This seminar will focus on King Lear and its roots in fairy tale, myth and fictional history. Shakespeare’s source material for his tragedy, King Lear was the mythological Leir of Britain. His play also serves as a literary retelling of a common folktale motif. All versions contain a similar contest of competitive declarations of love for the father between three daughters - two false and one true. Shakespeare arguably takes this material to its furthest extreme in offering us an ending that culminates in the ultimate symbolic transformation of death itself. If this work is taken in place of a dream, the story of a single psyche emerges, and it becomes a journey of initiation and individuation, but it also has much to say about our outer lives, the concrete realities of patient scoping with parental complexes, sibling rivalries and estrangement.

Heather Angel (GAP, UKCP, IAAP) is a Jungian analyst in private practice on a London houseboat, Lindisfarne, in Battersea. She has a special interest in myth and fairy tales and their application in clinical practice

Shakespeare, W. (1994) Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London: Harper Collins. ‘King Lear’ 1126-1167

English Fairy Tales (1994), Ware: Wordsworth. ‘Cap o’ Rushes’ 212-218

Jung, C.G., The Collected Works, Vol. 9i The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,§§ 384-455

Further Reading:

Monmouth, O.G. and Thorpe, L. (2015) The History of the Kings of Britain. London: Penguin Classics. ‘Leir of Britain’ - Vol. II, ch. 11-14

Spenser, E. and Brooks-Davies, D. (1995) The Faerie Queene: Books I to III. London: Everyman. 294-295

Calvino, I. and Martin, G.(1999) Italian Folktales. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc. ‘Dear as Salt’ 172-175

Freud, S. (1985) Art and Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets (1913)’ 235-247

Lamb, C. and Lamb, M. (1965) Tales from Shakespeare. Blackie. ‘King Lear’24-38

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