Macbeth and Sigmund Freud
Sexual Frustration: The root of Evil Sigmund Freud contends that people develop neuroses as a result of frustration. Freud’s essays on this topic postulate that sexual repression may result in aggressive behavior. These two elements emerge in the characters in Macbeth. In Freud’s book, Civilization and its discontents, he takes the premise even farther by correlating severe sexual frustration with the onset of psychoses. In regard to Macbeth, I believe that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth portray this spiral into psychosis as a result of their frustration. We can prove this by first looking at the ideologies of Freud, and then relating it to the downfall of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Freud was both a medical doctor and a philosopher. ... Freud should be considered one of our greatest benefactors because he pioneered the desire to understand people whose behavior and thoughts cross the boundaries of convention set by civilization and cultures. As a philosopher, Freud was interested in exploring the relationship between mental functioning and certain basic structures of civilization. In his book, Civilization and its Discontents, Freud describes two fundamental principles, the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle. ... Subordinating the pleasure principle to the reality principle is done through a psychological process Freud calls sublimation, where you take desires that cant be fulfilled, or shouldnt be fulfilled, and turn their energy into something useful and productive. ... Sex is pleasurable; the desire for sexual pleasure, according to Freud, is one of the oldest and most basic urges that all people feel. ... Freud tells us that, without the sublimation of our sexual desires into more productive realms, there would be no civilization. ... The desires that cant be fulfilled are packed, or repressed, into a particular place in the mind, which Freud labels the unconscious. Whatever route is taken into the unconscious, what you find there, according to Freud, is almost always about sex.