Gloucester's inwardness and maternal anxiety in King Lear

Abstract

This essay aims at discussing the issues of inwardness and maternal anxieties in Shakespeare’s play King Lear. It also approaches the signifier, based on Lacan’s assumptions. It first presents Lacan’s assumptions on the signifier and the constitution of subjetivity. After that, it discusses maternal anxieties based on Janet Adelman’s work (1992).Adelman studies maternal fantasies based on Freud’s psychoanalytic framework, but she never mentions Lacan’s assumptions. She does not reveal the deeper devices in Lear’s inwardness are denied and repressed, whose driving and inward projections suggest dark dimensions and dispositions of Lear’s inner self; she only discusses maternal fantasies re-imagined with his daughters. In order to overcome this gap, I discuss and analyse the psychic constellations which are revealed in the silences, non-said, and non-sequiturs of his speeches, which point out a set of metaphors projected beyond the pre-oedipal phase, experienced by Gloucester. Such experience will not be directed only to his son Edgar image, but he projects his anger to other characters in the play, such as Edmond and his maternal figures. The experience of self individuation could be associated to a chain of imagetic, paranoid elements, which point out the loss of referenciality, wholeness and centrality of the psyche of the self, and consequently confuses him and makes him re-direct the locus of his inward projections. According to Lacan, the unconscious is something purely logic, in other words, it is something originated from the signifier.