SOURCE: "Macbeth'. A Dream of Love," in American Imago, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 85-105.

In the following essay, Stockholder discusses the dream-like mingling of sexuality and violence in Macbeth.

Plato in the Republic reflected uneasily that even a good man might dream that he slept with his mother, and Freud tried to reassure the audience to his Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis when he reminded them that there was someone in the real world actually doing the horrible things of which they merely dreamed.¹ The combination of the involuntary nature of our dreams and their emotional power can remain a source of worry even though most of us exempt from moral judgment the expressions of desires in the willess realm of dreaming. However, any action that ensues from a state of mind that seems on the borderline between waking and dreaming, any engulfing or compulsive emotion, raises troublesome questions...