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April 14, 1964. A PSYCHOANALYTIC COMMENTARY ON 'THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE SECOND' BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Martin Wangh, M.D.
Dr. Wangh presented the hypothesis that the seemingly confused motivations and enigmatic behavior of Shakespeare's Richard the Second could be understood as manifestations of his struggle with an unconscious sense of guilt over the Oedipal crime of usurpation and parricide, for which his murder of his uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, unconsciously stands. By further unconscious links, Richard also sees himself as a fratricide and regicide. Richard's fear-driven, ruthless, self-destructive acts, and his doubts about his true rights to the crown are defenses against his sense of guilt which is also warded off by effrontery, isolation, magical imprecation, and impersonal generalization. This central conflict finally results in his hasty, unnecessary, and passive abdication to his cousin, Bolingbroke. Having thus provoked the law of talion against himself, Richard enters a monumental mourning for himself, his friends, the crown, and pursues nothingness and death.
From the facts of the play, Richard's grief seems hollow when he laments the 'loss' of a crown whose possession he frequently doubted should be his, and the murder of three friends to whom he is not particularly close. Yet his ruing can deeply affect an audience because it contains, beyond the theme of narcissistic mortification, the repressed grief over the loss of beloved familial objects. However, Richard is able to abandon himself to mourning only after he has, in effect, passed on his Oedipal guilt to Bolingbroke. Thus, the main psychological theme within the play is the father-son conflict.
Dr. Wangh next examines the historical facts of Richard's background and reign, which were certainly known to Shakespeare, pointing out the similarities and discrepancies between the Richard of Shakespeare's creation and the Richard of Shakespeare's historical sources. Contrary to the aloof