This paper considers Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello as a symbolic enactment of intrapsychic life. The developmental movement from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position and from narcissistic love, arising from the investment of parts of the self in another person, to real, interpersonal love, is arrested and finally ruined by the agency of a split-off lago element in the personality. Faith in the good object is thereby perverted into doubt. The mechanisms whereby this happens are discussed in terms of Othello's devaluation of Desdemona in the growing presence of pathological processes.