I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
If people are going to be diagnosing Anakin Skywalker and Winnie-the-Pooh, then why not Diagnosing Lear, right? This article from The New Criterion is actually a fairly serious piece of literary criticism focusing more on things like personal responsibility and expression of emotion, but the bits at the beginning that actually are directly about psychiatric diagnosis are pretty funny:
Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven’t succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly.
Not, of course, that that puts doctors off, far from it.
I know it’s not at all uncommon for people to try to diagnose fictional characters, but when a friend of mine sent me the link to this article today, I just felt like sharing it.
Psychoanalysts perceived in Lear a case of thwarted incest (they would, wouldn’t they?). A variety of diagnoses have been offered from senile dementia to manic-depressive psychosis. (No one has suggested General Paralysis of the Insane, the last stage of syphilis.) Dr. Truskinovsky, writing in the Southern Medical Journal in 2002, makes a powerful case for mania, and suggests that Lear had been suffering from bipolar affective disorder all his life.
Personally, I am against all this diagnostic effort. It is not just that, as Dr. Truskinovsky dryly remarks, it is not altogether easy to decide what constitutes the symptom of grandiosity in an absolute monarch like Lear, so few of us having either experienced or witnessed that condition of man. It is rather that the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance.
I don’t see King Lear as being manic-depressive, but then again, it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve read the play.
June 19th, 2007 at 9:39 am
I find this segment of the article most compelling and well, disturbing,
“It is rather that the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance. If only Lear had taken the right pills, everything would have been all right, and Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia would have been like the Andrews Sisters. The only question Lear raises for the modern mind is how to get him, or anyone like him, to the right doctor on time,”
I think the medicalization of all our problems serve to disempower us and when we accept it, it often allows us to not be responsible for our own behavior. We are sick. We can not help ourselves. We are not responsible for our behavior.
I should go on…but my poor little brain is tired.
June 19th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who don’t medicalize their problems but still refuse to take any responsibility for their own behaviour. They say it’s just their nature and they won’t bother trying to change, or they blame the way other people have treated them and they won’t bother trying to change. Then there are people who won’t believe that any of their problems could be the result of an illness and wind up hating themselves for their “character flaws” and “not trying hard enough” when really, they’re trying hard enough but should probably be trying something different. One of the different things they should try is not blaming themselves for everything.