Reporting from Canada, #7: The Scottish Play and Leadership

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

It is said to be bad luck in theatre to name the play of concern in today’s column, but it rhymes with Macdeath. Perhaps the bad luck has to do with the destructive leadership that takes over in this Shakespearean play that we just saw in Stratford, Canada.

As is common nowadays, the play is moved in time, this time to the motorcycle wars of the 1990s in Quebec. Even so, the psychological portrait of Macbeth remains more or less the same.

Macbeth, the person, at first seems to be an apparently satisfactory man, partner, and motorcycle gang member—that is, until his wife and the prediction of 3 witches kickstart his ambition to take over leadership. From our psychiatric perspective, the witches may well be psychological projections of his own repressed desires. It is when he feels humiliated and spurred on by his wife that he goes ahead to kill the current leader, Duncan, and then he becomes more paranoid and vulnerable. Seeing a psychiatrist would surely feel like weakness. Soon his wife commits suicide and he is brutally killed by remaining gang rivals as his ambition becomes cruelly unmoored from his prior moral values.

Over history, political leadership is replete with leaders and revolution based on such toxic masculinity and desire for revenge after being humiliated. Whether that fits our current leadership is certainly worth considering and addressing. Similar leadership challenges can come up in any organization.

Humiliation is probably best responded to with humility instead. That includes therapists in response to our critical patients, as well as carefulness about especially not causing feelings of humiliation in those patients with undue narcissistic sensitivity.

A bonus in experiencing the play at Stratford was a presentation by a combined astrologist and psychologist on the relevance of astrology in Shakespeare’s time and the play, titled “Mars: The Astrological Key to Macbeth.”¹ The symbolism of the planet Mars was covered in some detail, including both ensuing positive and negative personality traits. Macbeth seems to turn from the more positive, like courage, to the more negative, like cowardly.

Me? I am a Taurus in astrology and it seems to fit.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Reference

1. Costello P. Shakespeare and the Stars: The Hidden Astrological Keys to Understanding the World’s Greatest Playwright. Ibis Press; 2016.