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It is clear that psychoanalytic investigation of Othello's behavior must begin with the Oedipal conflicts.8 Recently, however, M. D. Faber,2 building, as he calls it, upon our knowledge of the Oedipal conflicts which beset Othello, has argued convincingly that decisive oral conflicts play their part in Othello's overdetermined act, the murder of Desdemona. Can we go further? Can we find, that is, a yet deeper, more archaic level of motivation—something beyond the frustrations of the pleasure principle and independent of them? If so, we may find a tentative confirmation on the clinical level of the highly speculative contentions of the existence of a “death instinct” and of the essentially conservative nature of the instincts in general which Freud deduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I am aware of the difficulties of this undertaking and of the fact that Freud would have agreed—did in fact agree—with the position expressed by Edward Bibring:
Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such; they are biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis alone. That being so, it follows that, strictly speaking, the theory of the primal instincts is a concept which ought only to be adduced in a theoretical context and not in discussion of a clinical or empirical nature. In them, the idea of aggressive or destructive instincts will suffice to account for all the facts before us.7a
I have no hesitation in calling Shakespeare's Othello a clinical case. But Othello is more than that, and I believe that in the play itself we can find evidence that Shakespeare may indeed have intuited a level of motivation for Othello beyond the frustrations of the Oedipal