SOURCE: Blechner, Mark J. “King Lear, King Leir, and Incest Wishes.” American Imago 45, no. 3 (fall 1988): 309-25.

In the following essay, Blechner contends that King Lear is “a love-tragedy between father and daughter,” and provides a psychoanalytic appraisal of the play as it dramatizes the consequences of Lear's long suppressed incestuous passion for Cordelia.

Shakespeare's King Lear is often thought to be one of his most beautiful but most problematic plays. For nearly four centuries, literary artists and critics have agonized over the work, puzzled by its seeming irrationality and its loose dramatic structure. The poetry in the play is magnificent, and it is a rare person who can see the play without feeling profoundly moved. Yet discussions of why the play is so moving often founder, and some critics of the play, without a concept of unconscious motivation, come to judge it as an arbitrary and irksome miscalculation...