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An interesting conjunction of object relations theory and Shakespearean drama occurs in a passage where Fairbairn (1952) describes two fundamental forms of anxiety that may accompany the process of self-object differentiation: “The anxiety attending [intrapsychic] separation manifests itself as a fear of isolation; and the anxiety attending identification [symbiosis] manifests itself as a fear of being shut in, imprisoned or engulfed (‘cribbed, cabined and confined’)” (p. 43). The allusion, which Fairbairn makes no effort to identify, is to the anxiety Macbeth experiences when he learns that Fleance has escaped destruction:
But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound inTo saucy doubts and fears.
Somewhat similar imagery, this time of suffocation (being “smothered”), crops up during another crucial moment of anxiety that Macbeth experiences (as he anticipates killing the king):
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,Shakes so my single state of man that functionIs smothered in surmise and nothing isBut what is not.
Of the two sources of anxiety Fairbairn mentions, it is generally the threat of maternal engulfment that shakes the state of manhood of so many of Shakespeare's protagonists, as Adelman's Suffocating Mothers demonstrates.
Adelman shrewdly begins her exploration of “masculinity and the maternal body in Shakespeare” (p. 2) with the moment in King Henry VI, Part 3, when the man who will become Richard III attributes the origin of his physical deformities to the environment of his mother's womb—almost as though it were the demonic agent of that same mother who later on, in response to her son's