What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Martin S. Bergmann & Michael Bergmann

Author:Martin S. Bergmann & Michael Bergmann
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Gotschna Ventures Press
Published: 2008-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Longing and Internalization

Sonnets 27, 28, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 113, 50, 51, 52, 57, 58, 97

The pain of enforced separation between lovers seems to be the oldest theme in love poetry. It is already prominent 1,500 years before the Christian era. We quote a love poem written in Egypt between 1300 and 1100 BC.

Seven days since I saw my sister,

And sickness invaded me;

I am heavy in all my limbs,

My body has forsaken me,

When the physicians come to me,

My heart rejects their remedies;

The magicians are quite helpless,

My sickness is not discerned.

To tell me “She is here” would revive me (Bergmann 1987 p. 4)!

The metaphor of love as a form of sickness is also found in the Song of Songs (2:5). “Stay with me flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love (Ibid p. 4).”

Into this ancient theme the Poet of the Sonnets poured images and metaphors never used before. A number of sonnets repeat the same theme but use different metaphors, giving us a theme with variations. Accordingly we have broken these sonnets on longing and internalization into subgroups based on psychoanalytic themes. The first major theme connects the absent lover to insomnia. It extends over Sonnets 27, 28, and 43. Three hundred years before psychoanalysis established that insomnia is connected first with the absent mother and later with the inability of a person to find within her or himself a representation of the good mother. Shakespeare in these sonnets described insomnia as a longing for the absent lover. We observe that in Macbeth he will discover another form of insomnia based on unbearable guilt.

In Sonnets 44 and 45, the traditional four elements were expressed as metaphors to convey the pain of separation. In Sonnets 4 and 47, the pain of separation is developed as a conflict between eyes and heart. This metaphor enabled the Poet to discover the role of what we today call the internalization of the lover’s image so as to make his absence bearable. In Sonnets 27, 28, 43 and 44, the Poet created a new vocabulary to describe how, when in love, and the lover unavailable, he succeeds in overcoming his longings by creating at night before his internal eyes the image of the man the Poet loves.

This is an idea that psychoanalysis successfully approached only after World War II, namely the internalization of the image of the mother 21 by the child that enables the child to tolerate her absence. Psychoanalysts have found that the infant’s fear of being separated from the mother is at its height during a specific period: from the moment the infant learns to differentiate between mother and stranger and until what is called “object constancy” is established. Separation from the caring mother is a major theme of early childhood. Mothers that never leave their children fail to promote them and mothers who are not maternal and leave the children to others prevent them from becoming capable of loving. At birth and shortly afterwards the infant is “promiscuous,” smiling at every caretaker with the same pleasure.

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