I didn't get a chance to bring this up in class today so I thought I would post on the blog now... Shakespeare seems to deal with the struggle between the Id and the Ego throughout this play.
Through psychoanalysis, Lear and Gloucester's insanity can be view as a battle of the Id and the Ego, with the Superego caught in between. Both men act rashly -- Lear quickly dismisses Cordelia and Kent without considering the ramifications his actions and Gloucester believes Edmund without listening to Edgar's side of the story. Their irrational behavior is a result of the Id overpowering the Superego to manifest itself. Because of this behavior, both men sink into insanity -- the Id has completely taken over which results in their primal behavior. However, the Ego is still there -- Lear and Gloucester both realize their faults and try to rise out of madness. By learning where they went wrong and trying to rectify their mistakes, Lear and Gloucester's sense of self returns. The Superego is then able take back control and sanity is restored.
Albany also struggles with his Id and Ego. During the first few scenes, Albany wavers over whether or not he should support Goneril, Regan, and Edmund. When in the presence of these characters, Albany is influenced to "lower his waterline," as Laz would say, and to allow his more barbaric feelings to manifest themselves. However, due to his Superego, Albany feels that he should suppress these feelings. Eventually, Albany realizes that the right thing for him to do is to support Lear and his Ego is triumphant.
Disagree? Agree? Anything else anyone wants to add?
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11 comments:
Hmm... I'm not really understanding your first point. How does dismissing two people show evidence of his id? The id's mantra is survival of the fittest so I find it hard to link Lear's actions in act I to the id. Cordelia and Kent didn't really pose any threat to Lear's already fading power.
Also, is id vs ego a black and white battle between evil and good? I took id to mean all the primal instincts we still have from the caveman days and ego is just a product of the superego's filter. Essentially, the ego comes from the id.
There may be a struggle between id and superego, what our primal instincts tell us to do and what society says is wrong. So I don't really see it as an internal battle but really a battle between inherent feelings and social norms.
I don't know... I guess I was just trying to make it fit really.. and didn't do a good job of making it fit coherently. Eh. You make valid points, so everyone just disregard the whole Lear-Gloucester thing... or modify it to make it work?
I think my argument of Albany still works to an extent though.
Yeah it sorta works, our interpretations of id, ego, and superego are just different so I didn't take it the same way as you intended it to be.
I disagree with your statement Albert that battle between Id and Ego can't be an internal battle. It is not a conscious struggle where you are literally weighing "should i be barbaric or should I adhere to what society tells me" as much as it is a subconscious struggle.
The difficulty comes into play when assessing to what extent Shakespeare's characters exhibit this behavior we normally process without even realizing it. In the majority of the characters (those overrun by pride), their certainty with which they conduct themselves would lend itself to the idea that little superego exists in them. Little superego means little conflict.
I don't know if the id-ego internal battle is quite applicable to Lear for this reason, but I disagree with Albert asserting that it doesn't exist at all.
I agree with both Oren and Albert in some aspects of this issue. I think that the superego acts as a sort of mediator between the id and the ego, whittling our innate barbaric desires down until all we have left to show as our "public face" (ego) is what society has deemed acceptable. I do, however, think that this all happens subconsciously. I think that because this filtering all occurs in our psyche, it is both an internal battle and a battle between inherent feelings and social norms.
Another facet of psychoanalysis that I find interesting and applicable to King Lear is the Oedipus Complex, which Laz told us about in class the other day. Though Freud originally devised this theory with only boys in mind, he later applied it to women. In his work The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote, "...the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on — in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt." Perhaps because women were not educated during Shakespeare's time, were mostly illiterate, and were not wholly accepted into society, their superegos were not as highly developed. This might result in more id manifesting itself in women's behavior than men's, as we see in the animalistic nature of many of Shakespeare's female characters, such as Goneril and Regan. Just a thought...and an imperfect one at that, because it still doesn't account for why Cordelia is good-natured.
I'm going to go back to the first point Elizabeth made about Lear throwing tantrums as a result of his id.
Lear reacts so quickly and excessively when confronted by Cordelia and Kent because they defy his false image of self importance. He starts off being so secure with his powerful status because the rest of the world reflects that image back at him (Goneril, Regan, the Fool, Kent all praise him).
He must think that his importance is something independent from his responsibilities as king and relationships because he doesn't expect to lose any of his power by giving away his thrown. This suggests that Lear really has no concept of id and superego and supressing actions because he doesnt think there will be consequences for his actions.
The reason Lear flips out at Cordelia is because when she challenged him, she poked a hole in that secure self image. I don't think he ever had to supress any barbaric feelings before Cordelia and Kent challenged him because he genuinely thought that he was a head honcho and doing a great job. It is AFTER Cordelia and Kent that Lear realizes, " Ah, there are things I am capable of maybe I shouldn't do." (Like banishing his daughter and loyal servant. )
Lear's struggle after that is to find what IS suitable for him to show to the world. His old age, his dependency on Cordelia for love, his weaknesses as a mortal man?
If that doesn't make sense to anyone then please challenge it... this is my first blog post...ever.
Rachel
I think Rachel brings up a good point. What if the id-superego-ego model doesn't fit? It's like what Laz was telling us. If we apply one model to one situation and it works, we try to apply that model to everything else, even if it doesn't fit.
The possibility that Lear doesn't fit the id-superego-ego model is an intriguing one. One problem in applying the IEE model is that Lear goes insane. So, how can we apply a model, usually reserved for sane people, to a person that has completely lost it?
I wanted to discuss Liz's point about Albany. I don't really agree that it's necessarily a direct corrolation with id vs. ego.
Albany doesn't stand up to Regan, Goneril, and Edmund until he reads the note about his wife cheating on him. He then "sees the evil in their ways", and doesn't want to be on their side anymore. This doesn't seem to me to be a case of doing what's wrong or right. It seems like a personal vendetta. He seems to simply be getting back at her, and using all the tools at his disposal, which are her crimes. He drags Edmund in because he's the "other man", and his sister-and-law for the connection.
From my understanding, id versus ego is a personal standard about what you should do. While Albany does good in the end, I still beleive this is for more selfish reasons than simply finding the error in his ways.
I think that the id, ego, and superego model does still work in this case. King Lear's insanity seems to be the Id taking completely unsurpressed. Lear has no common sense. He follows every drive and impulse- going out into a deadly rainstorm, saying as he feels, and crying. His super ego should have told him to be more rational, act more diplomatically, and hold back his non-manly emotions. His insanity seems to me to be a well pulled bankjob by the ID.
Anisha:
I think the id has a little more sophistication than that. Id, while being the primal instincts that are innately present in our human subconscious, does not necessarily mean that it will lead to crying, etc. when the "waterline" drops to dramatically low levels. I think Lear is just a broken man who can't cope anymore. I don't think his id had anything to do with his insanity.
Albert, I completely disagree. The ID is the surpressed actions of a human mind, correct? All those things that aren't done because they aren't socially or rationally acceptable are stored in the ID. I beleive Laz said that none of the insticts that people have in them are ever lost. They're just somewhere in the back of their mind (the ID). Crying, for instance, is a human instict. Elizabethan culture did not allow men to cry. Woman could cry- which is to say that the instict is there for some humans. For males, however, this instict has been supressed since birth, when men are told not to show emotion. He does, though, which shows that he isn't quite listening to that superego.
His insanity is an extreme decrease in the waterline. He loses rationality, which is to say, his superego "waterline" has gone down. His actions- his walk in the rain, the things he says to the Fool and Kent, etc, are all things that Lear would not typically do. His line of what is wrong or right has definately changed. To me, insanity is the best example of a change in the waterline.
Anisha
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