LEAR AND HIS DAUGHTERS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF KING LEAR AND ITS FAIRY TALE ORIGINS

This seminar will focus on King Lear and its roots in fairy tale, myth and fictional history. Shakespeare’s source material for his tragedy, King Lear was the mythological Leir of Britain. His play also serves as a literary retelling of a common folktale motif. All versions contain a similar contest of competitive declarations of love for the father between three daughters – two false and one true. Shakespeare arguably takes this material to its furthest extreme in offering us an ending that culminates in the ultimate symbolic transformation of death itself. If this work is taken in place of a dream, the story of a single psyche emerges, and it becomes a journey of initiation and individuation, but it also has much to say about our outer lives, the concrete realities of patient scoping with parental complexes, sibling rivalries and estrangement.