Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 32:596606, 2012

Copyright Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver

ISSN: 0735-1690 print/1940-9133 online
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2012.703904

Civilization and Its Discontents in the 21st Century: Freud,

Shakespeare, and Romantic Love
Richard Raspa, Ph.D.

Four of the most recognized lines in the English language are spoken in Shakespeares tragedy
Romeo and Juliet:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And Ill no longer be a Capulet. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 2.2.3336)

This aching desire expressed by the 13-year-old Juliet anticipates Freuds model of the human
condition over 300 years later. Shakespeares Renaissance drama of love evokes the mystery
and the longing of romantic passion, as well as the frustrations and obstacles to its fulfillment.
Many of the Freudian psychic elements are present in Juliets speaking: repression, the denial and
symbolic killing of the father, the rush toward the intoxication of romantic love, the craving for
personal happiness against the stifling demands of family and society, and the trace of what Freud
termed Todestrieb, the impulse toward aggression and annihilation. These four lines forecast
Freuds conception of the fundamental conflict in civilized lifethe clash between pursuing
individual instincts toward pleasure and what comes naturally, versus repressing those instincts
through social controls internalized by the individual. It is a struggle that leaves people frustrated
and unhappy.
My purpose in this article is to explore the iconic romantic love story in Western culture,
Romeo and Juliet, through the lens of Freuds model of humanity. The model developed in his
penultimate book, Civilization and its Discontents and published in 1930, has just marked its
eightieth anniversary. It is a fitting time to look at it in hindsight to appreciate the books power
to uncover the traceries of the human psyche and the complexities of romantic love. At the same
time, diligence is required in such an analysis. Exploring Shakespeare through Freuds critical distinctions risks reducing the art and beauty of the dramatists characters, like Romeo and
Juliet, to a cluster of symptoms and pathologies defined by the DSM IV. I proceed, nevertheless,
with caution. The potency of Freuds concepts to illumine the psychological complexity in the
play repays the risk. Considering both men side by side, Freud, the preeminent psychoanalyst
of modernity, and Shakespeare, the preeminent writer in the West, reveals the genius of both.
They have changed the ways human life is understood. Both have constructed interior maps of
Dr. Raspa is Professor of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Director of Humanities, CAPEWAYNE;
Adjunct Professor, College of Medicine, Wayne State University.

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romantic love, and both have situated individuals in an epic struggle with themselves and others
in the cultural contexts they inhabit.

CHANGING UNDERSTANDING
Shakespeare and Freud are prime movers of modernism. The defining characteristic of the modern period in the West from the seventeenth century onward is the tearing from hierarchical
systems of civil and ecclesiastical power toward installing the individual as the measure and
source of authority. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shakespeare dramatizes the turn
inward toward individual consciousness and subjectivity. Correspondingly, at the beginning of
the twentieth century, Freud extends the interior turn downward toward the hypothesized domain
of the uniquely subjective unconscious where drives and instincts reside. Shakespeare brings us
into the interior space of singular self-revelation where we overhear characters struggling with
claims of family, state, and church, against whispers in their minds and hearts that urge aggression and transgressive pleasure. In a parallel way, Freud excavates the interior space of the mind
and brings us into its three potenciesid or the domain of instinct, ego or consciousness of reality and the power of rationality, and superego or internalized moral code and conscience. Over
his career, Freud theorizes their connections and functions. Experience is the dynamic interplay
of these three mental energies as the individual negotiates the strife between personal pleasure
and social restraint. In different historical periods, the doctor, Freud, and the artist, Shakespeare,
give us ways to fathom the emerging power of the individual and appreciate the psychological
processes of the self caught in the entanglement of desire and duty.

MAPS OF ROMANTIC LOVE

Romantic love fascinated Freud and Shakespeare. It is implicated in the recurring themes of their
work. Nothing is, they suggest, as personal or as intimate or offers as many possibilities for
happiness as union with another person. In this section, I treat Freuds map of romantic love and
then use its landmarks to brighten the psychological geography evoked in Romeo and Juliet.
In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (2005) treats romantic love as wild, untamed instinct.
It is as natural an impulse as survival, and drives the person toward sensuous and bodily pleasure
and away from pain. In its raw, elemental form, romantic love is the longing for sexual gratification. Thought and feeling compress in flashes of desire, yearning for touch, locked in the
embrace of the quaking body and shuddering loins. The union melts momentarily the isolation
of two individuals, and the rapture it stirs yields lifes most intoxicating pleasure. Freud called
romantic love an expression of the life forceEros.
This erotic instinct, however, is larger than the yearning for sexual pleasure. It includes all corporeal delight aroused through the sensesthe trace of a fragrance, tinge of the palate, the gleam
of color during sunset, or the murmur of a lake in the spring. It has the power to produce happiness. At the same time, Freud reminds us, individuals exist in communities. The instant the frame
of a person widens to include others in social process, there is conflict. The urge toward individual pleasure meets the opposing claim for social modulation. Shifting the focus from person to

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group, from What I want, to What they want, is needed to enter into cooperative enterprises
that build and sustain civilization. Freud says:
Civilization . . . [is] the whole sum of achievements and regulations which distinguish our lives from
those of animal ancestors and which serve two purposesnamely, to protect men against nature
and to adjust their mutual relations. . . .[including] all activities that are useful for making the earth
serviceable. (Freud, 2005, p. 73)

Civilization, Freud claims, is the source of progress. It drives technology, medicine, and commerce, supports aesthetic expression, and is designed to produce control over nature, elevating
the standard of living and general hygiene. It ultimately brings order into the world. The
demand to temper solitary desire is everywhere insistent and unavoidable. Civilization, Freud
insists, frustrates personal satisfaction and leads ineluctably to discontent. Happiness evades.
The programme of pleasure succumbs to the programme of civilization, the imperatives of
duty.
At this juncture, we arrive at the central theme of Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud,
2005). Human beings are caught in an unavoidable and tenacious clash between the individual
instinct for pleasure and the groups insistence upon the repression of Eros. Arresting desire
releases the erotic urge into higher mental acts that bring people into communities of practice.
Freud argued that civilization commands renunciation of pleasure to sublimate unbridled instinct
into relationships of affinity and cooperation, creating networks of cultural achievement. Eros
the life forceis the generative power in all acts of creation. It inspires inventions of the mind
expressed in art, scientific achievement, and business enterprise, as well as the energy of athletic and performance arts and the more general forging of community. These sublimated or
symbolic forms require complex intellectual processes. They also demand a repression of erotic
instinct. In its physical and sexual expressions, Eros is the force to bring forth life. In its symbolic
configurations, Eros is the power to create culture and civilization.
Eros is one of the two instincts between which human beings are thrown in life. The other that
Freud identifies is the death impulse, Todestrieb, the inescapable natural pull toward annihilation
and self-destruction. Its primary manifestation is aggression. When the erotic impulse is subdued,
frustration ensues. The individual reacts by projecting the aggression outward toward rivals and
enemies. If that projection is blocked by the superego, aggression is directed toward the self and
an internalized moral law provokes guilt. In terms of psychic regulation, communal obligation is
sovereign over pursuit of happiness. This struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct
saturates all human experience. Life versus death, love versus hate, is lifes basic motion. All
other movement proceeds from this.
Freuds definition of the human dilemma as the struggle between Eros and death is also found
in Shakespeare, where it is inflected in dramatic and poetic form. Shakespeares imaginative
universe spins on the axis of love and hate. Particularly in Romeo and Juliet, the world turns on
those disjunctive choices for the characters. We observe fathers and mothers, children, friends,
lovers, servants, hating and loving to death. Shakespeares characters live on a stage where Eros
and Todestrieb loom in every action, and life and death brew in every decision.
From the plays opening scene, the chorus persona reminds us that what is about to transpire
on stage between star-crossed lovers has cosmic significance (Shakespeare, cited in Evans,
1974, p. 6). The play reaches for things that have universal proportion, as matters of love, hate,
family, identity, and murder charge the dramatic conflict. In fact, the play opens and closes in

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malignant conflicts. Between the beginning and the ending, the fabric of Veronas civilization is
ripped and the promise and vigor of young life is inconsolably shredded.
Hate is a congenital and contagious disease in the houses of Capulet and Montague. There
is a grudge that scatters the plague of assaults, murders, and suicides in the play, a grudge of
such astounding insignificance, that no one remembers and that Shakespeare does not name. The
grudge is what Freud would call the narcissism of minor differences. (Freud, 2005, p. 108).
Whatever disagreement or difference exists between the warring families transmutes into a form
of self-righteousness and admiration for the familys posture in the grudge. In Freudian terms,
narcissism expands into erotic fascination with family superiority.
The play opens on Veronas streets, which have become, since the feud, a bitter war zone.
Minor characters introduce the drama, and they embody, as peripheral figures often do in the
entire Shakespearean canon, the thematic impulse of the play. Servants of both households
saunter along the town pathways with bravado and swagger looking for a fight, itching to tangle
with the family nemesis. The pathos is that these marginal characters, of low estate, earning what
would correspond to minimum wage, of no social consequence to the lord and lady of the manor,
these characters identify with the noble houses of Capulet or Montague. They seem to believe
that by such association their own social status could be elevated and ennobled. They put their
lives at risk and some die for family honor. Sadly, they get what they want. We see their bodies
strewn across the stage with the appearance of the Prince of Verona who shouts down the fight:
PRINCE: What ho, you men, you beasts
That quench the fire of your pernicious rage
With purple fountains issuing from your veins;
On pain of torture, from those bloody hands,
Throw your mistempered weapons to the ground. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.1.8387)

Animosity spreads from the streets into rooms of power and prestige, those aristocratic houses
of splendor where aggression seems to seep into pillars and arches that hold the houses together.
Indoors, aggression can often express itself in milder forms as irritation, harshness, sometimes
simply impatience. Later in Act 1, Lady Capulet calls Juliet to discuss marriage. The meeting has
the tone of a business conference. The agenda has one item: marriage for 13-year- old Juliet. The
meeting is an interruption in the mothers routine. Annoyed by the Nurses joking, even by the
need to have such a conversation with her daughter, she moves quickly to conclude the agenda:
LADY CAPULET: By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid. This then in brief:
The valiant Paris seeks you for his love. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.3.7174)

Lady Capulet is civilization embodied. She aspires to situate her daughter among the highest
ranks of Veronas ruling class. Paris, the man who wants to marry Juliet, is wealthy, handsome,
and smart, she says. Lady Capulet and her husband are arranging this marriage to secure the
continued prosperity and social prestige of the family. She articulates civilizations demand for
adherence to custom and social hierarchies. A refined Renaissance aristocrat, Lady Capulet is,
nevertheless, aggressive with Juliet. Her announcement of Paris proposal is really a charge to
forgo the pleasures of childhood and join what Freud (2005, p. 119) would call programme of

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civilization regulated sexuality, conjugal and parenting responsibilities, and dutifully supporting a spouse to extend familial privilege. Her tacit maternal order to Juliet is this: Its time to end
youthful dependency and become, like me, a responsible adult.
In contrast to Lady Capulet stands the Nurseearthy, sensuous, playful, and exuberant. Unlike
Lady Capulet, who is distant and authoritative, the Nurse is close with Juliet, bonded from earliest infancy in a warm and loving guardianship. Following customary aristocratic practice, the
nurturing of Juliet has been delegated to the Nurse. She is the surrogate mother. The Nurse has
breast-fed Juliet, cared for her basic hygiene, and become Juliets confidant. More than anything,
the Nurse delights in the daughters beauty, innocence, and intelligence. The Nurse is the embodiment of the energy of Eros. Unable to resist verbal play, her dialogue with mother and daughter
becomes a stream of spontaneous erotic riffs that roll back and forth in time. The Nurse recalls
with amusement a bruise on Juliets skull as a child; her pun plays off the meaning of falling
backward as sexual intercourse:
NURSE: And yet I warrent it had upon its brow
A bump as big as young cockerels stone [rosters testicle]
A perilous knock, and it cried bitterly.
Yes, quoth my husband, fallst upon thy face.
Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest into age. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.3.5156)

The Capulet household enacts Freuds concept of the ids aggression and the war between pleasure and duty. Within the walls of the house, love and hate intensify at the masked ball when
Romeo, with his friends Mercutio, Benvolio, and others connected with the Montague faction,
have crashed the ball protected by their party costumes. Young men, bristling with the thrill of
sexual energy, come uninvited to Capulets house to brush against the edge of safety by entering
the precinct of the enemy. They play a game with clan law: Can they get away with sneaking
in and out of the enemys home, eat their food, drink their wine, dance with their women, and
experience the cheer and welcome reserved for friends and close associates? They are pushing
against a destructive social code scripted by the feud of old men: Enemies never respect or mingle
with civility.
Juliets young cousin Tybalt is there, offended by the presence of Romeo when he recognizes
him:
TYBALT: What dares the slave
Come hither, coved with an antic face [mask]
To fleer [mock] and scorn at our solemnity [festivity]? (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.5.5557)

Driven by hate, Tybalt would, if he could, kill Romeo at the masked ball, imperiling the home as
civilizations repository of hospitality and the sanctuary against danger. Members of the Capulet
family, in their unconscious ways, evidence Freuds caution, articulated three hundred years after
the play was written: namely, that civilization which was designed to sublimate the natural instinct
of aggression into cooperative alliances, is here threatened. Capulet, however, stays his nephew
and eludes a brawl that would have been indistinguishable from the deadly hand-to-hand combat
in the public thoroughfares of Verona.
The brutal unleashing of aggression in the Capulet household occurs later in the play, when
Juliet, having been secretly married to Romeo by Friar Lawrence, is ordered to marry Paris.
Bloodshed has filled the streets. Juliets cousin, Tybalt has killed Mercutio, and in retaliation,

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Romeo has killed Tybalt, and has been banished by the Prince from Verona. Pain blankets the
households. Lord and Lady Capulet conclude that marriage will cheer Juliet out of her sorrow, so
they arrange a hasty wedding with Paris. Juliet refuses, weeps, and begs her parents not to force
the marriage. Both parents are unmoved and angry. Lord Capulet curses his daughter into exile:
I tell thee whatget thee to church a Thursday
Or never after look me in the face. . . .
Graze where you will, you shall not house with me. . . .
Beg! Starve! Die in the streets!
For by my soul Ill neer acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 3.5.161162, 188,
192194)

And Lady Capulet concurs:

Talk not to me, for Ill not speak a word.
Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 3.5.202203)

Both mother and father discharge their anger onto their child, threatening to abandon Juliet to
the streets. They even deny her the space to have feelings, doubts, or a voice of her own. Juliet
must renounce desire and obey. Freud warns that civilized people often underestimate the raw
potency of the id. At times, desire cannot be mastered efficiently on command. Eros cannot be
subdued with ease. The Capulets slighting of the power of instinct has tragic consequences.
Juliet is broken and begins to consider suicide as an alternative to her familys repression: If
all else fail, myself have the power to die (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 3.5.242). Juliets
desperation presages Freuds broader criticism of the weakness of modern educational systems:
Schools fail to prepare young people to manage the sway of sexuality and the fury of aggression
that will inescapably confront them in life.
Against the violence that thrusts members of the Capulet and Montague households into street
brawls and domestic abuse in the home stand Romeo and Juliet. Solitary, open, innocent, they are
different from every other character. They are only children who have been the focus of familial
expectation all their lives. Civilization for them is an insistent voice in every decision, a lid on
every burst of desire. When they meet for the first time at the Capulet masked ball, they fall
instantly in love. Shakespeare evokes that moment of alchemy when two people simultaneously
blaze with passion for each other.
JULIET: Whats in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title.
ROMEO: Call me but love and Ill be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 2.2.4347, 5051)

Romantic love is a unique experience, far different from the more common situation in which
one person may be drawn to another who does not reciprocate, thus kindling the unhappiness of
unrequited love. For Romeo and Juliet, their encounter is a moment of wonder. It dissipates the
cynicism about human motive and possibility: that love could happen in this world of crises, loss,

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disappointment, and suffering; that people could be exquisitely happy and gloriously alive. Even
in the play, the common view mocking romantic love is reflected in Mercutios most famous
speech on the legend of Queen Mab. She is the fairy queen who appears in dreams and teases
with fantasies of love, which leave only disappointment and sorrow. Kisses mutate into blisters
and the plague, rather than rapture and happiness. Queen Mab, the maker of lovers fantasies,
is a trickster who ditches a trail of pain after the dream. Romantic love, Mercutio suggests, is a
delusion:
MERCUTIO: And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers brains and then they dream of love. . . .
Oer ladies lips who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.4.7071, 7475)

In spite of this image of betrayal, in human beings the desire for romantic love is inextinguishable. It is the secret yearning of the world. Not only euphoria and sensuous delights, such love
promises to fill the longing to be appreciated, embraced in all ones individuality and imperfections, and installed at the center of anothers world. Romance invites the uncovering of oneself in
the presence of the other. Each time self-disclosure occurs, there is no running away; rather there
is a summons to peel away all the masks that disguise who one is. This love promises deliverance
from suffering, and pulls lovers toward transcendence where happiness is the permanent state
of being. The hope of romantic love is immediately apparent at the first meeting of Romeo and
Juliet:
ROMEO: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright. . . .
Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight.
I neer saw true beauty till this night. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.5.44, 5253)

Shakespeare captures loves power to shatter the coherence of everyday life, stunning lovers
out of habits of mind and action. Romantic love releases civilizations repressions and the cramp
of social and familial duty. It is liberation from the banalities and ugliness of ordinary life:
ROMEO: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.5.9396)

Love breaks the coercion of the family feud in the play. The metaphor of the pilgrim couples romantic with spiritual love. Both are journeys in search of a profound connection with the
belovedthe lover with the human and the pilgrim with the divine. Union symbolizes rapture
undiminished by pain or loss. Romantic and spiritual love are, psychologically, the search for
immortality and permanent bliss.
JULIET: My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 2.2.133135)

Both Romeo and Juliets passion is confronted by aggression, Todestrieb, in two potent scenes.
The first is Friar Lawrences cell and the second is the last scene of the play, at the Capulet crypt.

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Crushed by the pronouncement of banishment and the separation from Juliet, Romeo hurries
to Friar Lawrence for comfort. The Friar functions for Romeo much like the Nurse for Juliet. He
is the surrogate parent, judicious, compassionate, and deeply concerned for his spiritual son. Like
the Nurse, he is an advocate for the child, backing the love of Romeo and Juliet against parental
hostility. When he had earlier married the lovers in secret, he violated both social law and family
code. Friar Lawrence justifies his transgression in the hope that the union would quell the storm
of hatred between the Capulets and Montagues.
The Friar admonishes Romeo that the key to saving his marriage and his life is to shift his
perspective. He needs to observe the cardinal virtues: patience in suffering and gratefulness for
the mercy of the Prince.
ROMEO: Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,
No sudden means of death, though neer so mean. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 3.3.4445)
FRIAR: Ill give thee armour to keep off that word:
Adversitys sweet milk, philosophy,
To comfort thee though thou art banished. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 3.3.5456)

In his cell, Friar Lawrences advice offers a rapprochement of Eros and civilization, desire
and duty. Romeo is urged to resist impulsive reactions, and choose to consider his options.
Banishment is the time for Romeo to evaluate opportunities and take hold of his life. There is
hope, the Friar reassures. Things could be worse. Romeo could have been sentenced to death.
Instead, he is only exiled from society for a while. With the Friars help, Romeo can anticipate forgiveness from the good Prince, and acceptance from the Capulets as Juliets husband,
a bond that would signal the erasure of the feud. Things can be worked out, the Friar heartens
Romeo.
The final working out of things is different from the Friars hope. It occurs in the Capulet
crypt. The mood is luminous. Tybalts body is there, and Juliets body has just been left. It is the
last movement of the play. Romeo arrives, having heard the erroneous news that Juliet is dead.
He is unaware of the plot Friar Lawrence had hatched, of Juliets taking the magic cocktail to
feign death. He has also not received the letter from the Friar explaining the intrigue. Driven to
frenzy, Romeo hastens to the tomb to see Juliet, and take a final embrace before ending his life.
He is distracted momentarily by an aggressive Paris, who has come to the crypt to mourn the
death of Juliet; both young men act without patience. Pariss attempt to arrest Romeo results in
Pariss mortal wound. Romeo goes to the bier and faces Juliet for the last kiss before taking the
poison to join her in deaths embrace. The suicide is romantic loves release from all the limitations of lifesuffering, loss, repression of civilization, and pressures of place, of time, of breath
itself:
ROMEO: I still will stay with thee
And never from this [palace] of dim light
Depart again. Here, here, will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 5.3.106112)

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When Friar Lawrence enters the crypt, he exhorts the waking Juliet to leave with him and enter
a convent to live out her solitude. Juliet, however, like Romeo, sees death as the only alternative
to a life without her beloved. If they cannot be together in life, then they will be merged in
death.
We are stunned by the losses: Four young people dead. Hero and heroine end in suicide,
the others by violent brawls. The hope of the families futures is annihilated. The promise of
love expires. Romance is doomed, tragedy inevitable. The youthful expression of wild Eros and
impetuous aggression corrodes in death and destruction. When the Capulets and Montagues
enter the crypt, they are brought into the desolation of their feudthe crushing loss of their
only children. The old men incinerated by their calamity have to temper their aggression
and extinguish the feud. Their peace is a woeful and comfortless promise to erect statues in
honor of the victims of their hate. They are in-laws now whose only progeny are stone monuments to their feud and their flesh-and-blood children. The play ends. Todestriebe vanquishes
Eros.
Or does it? Does aggression rule the world? While the Capulets and Montagues grieve their
loses, many questions remain, including this one: Could the tragedy have been averted? Could
love have prevailed? With patience and gratefulness, could Romeo have resisted the impulse
toward death and annihilation?

THE EPIC STRUGGLE: EROS AND TODESTRIEB

In our postmodern world of globalization and terror, Freud and Shakespeare continue to light
up the darker recesses of the human mind. Unrelenting change that marks our time pushes us
into states of anxiety and uncertainty. We can discern in these marks the same conflict between
desire and duty that absorbed human beings in the era of Freud and Shakespeare. The spindle
of Eros and Todestrieb is a classical problem, reaching back to the roots of Western antiquity in
our earliest pre-Socratic philosophersAnaxagoras, Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclites.
The ancients framed the Freudian conflict of the erotic and the death instinct as the philosophical
problem of the one and the many. How can human beings find unity and coherence amidst the
multiplicity of demands in the natural and social worlds? Shakespeare suggests a perspective.
His anatomy of subjectivity evokes the secret longings of the heart against the boisterous and
often contradictory rules of social organization. In Shakespeares universe, love is the guiding
principle for living. Love is compassion, love is forgiveness, and, most vividly, love is romance.
Romantic love heightens feeling and deepens connection to another. It inspires the wonder at
being alive and of being cherished. Love is at the center of Shakespeares imaginative universe.
Even Shakespeares great villains, like Iago in Othello, triumph only for a time, granted a slim
provisional victory. In the end, after the horror and mutilation, villains perish. The fragile hope
of a new beginning and the creation a new civilization arise: Cassio will restore order in Othello.
If Romeo and Juliet could have stilled, for a moment, the rush of Eros, perhaps they might have
averted their tragedy.
Shakespeare endows all his characters with agency. All have choice in the matters of their
life: Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all, says
Edgar, the abused and betrayed son of King Lear (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 5.2.810).
Human beings have little control over the circumstances they inhabit. They wield, however,

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sovereignty over how they will respond. To have ripeness is to be ready to engage what is in the
moment, the situation at hand. Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeththe four greatest tragic heroes
Shakespeare createdlearn about ripeness through their trials of agony. These tragic figures have
make choices that set in motion disastrous consequences. They are human beings, as Edmund
says in King Lear, who have had freedom of choice in all occasions and conditions:
EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world
that when we are sick in fortune. . . .we make guilty of
our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were
villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion,
knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical
predominance,. . . . and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence. . . . An admirable
evasion of whoremaster man. (Shakespeare, cited in Evans, 1974, 1.2.118127)

Unlike Shakespeare, Freud lessens the role of choice and increases the power of erotic instinct in
romantic love. However, such love is doomed from its inception. Nothing can alter its trajectory
toward aggression and annihilation.
The great psychoanalyst could have written an alternative ending to Romeo and Juliet. Had
they survived, they would have eventually experienced loves entropy. Not because of fate or
destiny, not even because of social pressures, is romantic love doomed. Rather, it must fail
because of the nature of humanity, and the operation of the mind. Human beings develop in
the dynamic tensions of id, ego, and superego. Aggression is as natural as love. Sooner or
later, even the most passionate lovers, like Romeo and Juliet who have been cast into states
of ecstasy, will say or do something that kindles suffering in the beloved. Over time, disappointments and anger can tally in disillusionment. The quest for permanence is abandoned
as fools gold. Ordinary life takes hold and asserts its demands for order, for repression, for
duty. Passion is tamed. Desire attenuated. Mild pleasure replaces rapture, and sometimes, even
worse, atrophies into toleration of the other. Had Romeo and Juliet survived, romantic passion
would not. The intoxication of love, the transcendence to states of rapture, and most of all, the
permanent state of happiness would have attenuated. Reality would intrude in the form of civilization. Tempering passion, disciplining appetite would have to occur. And civilization would
continue.
Feud argues there is something that is unalterable in Todestribeaggressionthat arose when
civilization was first conceptualized and established. The myth of patricide, Freud proposes, is the
origin of civilization. Rebellious sons killed their father, who was appropriating all the available
women for his own pleasure. The sons then enacted laws to prevent aggression in the future. Irony
abounds: the very thing created to prevent violence, civil and judicial codes of conduct, ultimately
becomes the thing that does violence to humanity because it shackles the free expression of Eros
and the search for personal happiness. Romantic love is doomed because the quest for individual
pleasure cannot survive the demands for social organization and civilization. The only victor here
is civilization. Human beings are left discontent.
We will have to wait to see if the evolution of humanistic psychology in the future will offer
an alternative understanding of the generation and continuation of romantic love. It is a project
worth waiting for.

606

RICHARD RASPA

REFERENCES
Evans, G. Blakemore, Ed. (1974), The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Freud, S. (2005), Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton.
Wayne State University
5057 Woodward, Room 9204.1
Detroit, MI 48202
aa2267@wayne.edu

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