Freud, Husserl, and Stein: The Fool’s Empathy in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Sigmund Freud’s analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear focuses on how the titular character is driven by repressed desires, fears, and internal conflicts. He believes that the audience grasps this emotional complexity by projecting their unconscious feelings upon him. Freud’s engagement with Shakespeare serves as a natural entry point into questions about how one understands another’s inner life, specifically as it impacts the modern-day conception of empathy. His philosophical compeers Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein propound theories that allow one to access another’s mind. For them, speech, intonation, and facial expressions serve an epistemic function, revealing that person’s motives, desires, and beliefs. Their seminal treatises of empathy expand upon Freud’s theory of projection and thus serve as a vital heuristic tool in explicating King Lear. Just as Freud grounds his theory of empathy in the listener’s response to a comic’s jokes, Shakespeare uses the Fool’s acerbic riddles to express the affectionate knowing between him and Lear. The intelligence underlying these witticisms not only undoes the rigid taxonomy of “fool” and “wise man,” but also brings to light those matters that weigh most heavily upon Lear’s consciousness, proving that “the phenomenon of foreign psychic life is indubitably there.” (On the Problem of Empathy 1989, p. 5) All of these writers espouse a view of empathy that creates a web of shared understanding that explicates how the Fool grasps Lear’s unconscious mind and forges a meaningful connection with him.