Reply to Stern

I am most grateful for Jeffrey Stern's kind words and sagacious comments on the paper. It was striking to me that the sad narrative of Richard and his mother is equally captivating whether told in Chicagoan “Kohut-speak” or in the Edinburghian British Object Relations language of Ronald Fairbairn. In either conceptual framework we find a parent, narcissistically wounded by a child's imperfection, responding with rejection and emotional abandonment, but in Richard's case the hate is expressed with the emotional power that only Shakespeare could have drawn upon in characterizing the doomed relationship between the ill-fated king and his mother.

The major difference between my formulation and Stern's is his questioning whether indeed Richard “wishes” to be hated; Richard, he asserts, is striving “not to perpetuate but to transform” the tie to his mother, “in fantasy and by proxy … from one of shaming hatred to one of admiration if not of love” (p. 1198). I believe that Richard's own words, in the soliloquies I've quoted from the two plays, Richard III and Henry VI, Part Three, contradict such an optimistic and benign interpretation, as Richard twice acknowledges that love is unattainable for him and that a hate-laden villainy is his only means of relating to the figures in his life.

I agree with Stern that Richard experienced torrential inundations of guilt, especially in the dreams he had on the last night of his life, but, as I comment in the paper, such guilt was no deterrant to his murderous malevolence. Of interest in this regard is that nowhere in either play does Richard display any awareness of the concept of atonement, which I have characterized as “identification with the aggressed” (Rosen 2009).

Stern brings a fruitful melding of his academic background and his psychoanalytic training to his explication of Richard's tragic and loveless life. How splendid is the hope that there might be greater opportunity for further exchanges around literature's towering chara