Lay On, MacDuff

 

Writers and poets are the true psychologists, the authorities on the psyche. It takes a deep empathy, a deep understanding of how the human psyche works, to make a believable fictional character, or to write a poem that resonates with many souls, not just your own. This is what Keats called “negative capability.” Their fruits—the beauty of their writings—certifies their wisdom and expertise. We are mad that we do not turn to them first when in mental turmoil.

By contrast, we have no way of knowing if a scientific psychologist or analyst knows what they are talking about; and can generally assume they don’t. Because the psyche cannot be studied “scientifically.”

As the greatest of writers, this makes Shakespeare the greatest of authorities on the human mind. His characters always have authentic motivations.

He has much to say on the matter of madness.

MacBeth is one example. Both MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go mad in the play. Both have what psychologists these days call “psychotic breaks”: they hallucinate. Lady MacBeth commits suicide.

And Shakespeare makes the cause clear: guilt. People are commonly driven mad, psychotic, by their own guilty conscience. A concept familiar too in classical mythology: one is hounded to madness by the Erinyes.

Modern psychiatry/psychology rules this out altogether. Moral considerations are not allowed in modern psychiatry. Meaning that in such cases modern psychiatry is useless, or worse than useless.

No wonder that, in modern times, “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder,” the psychotic forms of madness, are considered incurable. Psychiatry only dulls the symptoms with drugs.

By contrast, in Shakespeare’s play, while Lady MacBeth kills herself, MacBeth seems to recover lucidity by the end of the play—seemingly because he accepts that he is about to be killed, and accepts it as his proper fate. He has ended his rebellion against God, and returned to an appreciation and acceptance of divine justice.

Once, abroad, needing something to read, I picked up a paperback on Florida’s Death Row. And the author claimed the prisoners on Death Row were invariably barking mad.

Yet they cannot have been mad when they committed their murders: some were mob hit men, professional murderers. They did it for money, and had to plan for the killings. You can’t do that if you are out of touch with the physical world around you.

They too seem, then, to have been driven mad by guilt.

This is not the cause for all mental illness; Shakespeare makes this, too, clear.

Lady MacBeth’s Doctor remarks: “yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.”

“More needs she the divine than the physician.”

Implying that others will, to the contrary, need a physician. Some madness is caused by physical illness. Some is caused by bad upbringing: Plato and the New Testament agree on this.

But when, as is often the case, the problem is moral, no “physic” can work.

MacBeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient Must minister to himself.

The cure is confession, repentance, and restitution.

However, the sufferer also has an obvious vested interest in avoiding confession. This conflict is what drives them mad. On the one hand, fearing discovery, they become paranoid, and will add sin to sin in defiance of their conscience, now an enemy.

“I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

Himmler said more or less the same thing in justifying the Nazi Holocaust.

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

Sin hardens into vice. 

This is why it is up to the patient to minister to themselves. If their only help is confession, they will try to destroy anyone who tries to help.

On the other hand, the desire to confess, to “make a clean breast of it,” also becomes overwhelming. This causes them often to, as if inadvertently, let their guilt slip out. As MacBeth does before a table full of prominent nobles. As Lady MacBeth feigns doing with her nighttime notes.

“I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”

The cure for such mental illness is obvious. And you will never get it from a psychiatrist.