Analysis Of The Human Condition In Shakespeare's Macbeth

A convincing and tempting argument can be made that characters in Shakespeare’s MacBeth suffer from psychological ailments such as post-traumatic stress disorder or delusional schizophrenia. The appeal of such arguments is likely due to the resulting simplicity; when MacBeth, the main character, can be diagnosed with PTSD, his actions throughout the story can be explained and justified with the diagnosis, along with some convenient paradigm-shifting. However, when viewed through a psychoanalytic perspective of criticism, MacBeth, the main character of Shakespeare’s tragedy MacBeth, can be shown to be free of mental illness or affliction; MacBeth suffers only from critical facets of the human condition and conflicts between his id and superego.

Man has struggled eternally with the human condition and its omnipotence. To declare MacBeth free from any mental illness, only some aspects of the human condition require attention. These aspects are guilt, shame, and pride. By comparing the human condition’s effect on MacBeth with any diagnosis of mental illness, it will be seen that the human condition is responsible for many of MacBeth’s actions throughout the tragedy. MacBeth’s subconscious is just as significant a factor. In order to bring himself to commit his atrocities throughout the tragedy, MacBeth’s id, the part of his subconscious focused purely on animal-like drives and pleasures, suppresses his superego, the “voice of reason” of the subconscious which prevents one from acting purely on the pleasure principle of the id. For as long as the superego is silenced by the id, MacBeth can commit ghastly murders necessary to gain and maintain power, only feeling the routine guilt and shame when the superego’s morality has

MacBeth meets three witches in his war camp at Forres, Scotland. The witches present MacBeth and his companion Banquo with a prophecy - they are to be kings. The supernatural nature of witches and prophecy in an otherwise worldly setting can easily be attributed to a daylight hallucination due to delusional or paranoid schizophrenia. In this regard, I will concede and compromise with the mental illness theory; MacBeth received this prophecy not from a supernatural trinity of sisters, but as an internal premonition after victory in battle. In other words, after a battle that was considered by the minor Captain character to be as memorable as the site of Christ’s crucifixion, MacBeth’s sense of importance, vanity, and pride implanted in his id a notion not that he would be king, but that he should be king. All later mentions of the witches later in the play are merely references to this ambition. In this regard, the prophecy upon which the tragedy is based is given to MacBeth not by a hallucination caused by an unmentioned mental illness, but by an idea implanted in his subconscious by a swollen sense of pride and importance. Rather than hallucinatory schizophrenia or delusions, MacBeth suffers from the more realistic human condition; specifically pride and its effect of man’s sense of importance and