I once watched, up close, someone finally reach a position they had wanted for years. They had given years to it. The evening the decision came through, they smiled—that much was real. But when I saw them again a few days later, something in them had gone slack. I asked if anything was wrong; they said no, everything had worked out. Everything had worked out, and they looked as hollow as the success was complete. They had gotten what they wanted. Why that face? For a long time I could not understand it.
Freud, too, seems to have paused before that face. He gave one short essay the title “Those Wrecked by Success”: a person who has run their whole life toward some position falls apart at the very moment of arriving there. The figure he brought in as the type was Lady Macbeth—the woman who pushed her husband’s back toward the crown and steadied his hand on the knife. The crown is finally set on her head, and after that she begins to come apart.
Where Freud Gave Up
In 1916 Freud wrote “Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,” and he gave one of its sections to those wrecked by success: a person falls ill at the very instant of getting what they had long wanted. The figure he brought in as the type was Lady Macbeth. She pushes her husband’s back toward the crown, steadies the wavering man, and puts the knife in his hand. And when the crown is actually set on her head, she begins to come apart. Of what she felt in that place, Freud writes only that it was something like disappointment, something like disillusion. What rose up at the place she had reached was not fulfillment but its opposite.
The question is why. He follows two threads. One: that her nature was in truth soft, and she could not finally bear the hardness she had committed. The other: that she had no child. Inside the play is the line “He has no children,” and the reading runs that the emptiness of winning a throne with no blood to pass it to gnawed at her. But Freud takes this second hypothesis back himself. Shakespeare has pressed the play’s time so tight that no span in which childlessness could ripen into illness ever passes on the stage.
And here he does what the founder of psychoanalysis rarely does. He gives up. What the motive could have been, he writes, is impossible to guess. And then he goes further: the damaged text, the dramatist’s unknowable intention, the buried meaning of the old legend—this threefold tangle, he says, cannot be penetrated, and we must give up the hope of doing so. Why Lady Macbeth collapses after her success—to that question, he admits, we have given no answer.
The exit he chooses from that unanswered place is the curious part. Borrowing another analyst’s hand, he comes to see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth not as two separate figures but as two halves split from a single psychical being, copied from one prototype. To treat her as an independent character, he says, is pointless. So he ends the essay unable to close her, suturing her instead into one body with her husband. He has left a hole in the middle of the person. This essay begins from that hole.
Where Does the Cut-Out Thing Go — Jung
Set someone else before that hole. What would Jung say?
First, the words she throws out when she first comes onstage catch me. Calling on spirits, she asks to be unsexed, to be filled from crown to toe with cruelty, to have the passage to remorse stopped up. She asks that the milk in her breasts be taken for gall. Anyone who has read Jung for a while will land on one word here: animus. A woman overtaken by her own unconscious masculinity. In a woman so taken, Jung saw a rigid intellect and a kind of “demonic passion,” and in that place the feminine guttering out. A function that belongs inside, he said, has been turned outside. Over “unsex me,” no diagnosis lies down more exactly.
But Jung’s real weight is in the next step. He holds that the thing cut away does not vanish. It is pushed outside consciousness and goes on living apart. It waits quietly behind the partition, and the moment the wall falls it overwhelms the conscious life and turns it to wreckage. A severed complex, he wrote, takes on a separate existence of its own. Lady Macbeth reigns over the play’s first half. She is larger than her wavering husband, harder than the knife. Here Jung would have seen inflation. What has swelled to one side dooms itself to the calamity that strikes it dead. What has gone to one extreme inevitably breeds its opposite, and that opposite, at some point, breaks through the conscious control—the reversal Jung called enantiodromia.
And then the fifth act. She walks in her sleep with a candle and washes her hands. Washes them, and washes them again. Jung saw exactly this in his consulting room: washing ceremonies, a compulsive act repeated with responsibility thinned out, a kind of automatism. The hand moves by its own will, and the “I” that watches it no longer holds the wheel. The hard will that in the first half put the knife in her husband’s hand now watches, blankly, as her own hands wash of their own accord. Put into Jung’s language, the answer is plain. The femininity she sent out the front door, the softness whose passage she had sealed against remorse, has come back over the wall on its own and brought her down. The “why” Freud could never fill, Jung fills most directly of all. That hand that will not stop is the exiled thing, returned, with its hand on the wheel.
The Illusion of Washing — Buddhism
Yet if you follow this play from beginning to end, one motion keeps repeating. The motion of washing.
Just after the knife, her hands bloodied, she says a little water will clear them of the deed. A rinse will do. And at the end of the play, the words from that sleepwalking hand are the exact reverse: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Between these two lines lies the whole of how Buddhism reads her.
In the Saṃyukta Āgama (雜阿含經, Jap-aham-gyeong) there is a brahmin who tried to wash his sins away with water. He believed that bathing in the river would rinse off the wrongs he had done. The Buddha turns him around like this: though you wash off dust with water, you cannot cleanse the mind with it; make the mind clean within, and there is nothing outside left to wash. Lady Macbeth’s first act is precisely that brahmin. She took the deed for a stain on the skin, and a stain on the skin, she believed, rinses off. One step is already out of place here. The blood was never on her hands to begin with. The same sutra in the Madhyama Āgama says that the defilements that foul the mind—心穢 (sim-ye, the mind’s stains)—carry a person to a bad place. Not the hand’s stain, but the mind’s.
The smell in the fifth act—the smell no perfume can lift—is the moment that misplacement collapses on top of her. All along she has handled the mind’s stain as the hand’s, and so no water, no scent, reaches it. It was never the place to reach. The hands were clean long ago, and that very motion of washing clean hands and washing them again is the category mistake she never sees.
Wonhyo (元曉), unfolding the Awakening of Faith (大乘起信論), said that karmic obstruction—業障 (eopjang)—is not something washed off but something released through repentance. If you have been defiled, you must repent. The place to return to was not a basin but the turning of the mind, the originally clear ground. But she never turns. She only washes. “What’s done cannot be undone,” she says, in despair—and heard with the sutra’s ear, that line is only half right. What is done cannot be undone; that far it is true. But the mind can be turned. She stops at the first half and never reaches the second. And so, still rubbing her hands, she dies offstage. One of the oldest diagnoses had already, on a riverbank twenty-five hundred years ago, written her ending: the water is not the place.
A Hardness Forced Into the Hand — Yi Je-ma
Finally, I open a book my work keeps pulling me back to. Yi Je-ma (李濟馬).
Yi Je-ma read the mind as something with a grain. Some directions rise from within; some must be dragged in by force. And force exacts a price. That spell—“unsex me”—and the goading of her husband to “screw his courage to the sticking-place”—that is force. She drags hardness, cruelty, up against her own grain. In Yi Je-ma’s reading, a function dragged in by force becomes a hollow thing. Because it does not rise from the heart, it must spill, harder, toward the opposite feeling. A person who grips hardness by force tips, by the recoil of that force, toward grief.
So that the woman who asked to have the passage to remorse blocked should drown in remorse and come apart is, to Yi Je-ma, not a paradox but nearly a foregone order. The water rises higher on the side you dammed. The hardness she borrowed never became her own, and the price of the loan was billed in grief. What she sheds in her sleep is not blood but the very feeling she tried to wall out.
A Person Who Will Not Close
I set four people before her in turn, and the answers do not gather in one place. Freud asked why, gave up, and left a hole. In that hole Jung sees the exiled feminine return and take the wheel. The Buddha says the very motion of washing has mistaken its place; Yi Je-ma says a borrowed hardness has overflowed into grief. Four languages point to four different floors beneath the same collapse. The instant you choose one as the answer, the other three pull at it.
The play, too, will not close her. At the end she has not a single proper line. Her death happens offstage, carried in by the one line “The queen, my lord, is dead.” What stays on the stage is her husband’s speech over her body—that life is but a walking shadow, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even Shakespeare did not close her. At exactly the place where Freud came to a stop.
And then that first face comes back to me. The face that was hollow even with what it had wanted in hand. Now the hollow looks a little different. Not a thing explained by one account, but a place where several accounts stand side by side without gathering. Perhaps to read a person honestly is to leave that place unfilled, just as it is.
