Duped by Iago into believing that his beloved Desdemona has betrayed him, Othello is consumed with jealousy. His jealousy is so intense, in fact, that it leads him to kill Desdemona and then take his own life.
It's true that Hamlet takes center stage in most psychoanalytic discussions of Shakespeare. But it's not the only one of the Bard's works that can benefit from a psychoanalytic lens. There's actually an insightful reading of Othello in Klein's "Envy and Gratitude."
For both Freud and Klein, Shakespeare's Othello is valuable because it gets at the intensity of ambivalence: that grandly intimate connection between love and hate. This ambivalence crops up in Othello's relationship with Iago, as well as in his tragic love for Desdemona.
So put your Freudian hats on and let's get ready to rumble (with the psyche in Othello).
- The first line spoken in Othello is: "Thou told'st me thou didst hold him in thy hate." Hate, as we have seen, is at least as central to psychoanalysis as love. Do any of the psychoanalytic ideas introduced above help you to better interpret that line?
- Aside from hate, what other feelings in the play might psychoanalysis help us to shed some light on?