without driving forward to conclusions. But in fact, Shakespeare’s
work is alive with values— they simply echo the anti- idealist values
of his current audience and of the current world almost perfectly
and, so, are nearly invisible.
Sigmund Freud, we sometimes hear, is Shakespeare’s heir. And
in this there is a dose of literal truth. Freud read Shakespeare (in
En glish) throughout his life and refers to him many times in his
letters, essays, and books. There’s no doubt that reading Hamlet
helped Freud develop the theory of the Oedipal Complex. Freud’s
central idea, that character is confl ict and that the individual does
not always know the realities of his own inner struggles, is surely
Shakespearean. Freud might also have looked to Shakespeare to in-
spire (or to confi rm) his intuitions about the human penchant for
bisexuality, about the role of ambivalence in love, and about the de-
termining force of family life.
But Freud’s kinship with Shakespeare is deeper and more signif-
icant. Freud takes the enmity with ideals implicit in Shakespeare’s
work and renders it explicit. Freud is a relentless enemy of the war-
rior ideal, the religious ideal, and the ideal of transcendent philos-
ophy. He is a worldly pragmatist, who tries to guide his patients and
readers to hard- won and often precarious inner equilibrium and to
mea sured satisfactions. To ask for more from life—to seek contact
with the ideal—is to fall to illusion and in time, probably, to fi nd
ruin. Ideals simply will not sustain the level of investment that hu-
mans bring to them; they betray us repeatedly. The unity that ideals
confer on the subject is temporary: it is better to learn to live with
anxious internal confl ict than to succumb to delusion. After the ide-
alization there inevitably comes disillusionment, the hangover that
follows the bout of intoxication. The suff ering can last a long time.
Why waste life on courage, compassion, or the quest for Truth? The
exhilaration is brief, but the aftermath protracted and painful.
12 Polemical Introduction