Sexual Frustration as the Root of Evil

Sexual Frustration as 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. As a doctor, he was

interested in charting how the human mind affected the body. He

focused on forms of mental illness, such as neurosis and hysteria, and

he endeavored to find effective ways of treating these disorders.

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." The pleasure principle tells us to do whatever feels good;

the reality principle tells us to subordinate pleasure to what needs

to be done, to work. Subordinating the pleasure principle to the

re...

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...es. Freud sums up his essay with the

following:

It would be a perfect example of poetic justice in the manner of the

talion

if the childlessness of Macbeth and the barrenness of his Lady were

the punishment for their crimes against the sanctity of geniture—if

Macbeth

could not become a father because he had robbed children of their

father

and a father of his children, and if Lady Macbeth had suffered the

unsexsing

she had demanded in the spirits of murder.

Freud believes Lady Macbeth's illness, the transformation of her

callousness into penitence, could be explained directly as a reaction

to her childlessness. She is convinced of her impotence against the

decrees of nature, and at the same time reminded that it is through

her own fault if her crime has been robbed of the better part of its

fruits.