An American psychotherapist, M Scott Peck, wrote a book about evil based on working with patients who he concluded were evil. (People of the Lie; 1983) It's a great book for working out what evil might look like. His conclusions were evil is a conscious decision to not grow or prevent someone from growing to preserve an image or view of oneself. That is people who lie, cheat and misrepresent and manipulate people to preserve their own ego. When I read the book 15 years ago I did so to understand someone I had identified (I believe correctly) as evil.
There are many examples in the book of couples who are working together and their relationships are based on lying so that things remain as they want them. There's the chilling story of a couple where the husband had put himself in his wife's thrall [Peck's word not mine]because he was weak and she was dominant and in doing so he had got more and more pathetic and awake every day to head the word 'kill' in his head, while she would call him pathetic and useless to his face. In the end he kept trying to slit his throat because he knew he couldn't live without her. She on the other hand got dominance over him.
Other stories dealt with individuals - one a woman who put herself in therapy for four years but lied the whole time and had no control over anyone, couldn't hold down a job or a relationship, but didn't want her ego / spirit contraption deconstructed. that is she had this weird fantasy view of the world that everything she didn't like was someone else's fault and that she set the rules for any job she went to, any relationships she had and how she dealt with power and telephone companies. And she wouldn't change. Peck's view was a part of her probably wanted to get well but most of her (the intellect and ego) was not prepared to change and let people set rules for her. Also interestingly she had no empathy for anyone - other people just had to do what she wanted and she would impose and ascribe her feelings on them.
Anyway there were many other examples in the book but the important things for Macbeth are:
- Macbeth must voluntarily give himself and his will to achieve goals by killing others because in some sick way it reinforces him (and him is his ego / ambition / view of himself as pre-eminient over others...)
- Lady Macbeth has to also voluntarily give herself to the same goals (which she clearly does with her unsex me speech)
- Both must manipulate and lie to the same ends and reinforce each other while they are both working together (which they do) they can appear charming and civilised but their language and actions disguise their real intent
- The witches are a catalyst but the point at which Macbeth decides to kill Duncan is when he becomes taken by evil (but never, as we learn in his soliquoys, 100 % evil)
- The Macbeths should lose empathy with other people (which they do)
The other thing, rereading Peck's book, is that Shakespeare got it spot on. I had said in an earlier post that understanding of psychology had changed and that this meant portraying the Macbeths realistically is harder today. The clear message from this is that if you adopt a psychology of evil it works very well.
The stark soulessness of the 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' speech matches up with something in Peck's book: he quotes Simone Weil as writing "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, real evil is gloomy monotonous, barren and boring."
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