Unsex Me Here, Come You Spirits": The Psychological Symbiosis of Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth

Abstract

This paper explores the psychological interaction between Lady Macbeth and the Weird Sisters or witches in the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare and examines them not as individuals but as a unified embodiment of an ambitious, transgressive and disordered psyche. Using a literary-psychological approach, the research has assumed that the witches serve as an externalization of the suppressed, repressed ambitions and moral struggles of Macbeth and, in a less apparent way, of Lady Macbeth. Whereas Macbeth acts in direct communication with the supernatural, the psychology of Lady Macbeth appropriates the symbolic role of the witches and thus she becomes the human source of demonic persuasion. As the paper will contend, the later mental breakdown of Lady Macbeth, her somnambulism and suicidal actions are a result of the unresolvable nature of the conflict between the agency that she is acting and believes is hardened and her suppressed feminine conscience, a conflict that is initially sparked and reflected by the ambiguous nature of the witches in their oracles. By this examination, the paper sheds light on the main focus of the play, that of the external supernatural powers involved in the interaction with the interior psychological process of corruption of ambition into tyranny and, eventually, destruction of the self.