Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

This paper is a study on one of the most common mental illnesses, obsessive-compulsive disorder, also known as OCD, and one of its most famous fictional sufferers, William Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, whose compulsive need to wash her hands of an imagined contamination exhibits one of the disorder's best known symptoms. Shakespeare dramatized her story centuries before OCD had been identified as a psychiatric disorder and its origins were understood by the medical community, yet he managed to provide character details that are consistent with the diagnosis of an obsessive-compulsive personality. Though she may possibly have been able to hide her need to wash her hands continually before the traumatic event of her complicity in the murder of the king that brings her bizarre behavior out into the open, this disturbing situation either aggravates the behavior or prevents her from keeping it a secret any longer.

Such a pattern is typical of OCD, as sufferers are often able to conceal the rituals they feel compelled to practice from even their closest family members until trauma bring them out into the open. For Lady Macbeth, ultimate relief comes only in death; suicidal depression often accompanies OCD. However, had she been examined by a 20th century psychiatrist instead of her 11th century physician, her prognosis might have been much less grim. Modern therapies, including drug treatments and psychoanalysis, promise help for the chronic hand washers of today. Lady Mac

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her husband to carry out the deed. Rapoport (1989) notes, "Unless a symptom interferes with a person's life by impairing function or causing distress, we can't say the person is sick" (p. 15). Though she may have been provably neurotic before the murder, Lady Macbeth was quite able to function and not in any obvious distress. Only the trauma of confronting the corpse she contrived to murder pushes her over the edge. Levenkron (1991) observes, "OCD symptoms often await a trauma before emerging" (p. 40). Although she appears to be unmoved by Duncan's murder, killing a king while he sleeps under her own roof must be a disturbing event to orchestrate. Howard Felperin (1987) writes, "Her eventual madness is the index of the very humanity she would negate" (p. 102). For many OCD sufferers, their disorder is an attempt to regulate life and to deny the messiness of being human. Lady Macbeth tries to rise above being a frail human being; the effort drives her mind into illness. Shakespeare, who knew nothing of the clinical diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, chose Lady Macbeth's hand washing in part for the same reason that it is the best known example of an OCD symptom, because it is so obvious a psychological expressi

Category: Psychology - O