318

XVIII

SOME CHARACTER-TYPES MET WITH
IN PSYCHO-ANALYTIC WORK¹

(1915)

WHEN the physician is carrying out psycho-
analytic treatment of a neurotic, his interest
is by no means primarily directed to the
patient’s character. He is far more desirous to know
what the symptoms signify, what instinctual impulses
lurk behind them and are satisfied by them, and by
what transitions the mysterious path has led from those
impulses to these symptoms. But the technique which
he is obliged to follow soon constrains him to direct
his immediate curiosity towards other objectives. He
observes that his investigation is threatened by resist-
ances set up against him by the patient, and these
resistances he may justly attribute to the latter’s char-
acter, which now acquires the first claim on his
interest.

What opposes itself to the physician’s labours is not
always those traits of character which the patient
recognizes in himself and which are attributed to him
by those around him. Peculiarities in the patient
which he had seemed to possess only in a modest
degree are often displayed in surprising intensity, or
attitudes reveal themselves in him which in other
relations of life would not have been betrayed. The
following pages will be devoted to describing and tracing
back to their origin some of these astonishing traits of
character.

¹First published in Imago, Bd. IV., 1915–16; reprinted in Samm-
lung, Vierte Folge. [Translated by E. Colburn Mayne.]

319

I

THE ‘EXCEPTIONS’

The psycho-
analytic worker is continually con-
fronted with the task of inducing the patient to renounce
an immediate and directly attainable source of pleasure.
He need not renounce all pleasure; that one could
probably expect of no human being, and even religion
is obliged to support its ordinance that earthly pleasure
shall be set aside by the promise of an incomparably
greater degree of more inestimable bliss in another
world. No, the patient need merely renounce such
gratifications as will inevitably be detrimental to him;
he need only temporarily abjure, only learn to exchange
an immediate source of pleasure for one better assured
though longer delayed. Or, in other words, under the
physician’s guidance he must make that advance from
the pleasure-
principle to the reality-
principle by which
the mature human being is distinguished from the
child. In this educative process, the clearer insight
of the physician plays but an insignificant part; as a
rule, he can say to his patient only what the latter’s
own reason can say to him. But it is not the same
thing to know a thing in oneself and to hear it from
someone outside oneself; the physician takes the part
of this significant outsider; he makes use of the
influence which one human being can exercise over
another. Or–remembering that the practice of psycho-
analysis is to replace etiolated derivatives by the
original and fundamental–let us say that the physician
in his educative work makes use of one of the com-
ponents of love. In this work of after-
education, he
probably does no more than repeat the process which
first of all made training of any kind possible. By the
side of the necessities of existence, love is the great
teacher; and it is by his love for those nearest him
that the incomplete human being is induced to respect
the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the
punishment attendant on any infringement of it.

320

Thus, when one exacts from the patient a provisional
renunciation of any source of pleasure, a sacrifice, a
readiness to accept some temporary suffering in view
of a better end, or even only the resolve to submit to a
necessity which applies to all human beings, one will
come upon individuals who resist such an appeal on
special grounds. They say that they have renounced
enough and suffered enough, and have a claim to be
 spared any further exactions; they will submit no
longer to disagreeable necessity, for they are exceptions
and intend to remain so too. In one patient of the
kind this claim had grown into the conviction that a
special providence watched over him, which would
protect him from any painful sacrifices of the sort.
Against an inner confidence expressing itself thus
strongly the arguments of the physician will achieve
nothing; even his influence, indeed, is powerless at first,
and it becomes clear to him that he must find out the
sources which are feeding the injurious prepossession.
Now it is surely indubitable that everyone would
fain consider himself an ‘exception’ and claim privileges
over others. But precisely because of this there must
be a particular reason, and one not universally available,
if any individual actually proclaims himself an excep-
tion and behaves as such. This reason may be of more
than one kind; in the cases I investigated I succeeded
in tracing it to a common peculiarity in the earlier
experiences of these patients’ lives. Their neuroses
were connected with an event or painful experience
from which they had suffered in their earliest childhood,
one in respect of which they knew themselves to be
guiltless, and which they could look upon as an unjust
injury inflicted upon them. The privileges that they
claimed as a result of this injustice, and the rebellious-
ness it engendered, had contributed not a little to
intensifying the conflicts leading to the outbreak of
neurosis. In one of these patients, a woman, the
attitude in question developed when she learnt that a
painful organic trouble, which had hindered her from

321

attaining the aim of her life, was of congenital origin.
So long as she looked upon this trouble as an accidental
acquisition during later life, she bore it patiently ;
as soon as she knew it was part of her congenital
inheritance, she became rebellious. The young man
who believed himself watched over by a special
providence had been in infancy the victim of an
accidental infection from his wet-
nurse, and had lived
his whole later life on the ‘insurance-
dole’, as it were,
of his claims to compensation, without having any idea
on what he based those claims. In his case the analysis,
which reconstructed this event out of obscure glimmer-
ings of memory and interpretations of the symptoms, was
confirmed objectively by information from the family.

For reasons which will be easily understood I
cannot communicate very much about these and other
case-
histories. Nor do I propose to go into the obvious
analogy between deformities of character resulting from
protracted sickness in childhood and the behaviour of
whole nations whose past history has been full of
suffering. Instead, however, I will take the opportunity
of pointing to that figure in the creative work of the
greatest of poets in whose character the claim to be an
exception is closely bound up with and motivated by
the circumstance of congenital injury.

In the opening soliloquy to Shakespeare’s Richard
III., Gloucester, who subsequently becomes King, says :

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-
glass ;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph ;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them ;

* * * *

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-
spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

VOL. IV

322

At a first glance this tirade will possibly seem un-
related to our present theme. Richard seems to say
nothing more than ‘I find this idle way of life tedious,
and I want to enjoy myself. As I cannot play the
lover on account of my deformity, I will play the
villain; I will intrigue, murder, do anything I please.’
So wanton a cause of action could not but stifle any
stirring of sympathy in the audience, if it were not a
screen for something much more serious. And besides,
the play would be psychologically impossible, for the
writer must know how to furnish us with a secret
background of sympathy for his hero, if we are to
admire his boldness and adroitness without some
inward protest; and such sympathy can only be based
on understanding or on a sense of a possible inner
fellowship with him.
I think, therefore, that Richard’s soliloquy does
not say everything; it merely gives a hint, and leaves
us to fill up the indications. When we complete it,
however, the appearance of wantonness vanishes, the
bitterness and minuteness with which Richard has
depicted his deformity make their full effect, and we
clearly perceive the bond of fellowship which constrains
us to sympathy with the miscreant. The soliloquy
then signifies: ‘Nature has done me a grievous wrong
in denying me that beauty of form which wins human
love. Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see
that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to
overstep those bounds by which others let themselves
be circumscribed. I may do wrong myself, since
wrong has been done to me’—and now we feel that
we ourselves could be like Richard, nay, that we are
already a little like him. Richard is an enormously
magnified representation of something we can all
discover in ourselves. We all think we have reason
to reproach nature and our destiny for congenital and
infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for
early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love. Why
did not nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the

323

strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius or the
noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in
a middle-class dwelling instead of in a royal palace?
We could as well carry off beauty and distinction as
any of those whom now we cannot but envy.

It is, however, a subtle economy of art in the poet
not to permit his hero to give complete expression to
all his secret springs of action. By this means he
obliges us to supplement, he engages our intellectual
activity, diverts it from critical reflections, and keeps
us closely identified with his hero. A bungler in his
place would deliberately express all that he wishes to
reveal to us, and would then find himself confronted
by our cool, untrammelled intelligence, which would
preclude any great degree of illusion.

We will not, however, dismiss the ‘exceptions’
without pointing out that the claim of women to
privileges and to exemption from so many of the
importunities of existence rests upon the same founda-
tion. As we learn from psycho-analytic work, women
regard themselves as wronged from infancy, as
undeservedly cut short and set back; and the em-
bitterment of so many daughters against their
mothers derives, in the last analysis, from the re-
proach against her of having brought them into the
world as women instead of as men.

II

THOSE WRECKED BY SUCCESS

Psycho-analytic work has furnished us with the
rule that people fall ill of a neurosis as a result of
frustration. The frustration meant is that of satis-
faction for their libidinal desires and a long circum-
locution is necessary before the law becomes com-
prehensible. That is to say, for a neurosis to break
out there must be a conflict between the libidinal
desires of a person and that part of his being which we

324

call his ego, the expression of his instinct of self-
preservation, which also contains his ideals of his own
character. A pathogenic conflict of this kind takes
place only when the libido is desirous of pursuing paths
and aims which the ego has long overcome and despised,
and has therefore henceforth proscribed; and this the
libido never does until it is deprived of the possibility
of an ideal satisfaction consistent with the ego. Hence
privation, frustration of a real satisfaction, is the first
condition for the outbreak of a neurosis, although,
indeed, it is far from being the only one.

So much the more surprising, indeed bewildering,
must it appear when as a physician one makes the
discovery that people occasionally fall ill precisely
because a deeply-rooted and long-cherished wish has
come to fulfilment. It seems then as though they
could not endure their bliss, for of the causative con-
nection between this fulfilment and the falling-ill there
can be no question. I had an opportunity in this
way of obtaining insight into a woman’s story, which
I propose to describe as typical of these tragic
occurrences.

Well-born and well-brought-up, as a quite young
girl she could not restrain her zest for life; she ran
away from home and roved adventurously till she made
the acquaintance of an artist who could appreciate her
feminine charms but could also divine, despite her
degradation, the finer qualities she possessed. He took
her to live with him, and she proved a faithful and
devoted companion, apparently needing only social
rehabilitation for complete happiness. After many
years of life together, he succeeded in getting his
family to recognize her, and was then prepared to make
her his legal wife. At this critical moment she began
to go to pieces. She neglected the house whose rightful
mistress she was now about to become, imagined
herself persecuted by his relatives, who wanted to take
her into the family, debarred her lover, through sense-
less jealousy, from all social intercourse, hindered him

325

in his artistic work, and soon fell into incurable mental
illness.

On another occasion I observed a most respectable
man who, himself professor at a university, had for
many years cherished the natural wish to succeed the
master who had initiated him into the life of learning.
When this elder man retired, and the other’s colleagues
intimated that it was he whom they desired as successor,
he began to hesitate, depreciated his own merits, de-
clared himself unworthy to fill the position designed for
him, and fell into a state of melancholy which unfitted
him for all activity for some years after.

Different as these two cases are, they yet coincide
on this one point–that illness followed close upon the
wish-fulfilment, and annihilated all enjoyment of it.

The contradiction between such experiences and
the rule that frustration induces illness is not insoluble.
The distinction between an internal and an external
frustration dispels it. When in actuality the object in
which the libido can find its satisfaction is withheld,
this is an external frustration. In itself it is in-
operative, not pathogenic, until an internal frustration
has joined hands with it. This must proceed from the
ego, and must dispute the right of the libido to the
other objects that it then desires to possess. Only
then does a conflict arise, and the possibility of neurotic
illness, i.e. of a substitutive gratification proceeding
circuitously by way of the repressed unconscious. The
internal frustration is present, therefore, in every case,
only it does not come into operation until the external,
actual frustration has prepared the ground for it. In
those exceptional cases where illness ensues on success,
the internal frustration has operated alone–has indeed
only made its appearance when an external frustration
has been replaced by fulfilment of the wish. At first
sight there remains something astonishing about this;
but on closer consideration we shall reflect that it is not
so very unusual for the ego to tolerate a wish as harmless
so long as this exists in phantasy alone and seems

326

remote from fulfilment, while it will defend itself hotly
against such a wish as soon as it approaches fulfilment
and threatens to become an actuality. The distinction
between this and familiar situations in neurosis-forma-
tion is merely that usually it is internal intensifications
of the libidinal cathexis which turn the phantasy, that
has hitherto been thought little of and tolerated, into
a dreaded opponent; while in these cases of ours the
signal for the outbreak of conflict is given by an actual
external alteration in circumstances.

Analytic work soon shows us that it is forces of
conscience which forbid the person to gain the long-
hoped-for enjoyment from the fortunate change in
reality. It is a difficult task, however, to discover the
essence and origin of these censuring and punishing
tendencies, which so often surprise us by their presence
where we do not expect to find them. What we know
or conjecture on the point I shall discuss, for the usual
reasons, in relation not to cases of clinical observation,
but to figures which great writers have created from
the wealth of their knowledge of the soul.

A person who collapses on attaining her aim, after
striving for it with single-
minded energy, is Shake-
speare's Lady Macbeth. In the beginning there is no
hesitation, no sign of any inner conflict in her, no
endeavour but that of overcoming the scruples of her
ambitious and yet gentle-hearted husband. She is
ready to sacrifice even her womanliness to her murder-
ous intention, without reflecting on the decisive part
which this womanliness must play when the question
arises of preserving the aim of her ambition, which has
been attained through a crime.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here

… Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!
(Act I. Sc. 5.)

… I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me :

327

I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

(Act I. Sc. 7.)

One solitary stirring of unwillingness comes over
her before the deed :

. . . Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done it. . . .

Then, when she has become Queen by the murder
of Duncan, she betrays for a moment something like
disillusion, like satiety. We know not why.

. . . Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content :
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

(Act III. Sc. 2.)

Nevertheless, she holds out. In the banquet-
scene which follows on these words, she alone keeps her head,
cloaks her husband’s distraction, and finds a pretext
for dismissing the guests. And then we see her no
more ; until (in the first scene of the fifth act) we again
behold her as a sleep-walker, with the impressions of
that night of murder fixed on her mind. Again, as
then, she seeks to put heart into her husband :

‘ Fie, my lord, fie ! a soldier, and afeard ? What need we fear
who knows it, when none can call our power to account ? ’

She hears the knocking at the door, which terrified
her husband after the deed. Next, she strives to ‘ undo
the deed which cannot be undone’. She washes her
hands, which are blood-stained and smell of blood, and
is conscious of the futility of the attempt. Remorse
seems to have borne her down–she who had seemed so
remorseless. When she dies, Macbeth, who meanwhile
has become as inexorable as she had been in the
beginning, can find only a brief epitaph for her :

328

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
(Act V. Sc. 5.)

And now we ask ourselves what it was that broke
this character which had seemed forged from the most
perdurabIe metal? Is it only disillusion, the different
aspect shown by the accomplished deed, and are we
to infer that even in Lady Macbeth an originally gentle
and womanly nature had been worked up to a con-
centration and high tension which could not long
endure, or ought we to seek for such signs of a deeper
motivation as will make this collapse more humanly
intelligible to us?

It seems to me impossible to come to any decision.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a pièce d’occasion, written for
the accession of James, who had hitherto been King
of Scotland. The plot was ready-made, and had been
handled by other contemporary writers, whose work
Shakespeare probably made use of in his customary
manner. It offered remarkable analogies to the actual
situation. The ‘virginal’ Elizabeth, of whom it was
rumoured that she had never been capable of child-
bearing and who had once described herself as ‘a
barren stock’,¹⁾ in an anguished outcry at the news of
James’s birth, was obliged by this very childlessness
of hers to let the Scottish king become her successor.
And he was the son of that Mary Stuart whose
execution she, though reluctantly, had decreed, and
who, despite the clouding of their relations by political
concerns, was yet of her blood and might be called
her guest.

The accession of James I. was like a demonstration
of the curse of unfruitfulness and the blessings reserved
for those who carry on the race. And Shakespeare’s
Macbeth develops on the theme of this same contrast.

¹⁾Cf. Macbeth, Act III. Sc. 1:
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown,
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of mine succeeding. …

329

The three Fates, the ‘weird sisters’, have assured him
that he shall indeed be king, but to Banquo they
promise that his children shall obtain possession of the
crown. Macbeth is incensed by this decree of destiny ;
he is not content with the satisfaction of his own
ambition, he desires to found a dynasty and not to
have murdered for the benefit of strangers. This
point is overlooked when Shakespeare’s play is regarded
only as a tragedy of ambition. It is clear that Macbeth
cannot live for ever, and thus there is but one way for
him to disprove that part of the prophecy which opposes
his wishes–namely, to have children himself, children
who can succeed him. And he seems to expect them
from his vigorous wife :

Bring forth men-
children only !
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males. . . .

(Act I. Sc. 7.)

And equally it is clear that if he is deceived in this
expectation he must submit to destiny ; otherwise his
actions lose all purpose and are transformed into the
blind fury of one doomed to destruction, who is resolved
to destroy beforehand all that he can reach. We watch
Macbeth undergo this development, and at the height
of the tragedy we hear that shattering cry from Macduff,
which has often ere now been recognized to have many
meanings and possibly to contain the key to the change
in Macbeth :

He has no children !

(Act IV. Sc. 3.)

Undoubtedly that signifies ‘ Only because he is
himself childless could he murder my children ’ ; but
more may be implied in it, and above all it might be
said to lay bare the essential motive which not only
forces Macbeth to go far beyond his own true nature,
but also assails the hard character of his wife at its
only weak place. If one looks back upon Macbeth from
the culmination reached in these words of Macduff’s, one

330

sees that the whole play is sown with references to the
father-and-children relation. The murder of the kindly
Duncan is little else than parricide ; in Banquo’s case,
Macbeth kills the father while the son escapes him ;
and he kills Macduff’s children because the father has
fled from him. A bloody child, and then a crowned
one, are shown him by the witches in the conjuration-
scene ; the armed head seen previously is doubtless
Macbeth’s own. But in the background arises the
sinister form of the avenger, Macduff, who is himself
an exception to the laws of generation, since he was
not born of his mother but ripp’d from her womb.

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 un-
sexing she had demanded of the spirits of murder. I
believe one could without more ado explain the illness
of Lady Macbeth, the transformation of her callousness
into penitence, as a reaction to her childlessness, by
which she is convinced of her impotence against the
decrees of nature, and at the same time admonished
that she has only herself to blame if her crime has been
barren of the better part of its desired results.

In the Chronicle of Holinshed (1577), whence Shake-
speare took the plot of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is only
once mentioned as the ambitious wife who instigates
her husband to murder that she may herself be queen.
Of her subsequent fate and of the development of her
character there is no word at all. On the other hand,
it would seem that there the change in Macbeth to a
sanguinary tyrant is motivated just in the way we
have suggested. For in Holinshed ten years pass
between the murder of Duncan, whereby Macbeth
becomes king, and his further misdeeds ; and in these
ten years he is shown as a stern but righteous ruler.

331

It is not until after this period that the change begins
in him, under the influence of the tormenting appre-
hension that the prophecy to Banquo will be fulfilled
as was that of his own destiny. Then only does he
contrive the murder of Banquo, and, as in Shakespeare,
is driven from one crime to another. Holinshed does
not expressly say that it was his childlessness which
urged him to these courses, but there is warrant
enough—both time and occasion—for this probable
motivation. Not so in Shakespeare. Events crowd
breathlessly on one another in the tragedy, so that to
judge by the statements made by the persons in the
play about one week represents the duration of time
assigned to it.¹⁾ This acceleration takes the ground
from under our attempts at reconstructing the motives
for the change in the characters of Macbeth and his
wife. There is no time for a long-drawn disappointment
of their hopes of offspring to enervate the woman and
drive the man to an insane defiance; and it remains
impossible to resolve the contradiction that so many
subtle inter-relations in the plot, and between it and
its occasion, point to a common origin of them in the
motive of childlessness, and that yet the period of time
in the tragedy expressly precludes a development of
character from any but a motive contained in the play.

What, however, these motives can have been which
in so short a space of time could turn the hesitating,
ambitious man into an unbridled tyrant, and his steely-
hearted instigator into a sick woman gnawed by
remorse, it is, in my view, impossible to divine. I
think we must renounce the hope of penetrating the
triple obscurity of the bad preservation of the text,
the unknown intention of the dramatist, and the
hidden purport of the legend. But I should not admit
that such investigations are idle in view of the power-
ful effect which the tragedy has upon the spectator.
The dramatist can indeed, during the representation,
overwhelm us by his art and paralyse our powers of

¹⁾ J. Darmstetter, Macbeth, Édition classique, p. lxxv., Paris, 1887.

332

reflection ; but he cannot prevent us from subsequently
attempting to grasp the psychological mechanism of
that effect. And the contention that the dramatist is
at liberty to shorten at will the natural time and
duration of the events he brings before us, if by the
sacrifice of common probability he can enhance the
dramatic effect, seems to me irrelevant in this instance.
For such a sacrifice is justified only when it merely
affronts probability,¹ and not when it breaks the causal
connection ; besides, the dramatic effect would hardly
have suffered if the time-duration had been left in
uncertainty, instead of being expressly limited to some
few days.

One is so unwilling to dismiss a problem like that
of Macbeth as insoluble that I will still make another
attempt, by introducing another comment which points
towards a new issue. Ludwig Jekels, in a recent
Shakespearean study, thinks he has divined a technical
trick of the poet, which might have to be reckoned with
in Macbeth, too. He is of opinion that Shakespeare
frequently splits up a character into two personages,
each of whom then appears not altogether com-
prehensible until once more conjoined with the other.
It might be thus with Macbeth and the Lady ; and
then it would of course be futile to regard her as an
independent personage and seek to discover her
motivation without considering the Macbeth who
completes her. I shall not follow this hint any further,
but I would add, nevertheless, a remark which
strikingly confirms the idea–namely, that the stirrings
of fear which arise in Macbeth on the night of the
murder, do not develop further in him, but in the
Lady.² It is he who has the hallucination of the
dagger before the deed, but it is she who later succumbs
to mental disorder ; he, after the murder, hears the
cry from the house : ‘ Sleep no more ! Macbeth does

¹ As in Richard III.’s wooing of Anne beside the bier of the King
whom he has murdered.

² Cf. Darmstetter, loc. cit.

333

murder sleep . . .’, and so ‘Macbeth shall sleep no
more’, but we never hear that King Macbeth could
not sleep, while we see that the Queen rises from her
bed and betrays her guilt in somnambulistic wanderings.
He stands helpless with bloody hands, lamenting that
not great Neptune’s ocean can wash them clean again,
while she comforts him: ‘A little water clears us of
this deed’; but later it is she who washes her hands
for a quarter of an hour and cannot get rid of the blood-
stains. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
this little hand.’ Thus is fulfilled in her what his
pangs of conscience had apprehended; she is incarnate
remorse after the deed, he incarnate defiance—together
they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime,
like two disunited parts of the mind of a single in-
dividuality, and perhaps they are the divided images
of a single prototype.

If we have been unable to give any answer to the
question why Lady Macbeth should collapse after her
success, we may perhaps have a better chance with the
creation of another great dramatist, who loves to
pursue with unrelenting rigour the task of the psycho-
logical reckoning.

Rebecca Gamvik, the daughter of a midwife, has
become, under the influence of her adoptive father,
Dr. West, a freethinker and a contemner of all those
restrictions upon desires in life which are imposed
by morality founded on religious belief. After the
doctor’s death she obtains a footing at Rosmersholm,
the ancestral seat of an old family whose members
are unacquainted with laughter and have sacrificed joy
to stern fulfilment of duty. At Rosmersholm dwell
Pastor Johannes Rosmer and his invalid wife, the
childless Beata. Overcome by ‘a wild, uncontrollable
passion’ for the love of the aristocratic Rosmer,
Rebecca resolves to remove the wife who stands in her
way, and to this end is served by her ‘fearless, free-
born’ will, which is restrained by no ethical considera-
tions. She contrives that Beata shall read a medical

334

book in which the begetting of offspring is represented
as the sole aim of marriage, so that the poor woman
begins to doubt whether her own union is an honourable
one. Rebecca then hints that Rosmer, whose studies
and ideas she shares, is about to abandon the old faith
and join the party of enlightenment ; and after she
has thus shaken the wife’s confidence in the moral
uprightness of her husband, gives her finally to under-
stand that she, Rebecca, must soon leave the house in
order to conceal the consequences of illicit intercourse
with Rosmer. The criminal scheme succeeds. The
poor wife, who has passed for melancholic and crazy,
throws herself from the path beside the mill into the
mill-race, possessed by the sense of her own worthless-
ness and desirous of standing no longer between her
beloved husband and his bliss.

For more than a year Rebecca and Rosmer have
been living alone at Rosmersholm in a relationship
which he wishes to regard as a purely intellectual and
ideal friendship. But when from outside the first
shadow of evil gossip falls upon this relationship, and
at the same time there arise tormenting doubts in
Rosmer in regard to the motives for which his wife had
put an end to herself, he begs Rebecca to become his
second wife, so that they may oppose to the unhappy
past a new living reality (Act II.). For one instant
she cries out with joy at this proposal, but immediately
afterwards declares that it can never be, and that if
he urges her further she will ‘ go the way Beata went ’.
Rosmer cannot at all understand this rejection ; and
still less can we, who know more of Rebecca’s actions
and designs. All we can be certain of is that her ‘ No ’
is meant in good earnest.

How has it come about that the adventuress with
the fearless, freeborn will, which forged its way relent-
lessly to its desired goal, should now refuse to pluck
the fruit which is offered her ? She herself gives us
the explanation in the fourth Act : ‘ This is the
terrible part of it : that now, when all life’s happiness

335

is within my grasp—my heart is changed, and my own
past bars my way to happiness’. That is, she has
become a different being, her conscience has awakened,
she has a conviction of guilt which denies her happiness.
And how has her conscience been awakened? Let
us listen to her, and consider whether we can accord
her our full credence: ‘It is the Rosmer view of life—
or your view, at any rate—that has infected my will.
… And made it sick. Enslaved it to laws that had
no power over me before. You—life with you—has
ennobled my mind.’
This influence, we are further to understand, has
only become effective since she has been living alone
with Rosmer: ‘In quiet—in solitude—when you showed
me all your thoughts without reserve—every tender
and delicate feeling, just as it came to you—then the
great change came over me’.
Shortly before this she has lamented the other
aspect of the change: ‘Because Rosmersholm has
sapped my strength, my old fearless will has had its
wings clipped here. It is paralysed! The time is
past when I had courage for anything in the world.
I have lost the power of action, Rosmer.’
Rebecca makes this declaration after she has
revealed herself a wrong-
doer in a voluntary confession
to Rosmer and Rector Kroll, the brother of the dead
wife. Ibsen has made it clear by many little touches,
worked in with masterly subtlety, that this Rebecca
does not actually lie, but is never entirely straight-
forward. Just as, in spite of all her freedom from
prejudice, she understated her age by a year, so is
her confession to the two men not entirely complete,
and through the persistence of Kroll it is supplemented
on some important points. Hence it is open to us,
too, to conjecture that the explanation of her refusal
only exposes one motive in order to conceal another.
Assuredly we have no reason to disbelieve her
when she declares that the atmosphere of Rosmersholm
and her intercourse with the high-
souled Rosmer have
 

336

ennobled and–paralysed her. She expresses there
what she knows and has felt. But this is not necessarily
all that has happened to her, nor is she necessarily com-
petent to explain to herself that all. The influence of
Rosmer might even only be a cloak which conceals
another influence that was operative, and a notable
indication points in this new direction.

Even after her confession, in their last interview
which brings the play to an end, Rosmer again be-
seeches her to be his wife. He forgives her the crime
committed for love of him. And now she does not
answer, as she might, that no forgiveness can rid her
of the consciousness of guilt incurred by her malignant
deception of poor Beata; but charges herself with
another reproach which affects us as coming strangely
from this freethinking woman, and in no wise corre-
sponds to the importance which Rebecca attaches to
it: ‘Dear–never speak of this again! It is im-
possible–For you must know, Rosmer, I have–a
past behind me.’ She means, of course, that she has
had sexual relations with another man; and we do
not fail to observe that these relations, which occurred
at a time when she was free and accountable to nobody,
seem to her a greater hindrance to the union with
Rosmer than her truly criminal action against his wife.

Rosmer refuses to hear anything about this past.
We can divine what it was, though everything that
refers to it in the play is, so to speak, subterranean
and has to be pieced together from hints. But it is
true they are hints inserted with such art that it is
impossible to misunderstand them.

Between Rebecca’s first refusal and her confession
something occurs which has a decisive influence on her
future destiny. Rector Kroll arrives one day at the
house on purpose to humiliate Rebecca by telling her
that he knows she is an illegitimate child, the daughter
of that very Dr. West who had adopted her after her
mother’s death. Hate has sharpened his perceptions,
yet he does not suppose that this is any news to her.

337

‘I really did not suppose you were ignorant of this,
otherwise it would have been very odd that you should
have let Dr. West adopt you—’ ‘And then he takes
you into his house—as soon as your mother dies. He
treats you harshly. And yet you stay with him.
You know that he won’t leave you a halfpenny—as
a matter of fact you got only a case of books—and yet
you stay on ; you bear with him ; you nurse him to
the last.’ ‘I attribute your care for him to the natural
filial instinct of a daughter. Indeed, I believe your
whole conduct is a natural result of your origin.’

But Kroll was mistaken. Rebecca had no idea at
all that she could be West’s daughter. When Kroll
began with dark hints at her past, she could not but
think he was referring to something else. After she
knew what he did mean, she could still retain her
composure awhile, for she was able to suppose that
her enemy was basing his calculations on her age,
which she had given falsely on an earlier visit of his.
But when Kroll demolished this objection by saying :
‘Well, so be it, but my calculation may be right,
none the less ; for Dr. West was up there on a short
visit the year before he got the appointment’… after
this new information, she loses all control. ‘It is not
true !’ She walks about wringing her hands. ‘It is
impossible. You want to cheat me into believing it.
This can never, never be true. It cannot be true.
Never in this world !—’ Her agitation is so extreme
that Kroll cannot attribute it to his information alone.

KROLL : But, my dear Miss West—why in Heaven’s
name are you so terribly excited ? You quite frighten
me. What am I to think—to believe— ?

REBECCA : Nothing ! You are not to think any-
thing or believe anything.

KROLL : Then you must really tell me how you can
take this affair—this possibility—so terribly to heart.

REBECCA (controlling herself). It is perfectly simple,
Rector Kroll. I have no wish to be taken for an
illegitimate child.

VOL. IV

338

The enigma of Rebecca's behaviour is susceptible
of only one solution. The news that Dr. West was her
father is the heaviest blow that can befall her, for she
was not only the adopted daughter, but she had been
the mistress of this man. When Kroll began to speak,
she thought that he was hinting at these relations, the
truth about which she would probably have admitted
and justified by her emancipated ideas. But this was
far from the Rector's intention ; he knew nothing of
the love-affair with Dr. West, as she knew nothing of
West being her father. She cannot have had anything
else in her mind when she accounted for her final
rejection of Rosmer on the ground that she had a past
which made her unworthy to be his wife. Probably,
if Rosmer had consented to hear of this past, she
would have made only a half-confession and have kept
silence on the more serious part of it.

But now we do indeed understand that this past
must seem to her the more serious obstacle to their
union–the more serious . . . crime.

After she has learnt that she has been the mistress
of her own father, she surrenders herself wholly to her
now overmastering sense of guilt. She confesses to
Rosmer and Kroll that she was a murderess ; she
rejects for ever the happiness to which she has paved
the way by crime ; and prepares for departure. But
the true origin of her sense of guilt, which wrecks her
at the moment of attainment, remains a secret. We
have seen that it is something quite other than the
atmosphere of Rosmersholm and the refining influence
of Rosmer.

No one who has followed us so far will neglect to
bring forward an objection which may justify some
doubts. The first refusal of Rosmer by Rebecca occurs
before the second visit of Kroll, and therefore before
his exposure of her illicit origin and at a time when she
as yet knows nothing of her incest–if we have rightly
understood the dramatist. Yet her first refusal is given
in very serious earnest. The sense of guilt which bids

339

her renounce the fruit of her actions is thus effective
before she knows anything of her cardinal crime ; and
if we grant so much it is perhaps incumbent on us to
ignore the incest as the source of that sense of guilt.
Hitherto, we have treated Rebecca West as if she
were a living person and not a creation of Ibsen's
phantasy, one which is always subject to the most
critical tests of reason. We shall attempt to meet
the objection aforesaid on this same ground. It is a
just objection that, before the knowledge of her incest,
conscience was in some sort awakened in Rebecca.
There is nothing to prevent our making the influence
which is acknowledged and accused by Rebecca herself
responsible for this change. But we shall not thus
escape recognition of the second motive. The behaviour
of Rebecca on hearing what Kroll has to tell her, the
confession which is her immediate reaction, leave no
doubt that now only does the stronger and more
decisive motive for renunciation begin to take effect.
It is in fact a case of manifold motivation in which
a deeper motive comes to the surface from beneath
the superficial one. Laws of poetical economy necessi-
tate this way of presenting the situation, for this
deeper motive could not be explicitly set forth, it had
to be dissimulated, kept from the direct perception of
the spectator or the reader ; otherwise such serious
resistances, based on most painful emotions, would
have arisen that the effect of the tragedy might have
been imperilled.

We have, however, a right to demand that the
ostensible motive shall not be without an inherent
relation to the dissimulated one, but shall appear as a
mitigation of, and a derivation from, the latter. And
relying on the dramatist to have arranged his conscious
dramatic combination in logical accordance with un-
conscious possibilities, we can now try to show that he
has fulfilled this demand. Rebecca's feeling of guilt
finds its source in the shame of incest, even before
Kroll with his analytic insight has made her aware of

340

it. When we fully reconstruct and supplement the
past indicated by the author, we shall feel sure that
she cannot have been without an inkling of the intimate
relation between her mother and Dr. West. It must
have made a strong impression on her when she
became her mother’s successor with this man ; and she
thus stood under the domination of the Oedipus-
complex, even though she did not know that this
universal phantasy had been a reality in her case.
When she came to Rosmersholm, the inward force of
this first experience drove her to bring about, by
definite action, the same situation which had been
realized in the original instance, though not by her
doing—to get rid of the wife and mother, that she
might take her place with the husband and father.
She describes with a convincing insistence how against
her will she was obliged to proceed, step by step, to the
removal of Beata.
‘You think then that I was cool and calculating
and self-possessed all the time! I was not the same
woman then that I am now, as I stand here telling it
all. Besides, there are two sorts of will in us, I believe.
I wanted Beata away by one means or another, but
I never really believed that it would come to pass.
As I felt my way forward, at each step I ventured, I
seemed to hear something within me cry out: No
farther! Not a step farther!—And yet I could not
stop. I had to venture the least little bit farther.
And only one hair’s-breadth more. And then one
more—and always one more. . . . And so it happened.
That is the way such things come about.’
That is no plea for extenuation, but an authentic
description. Everything that befell her at Rosmers-
holm, the passion for Rosmer and the enmity towards
his wife, was from the first a consequence of the
Oedipus-complex—a compulsive replica of her rela-
tions with her mother and Dr. West.
And so the sense of guilt which first causes her to
reject Rosmer’s proposal is at bottom indistinguishable

341

from the deeper one which drives her to confession
after Kroll has opened her eyes. But just as under
the influence of Dr. West she had become a freethinker
and contemner of religious morality, so she is trans-
formed by her love for Rosmer into a being with a
conscience and an ideal. This much of the mental
processes within her she does herself understand, and
so she is justified in describing Rosmer’s influence as
the motive of the change in her—the only one of which
she could be aware.

The practising psycho-analytic physician knows how
frequently, or how invariably, the girl who enters a
household as servant, companion or governess, will
consciously or unconsciously weave a day-dream,
which derives from the Oedipus-complex, about the
disappearance of the mistress of the house and the
master taking the newcomer to wife in her stead.
Rosmersholm is the greatest work of art among those
which treat of this common girlish phantasy. What
makes it a tragedy is the circumstance that the early
history of the heroine in actual fact had completely
anticipated her day-dream.¹

After long lingering in the sphere of literature, we
now return to clinical experience. But only to
establish in a few words the complete agreement
between them. Psycho-analytic work teaches that
the forces of conscience which induce illness on attain-
ment of success, as in other cases on a frustration, are
closely connected with the Oedipus-complex, the rela-
tion to father and mother, as perhaps, indeed, is all our
sense of guilt in general.

¹An exposition of the incest-theme in Rosmersholm has already
been made, by similar methods to my own, in the extremely compre-
hensive work by Otto Rank, Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage.

342

III

CRIMINALITY FROM A SENSE OF GUILT

In their narrations about their early years, par-
ticularly before puberty, people who have afterwards
become very upright have told me of forbidden actions
which they had formerly committed—such as thefts,
frauds, and even arson. I was wont to dismiss these
statements with the comment that we know the
weakness of moral inhibiting influences at that time of
life, and I made no attempt to give them an important
place in the connected story. But eventually I was
constrained to make a more fundamental study of such
incidents, by reason of some glaring and more accessible
cases in which the transgressions took place while the
patients were under my treatment, and were people
of riper age. The analytic work then afforded the
surprising conclusion that such deeds are done precisely
because they are forbidden, and because by carrying
them out the doer enjoys a sense of mental relief.
He suffered from an oppressive feeling of guilt, of which
he did not know the origin, and after he had committed
a misdeed the oppression was mitigated. The sense
of guilt was at least in some way accounted for.

Paradoxical as it may sound, I must maintain that
the sense of guilt was present prior to the transgression,
that it did not arise from this, but contrariwise—the
transgression from the sense of guilt. These persons
we might justifiably describe as criminals from a sense
of guilt. The pre-existence of the guilty feeling had of
course to be demonstrated by a whole succession of
other manifestations and effects.

But scientific work is not satisfied with establishing
a departure from the norm. There are two further
questions to answer: whence derives the obscure sense
of guilt before the deed, and whether it is probable that
this kind of causation plays a considerable part in the
transgressions of mankind.

343

Prosecution of the former inquiry would hold out
hope of some explanation regarding the source of man-
kind’s sense of guilt in general. The invariable result
of analytic work is that this obscure sense of guilt
derives from the Oedipus-complex and is a reaction to
the two great criminal intentions of killing the father
and having sexual relations with the mother. In
comparison with these two, to be sure, the crimes
committed in order to account for the sense of guilt were
comparatively light ones for the sufferer to bear. We
must remember in this connection that parricide and
incest with the mother are the two greatest crimes man
can commit, the only ones which in primitive com-
munities are avenged and abhorred as such. And we
must remember, too, that other investigations have
caused us to entertain the hypothesis that the conscience
of mankind, which now appears as an inherited power
in the mind, was originally acquired from the Oedipus-
complex.

The answer to the second question lies outside the
scope of psycho-analytic work. With children, it is
easy to perceive that they are often ‘naughty’ on
purpose to provoke punishment, and are quiet and
contented after the chastisement. Later analytic in-
vestigation can often find a trace of the guilty feeling
which bid them seek for punishment. Among adult
criminals one must probably except those who trans-
gress without any sense of guilt, who either have
developed no moral inhibitions or consider themselves
justified in their deed by their conflict with society.
But in the majority of other criminals, those for whom
punitive measures are really designed, such a motivation
towards crime might very well be present, casting light
on many obscure points in the psychology of the
criminal, and furnishing punishment with a new
psychological basis.

A friend has recently called my attention to the
fact that the ‘criminal from a sense of guilt’ was
recognized by Nietzsche. The pre-existence of the

344

guilty consciousness, and the efficacy of the deed in
rationalizing this feeling, gleam forth from the dark
discourse of Zarathustra, ‘On the Pale Criminal’. Let
us leave to future research the decision how many
criminals are to be reckoned among these ‘pale’ ones.