Shakespeare's royal self - J. Kirsch

The book is divided in partes tres, corresponding to the analyses of three plays:

1. Hamlet
2. King Lear
3. Macbeth

Hamlet has the lenghtiest analysis, followed by King Lear, followed by Macbeth. All three parts follow the same structure - the author goes through the script of the play scene by scene offering a psychological interpretation of the events and the characters, so the book is quite enjoyable: è un po’ come una visita guidata in un bel museo o orto botanico or I don’t know what, where even if the guide is mediocre or says zum Teil something uninteresting you can still look around and be happy you’re there. I still remembered the plot of Hamlet and Macbeth, but I have never read King Lear, so that was new to me - I really liked it.

All three plays are tragedies. The theme of the first play is that of a young man whose individuation process is broken, breaking him as well; the theme of the second play is that of an old man whose individuation process starts and proceeds following the misfortunes that happen to him; the theme of the third play is that of a man who was whole before his unconscious takes over and destroys him. So in the first and last play we can read about the dire consequences of letting the unconscious win over the consciousness, while in the second we already start with a rather “unconscious” protagonist and we assist to his conscious birth, so to say.

Individuation is, according to Jung, the process of attuning consciousness and unconscious. The general view seems to be that the unconscious is the horse and consciousness il fantino, except they’re bound together as if they were un centauro. Given this state of affairs it is in the interest of “both” to get well together, and this is what individuation is about. So Hamlet is a young man with a bright future ahead of him, except his father gets murdered and he goes nuts, King Lear managed to get to retirement without really ever doubting himself, so that reality hits him like a ten-tonne truck out of nowhere, Macbeth is a brave and valliant comandante d’armi that can’t keep his primeval impulses in check.

What I had expected to see more, but I really only saw in Macbeth, was the idea that different characters were actually different parts of the same psyche. In Macbeth, Macbeth is (interpreted as) an ego and Lady Macbeth the anima of that ego; I thought this would be the most common analysis, since made up characters are by necessity shallower than true characters, and since after all these characters were contained in a single (Shakespeare’s) head to begin with. What instead most often happens is that each character is taken as a true, complete person, whose psychological profile is then constructed and analysed; while it is a stimulating thought exercise, I find it rather prone to overfitting, just because there aren’t enough data points.

Macbeth is also the richest play in terms of symbolisms, penso per la sua nightmarish atmosphere. I also thought this was the case in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and the “fiery wheel of Ixion” is explicitly mentioned as an archetipical symbol, which I found rather interesting because I thought “torn apart by a fiery wheel inside me” in I won’t hurt you was a nice instance of an archetipe slipping in a song.

There would be of course much more to say. It was also instructive to see Jung’s ideas applied by someone who was not Jung, and I am now rather curious to see what happened to the same ideas in the years after his death and up to now. So much more to read.