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Dr. Alma Bond does not suffer fools gladly. She is an insightful and
hard-hitting author and demands an intelligent and discerning reader. Choosing Lady
Macbeth, a semi-fictional character immortalized by Shakespeare,
immediately selects her audience. Lady
Macbeth, On the Couch: Inside the Mind and Life of Lady Macbeth is of
course, a novel, but it is designed and treated like a psycho-biography. It
is a book for Shakespeare lovers, Scottish history lovers, psychology
lovers and even adventure lovers. But not for the faint-hearted.
What made Lady M. behave as she did? Dr. Bond, a psychoanalyst of no
small accomplishments (both professionally and as an author of more than a
dozen books) has researched the factual evidence thoroughly, as indicated
by her extensive bibliography. She is further challenged by the
fact that Sigmund Freud himself could shed no light on Lady Macbeth’s
psyche.
Eleventh century Scotland was a violent, rough, superstitious country,
reminiscent of the blue-faced near-barbarians of Braveheart. A dozen kings had already been
murdered by men who a) believed they had better claim to the throne, b)
thought they could do a better job of it, or c) because they wanted to. Prior
to her marriage, Lady Macbeth was born into a royal line, and raised as a
queen-to-be. She
was abducted twice, abused, ravaged and treated as violently as the rest of
her counterparts since her claim was just as good, if not better, than
anyone else’s. Her marriage to Macbeth, which according to Dr. Bond,
became a love match following the usual murders and mayhem. Perhaps Macbeth
was merely her vehicle to achieve her birthright.
If the prophesies of the three weird sisters were instrumental in
Macbeth’s vision of his future, then too, Lady M had her own prophesy of a
sort: the reinforcement of a childhood trait of the pubescent Lady M. If
she set her mind to something, while others would waver, she would not. She
was very proud of that quality, according to Dr. Bond, and, of course, much
to her later regret, she did not waver. She pushed, she prodded, she
cajoled, she challenged, she humiliated and did whatever she needed to do
to set Macbeth on his quest for their
throne, and his bloody and murderous decline into damnation and ruin. Once she
realized her role, she could not live with the consequences any more than
he could.
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