Commentary on Rosen

Irwin Rosen’s “The wish to Be Hated” makes a significant contribution to our psychoanalytic understanding of Shakespeare’s Richard III by considering the importance of Richard’s relation to his hateful mother, the Duchess of York.

Rosen argues that Richard’s vicious character is molded less in response to his deformed body—with its withered arm, hunched back, and uneven legs—than in response to his mother’s filicidally motivated rejection of him. He cites compelling research demonstrating that the psychological effects of a child’s physical abnormalities are minimized when the mother responds to the child lovingly, but that when the mother hates her child because its defect destroys her dream of mothering an ideal—Kohut would say, when she experiences its imperfection as a stain on her own archaic narcissism—the damage to the child’s psyche is severe. This idea—entirely consistent with the words of the play—speaks powerfully to our understanding of Richard, his mother, and their relationship.

Persuasive too is Rosen’s referencing Freud’s discussion of Richard as “the exception” in “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” (1916) to explain the ease with which he murders (or orders murdered) his brother Clarence, his nephews (the princes in the tower), his new wife Anne, her former husband and father-in-law, and five others. Freud believes that as an “exception” Richard justifies his crimes with the thought that Nature has unjustly dealt his innocent infant self the cruel blow of his deformity. Becoming king as he sees it—regardless of the treachery he must employ to do so—merely evens the score.

Kohut, I think, would see Richard’s murderous cruelty somewhat differently. He would argue that Richard’s moral sense—we know he has one because his dreams are full of the guilt he dismisses by day—is entirely overridden by the imperative of his narcissism to repair his sense of shameful physical degradation by making himself omnipotent. Under the sway of this quest he regards those in his way merely as objects rather than as subjects in their own right (“independent centers of initiative” in the Kohutian jargon). So he is without a trace of the empathy foundational to morality.

I also think fascinating Rosen’s speculation, much indebted to a paper by Donald Silver (1983), that the almost universally unhappy mother-son relations in Shakespeare’s plays stem from the fact that his own mother was depressed: Mary Arden lost her mother when nine years old, and her first two children, both daughters, died in infancy before William was born.

I am less persuaded by his claim that Richard has “a deep-seated wish to be hated” (p. 1176). That what he does to fulfill his ambition to be king makes him hated does not necessarily mean that he does what he does because being hated is his goal. And while I like Rosen’s idea that Richard and his mother form in effect an intersubjective system of mutual influence—she as “vengeful victim,” he as the “monster” she insists he has been even in utero (p. 1179)—I disagree with his Fairbairnian assertion that Richard strives chiefly to “preserve, protect, and perpetuate” his tie to her as a “bad-enough” object (p. 1176). It seems to me that Richard strives not to perpetuate but to transform his tie to her—in fantasy and by proxy—from one of shaming hatred to one of admiration if not of love.

This, I take it, is the point of his outrageous courtship of Anne. Like his mother, Anne hates him because he has made her life a living hell, but unlike his mother—who rues not having strangled him “in her accursèd womb” (4.4.142 )—Anne drops the sword he puts in her hand to kill him and agrees—astonishingly—to marry him. His sense of triumph—“Was ever woman in this humor wooed? / Was ever woman in this humor won?” (1.2.247–248)—comes from having proved to her, and hence to himself (as he never could to his mother), that despite (or perhaps because of) his wickedness he is, as the 1988 Robert Palmer lyric would have it, “simply irresistible.” Not surprisingly, Richard is compelled to repeat this seduction (after poisoning Anne) with his brother’s widow, Queen Elizabeth. Thus, having murdered her two princely sons (Edward and Richard), as well as her older sons by a previous marriage (Dorset and Grey) and her brother (Rivers), he begs her to secure her daughter (his niece, also named Elizabeth) for him in marriage. Although he believes that she too is powerless to resist his omnipotent will, she deceives him.