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According to Stephen Reid,1a the origin of Timon's misanthropic behavior is to be found in his unsatisfactory reaction to his earliest childhood experiences. Allow me to briefly outline the psychology supporting Reid's position.
During the oral stage of libidinal development, the child experiences his mother's breasts as being sometimes gratifying or “good” and sometimes frustrating or “bad” further, he believes the frustrating or “bad” breast is the source of his own evil impulses. In reality, of course, these “evil” impulses do not come from breasts but from the child's fantasy destruction of the breasts. Nevertheless, it is the child's belief that is important because this gives rise to the persecutory anxiety—the feeling that there is an evil force, located in the “bad” breast, deliberately disrupting his life. The child soon discovers, however, that the “good” and “bad” breasts are simply different aspects of the same objects. Accompanying this realization is the feeling that it is not the breasts that are evil but, rather, the self. The child feels it is his own evil that turns the breasts bad; in other words, the “bad” breasts are a self-inflicted punishment, as it were, for his evil. This false feeling of being evil is later aggravated by, and focused on, the reprimands which the child's frequent naughty behavior elicits from the parents: this behavior, of course, is caused by the child's only partially developed superego. To the child, therefore, this situation means that in spite of his positive feelings toward the breasts, he acts negatively. This is his first experience of ambivalence and, in consequence, he feels depression and guilt.
These feelings are severe and in order to escape them the child