ABSTRACT
The “evil” characters, conversely, are aligned with King Lear’s elder daughters and their sexuality. If Lear is in the grip of primitive anxieties, which are indicative of “a failure of integration between psyche and soma”, it is natural to wonder what might have led him to develop such an extreme psychopathology. The somatic substrate of Lear’s anxiety is palpable, not only in his fire-breathing anger, but also in his fantasy of being suffocated by his wandering womb. Freud presents his analysis in proto-existential terms, as a confrontation of man with the inevitability of death, and he does not attempt to explain either Lear’s behaviour or the theme of the three caskets as a function of individual experience in childhood. It is that Lear’s fantasy of merger with Cordelia, which goes back to a child’s incestuous longing to return to the body of the mother, is ultimately a death sentence”.
