Shakespeare's King Lear’s Descent into Madness: A Psychoanalytical Approach

Many of Shakespeare’s tragedies involve fallen heroes who inevitably have to go through

journeys to resolve their issues or complete an ill begotten fate. Shakespeare’s play King Lear is

no different. The play highlights the life of a king, his journey into madness, and the events that

take place around him that leads up to his death. Several approaches have been taken to analyze

and deconstruct the carefully embedded details unfolding King Lear’s demise. Similarly, the

focus of this research paper is to take a psychoanalytical approach to analyze King Lear’s decline

into madness driven by his daughter’s rejection to be his caretakers. In doing so, I intend to

discuss the existence of incestuous desires between Lear and his daughters in accordance with

the Oedipus Rex Complex spurred by Lear’s attempt to make his daughter’s his mothers, and the

result of their rejection that drove him into insanity.

“Are Lear’s demands on his daughters tinged by desires that might be characterized as

incestuous?” ask Ryan in the text Literary Theory: A practical introduction 101. Several

instances of the play lead me to believe yes. In the text, “Maternal Images and Male Bonds,” it

states, “The motif of the missing mother is only a decoy for the play’s “darker purpose” produces

mother figures to fill the vacuum left by the absence of Lear’s wife.”In the beginning of the play

Cordelia picks up on the potential danger at hand stating, “How can my sisters speak the truth

when they say they love only you? Don’t they love their husbands too? Hopefully when I get

married, I’ll give my husband half my love and half my sense of duty. I’m sure I’ll never get

married in the way my sisters say they’re married, loving the...

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