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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
March 30, 1930
Dear Mr. Flatter
I thank you for kindly sending me your translation of King Lear, which gave me the opportunity of rereading this powerful work.
As to your question whether one is justified in considering Lear a case of hysteria, I should like to say that one is hardly entitled to expect from a poet a clinically correct description of a mental illness. It should be enough that our feelings are at no point offended and that our so-called popular psychiatry enables us to follow the person described as abnormal in all his deviations. This is the case with Lear; we are not shocked when, in his sorrow, he abandons contact with reality, nor when, clinging to the trauma, he indulges in phantasies of revenge; nor when, in his excess of passion, he storms and rages, although the picture of a consistent psychosis is disrupted by such behavior. As a matter of fact I am not sure whether such hybrid formations of an affective clinging to a trauma and a psychotic turning away from it do not occur often enough in reality. The fact that he calms down and reacts normally when he realizes he is safely protected by Cordelia doesn't seem to me to justify a diagnosis of hysteria.
Sincerely yours
Freud