreams are full of the guilt he dismisses by day—is