This paper argues that early, "preoedipal" anxieties about
dependency, autonomy, the boundaries of the self, the dangerous interpenetration
of inner and outer worlds--the outer world contaminating
the inner self, the self afraid of losing the precious "substance" that
keeps it alive--play a significant role in Shakespeare's plays, specifically
Hamlet and King Lear. It argues further that childhood
dependence on a mother influences later feelings about the opposite
sex and sexual conflicts revive early anxieties about autonomy and
independence, so that the attempt to establish a proper balance between
inner and outer worlds is inextricably tied (in the plays) to conceptions
of sexual identity. In broader social terms, these plays reflect the
problem of being (1) a separate, self-conscious individual at a time
when the old values of an ordered, hierar"chical society were giving way
to a new, middle-class, Protestant ethic of "individualism" and (2) a
man at a time when sexual roles were becoming polarized in new ways.
As the plays themselves imply--and as the paper tries to show--we can't
understand the dilemmas of modern "individualism" without understanding
the sexual parameters (learned in early childhood, reinforced by social
experience) in terms of which these dilenrnas are lived out
