SOURCE: “Primary Process Mentation and the Structure of Timon of Athens,” in University of Hartford Studies in Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1979, pp. 24-35.

[In the essay below, Neiditz suggests reinterpreting Timon of Athens, noting the dream-like state of the play and its symbolism.]

Interpretations of Timon of Athens have led us astray by forcing the play into a logical, sequential mold with conclusions that Shakespeare was exhausted, suffering from a nervous breakdown or portraying a “syphlitic” character.¹ Only Miss Ellis-Fermor, speaking of the Alcibiades-Senate scene, grasped the fact that it tumbles “suddenly into the action with the bewildering inconsequence of a dream.”²

If we approach the play like a dream, we recognize Shakespeare's suggestion of the simultaneity of time, the fulfillment of erotic and aggressive wishes through diction and plot, the predominance of cannibalistic and persecutory imagery, the splitting of four major figures to represent different aspects of the divided self, and the unity which depends upon the dramatization of an unconscious mental state. What we can conclude is that the structure of Timon is strongly influenced by primary process mentation which ignores consideration of time, space, and logical consistency, fulfilling wishes magically; and employs symbolism in a crudely associative manner.³

Primary process mentation as defined by Robert Rogers in Metaphor, A Psychoanalytic View, is “thinking which occurs in dreams, states of intoxication, extreme emotion or physiological deprivation, in the religious mystic's trance or the manic inspirational phase of creative imagination.”⁴ All of these situations have in common periods of reduced ego control, when self-criticism and reality-testing are minimal or entirely absent.

What Shakespeare gives us is a Timon over-whelmed by rage and an Alcibiades who revives an attachment to the city which banished him. Both reveal feelings which echo our earliest responses to the loss of a life-sustaining object: banishment r abandonment r annihilation and banishment r individuation r renewed attachment.⁵ To understand the play we must be willing to ask the right questions. The first questions might be: How does the Alcibiades-Senate scene reveal a coalescence of present, past, and future time? How are Alcibiades and Timon related both as one merged figure and as split aspects of the same person? How do other characters function in a plot which leads to the annihilation of Timon and the individuation of Alcibiades?

We meet Alcibiades defending an anonymous killer who acted in “defence” and who has done “fair service.” We never know who that killer is; this alone is a feature of primary process mentation, a disregard of the needs of others to “know.” After all, Alcibiades argues, “who is man that is not angry?” Timon is, of course, the angry man. The cause-effect sequence becomes clear:

1. Timon's rage is murderous (“Burn house, sink Athens.” “Tear me, take me and the gods fall upon you”).

2. The wish to kill or be killed is felt as reality (according to the primary process principles of the omnipotence of thought and the law of talion). The plot, in miniature, can be seen as a working-through of two opposing desires evoked by the murderous wish, the punishment of self and object combined (Timon as object) and the mutual forgiving of self and object (Alcibiades and Athens).

3. Alcibiades defends Timon (the anonymous murderer), pleading for mercy because of services rendered (Timon must have been a soldier because in Act V he is offered a “captainship”).

4. Like Timon, a good and guiltless soldier, Alcibiades reminds the senators that he is omnipotent (“I do beseech you, know me.” “Soldiers should brook as little wrong as gods”).

5. Banished, Alcibiades denies the effect of the banishment. He will separate from the object, the Mother city, and attack her for expelling him (“I hate not to be banished. It is a cause worthy my spleen and fury, / That I may strike at Athens”).

6. At the end of the play, about to enter Athens, Alcibiades is addressed as “noble and young.” The senators plead for mercy. Their contradictory arguments reflect the coalescence of time:

These walls of ours
Were not erected by their hands from whom
You have receiv’d your griefs; nor are they such
That these great towers, trophies, and schools should fall
For private faults in them

(V.iv.23-6).

Nor are they living
Who were the motives that you first went out (V.iv.27).
...... crimes, like lands,
Are not inherited,

(V.iv.37).

If Alcibiades is still “young,” how could all the senators who banished him have died? Have new walls been built by another generation, leaving Alcibiades youthful? Were the three senators who banished Alcibiades non-wall-builders? “Crimes like lands …” suggests a huge passage of time. The new senators are peers, not fathers. The banishment must have occurred when Alcibiades and Timon were babies. The banishers were “old, corrupt, and ugly.” And the hated fathers have died of “shame.” The new Athens should be spared because it will act as a true “cradle,” receiving warmly, opening, harbouring, giving full gratification (V.iv. 52-4).

The triumphant Alcibiades, both plague and healer, is brought “in” to the diseased city to approach the fold and cull the infected forth, to establish mutual leeching (V.iv.84). Evil is magically limited and contained. “Let die the spotted” (V.iv.34). And Alcibiades gets what he wants, reattachment to a nurturing maternal space and the godlike power to decide who shall live and die.

We can now see that the connection of Timon to Alcibiades is the connection to a preserved ego which survives the separation from and loss of the object. But what can we say about the relationship of Timon to the two important figures, Apemantus and Flavius? If Timon's basic reaction to separation is protest, these two figures seem to express the other sequential reactions designated by Bowlby: despair and alienation.⁶ Once Timon is rejected by his friends, separated from his undifferentiated brothers whom he, like an all-good mother has fed, Flavius registers true despair, both at the separation of Timon from his Fortune and at the separation of himself from his master to whom he was truly attached. Apemantus is, throughout, the detached “railer” whose answer to the loss of attachment is to need nothing.

C. Murray Parkes, writing on separation anxiety and the search for a lost object, focuses on bereaved adults and the overt manifestations of their need to “find” the dead loved one:

Searching, by its very nature, implies the loss of an object; it is thought to be an essential component of grief and central to an understanding of the process.⁷

Timon's search in the bowels of Mother Earth is as unsatisfying as the search which Parkes describes on the part of normal bereaved adults. “Out,” “separated,” “unattached,” Timon denies his connection with the human race. Unlike Lear he refuses his share of guilt: I am good. They are evil. Somewhere there is the one whom I have lost who is also good. She is dead. Perhaps I can find her, the good mother in the good earth. This might be one reconstruction of the illogical “searching” in the last two acts.

The symbolism of the “root” which is both nourishment and phallus (means of attachment) points forward to the dead parents of Posthumus in Cymbeline when Shakespeare delves more deeply.⁸ If we adopt Melanie Klein's concept of the persecutory breast and penis and the infant's wish to open the mother's abdomen to search for the father's penis (“root”) and to empty the abdomen of feces and fetuses,⁹ the search in the bowels which yields only gold and a single root takes on vivid significance. Such an interpretation is supported by the quantity and quality of the persecutory and cannibalistic imagery which is prominent in the play, imagery which brings us back to wishes to devour the breast, Timon as a breast which runs dry in Act II and is therefore persecuted or feels persecuted, the identification of man with meat, a primordial, anonymous murder, and Apemantus-Alcibiades as a contrasting pair, the former innocent, the latter guilty of feasting on human flesh.

To briefly discuss this condensed history, we listen first to Apemantus who, when asked to dine, replies:

No, I eat not lords.

(I.i.207)

As an alienated observer he sees:

… what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ‘em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up too.

(I.ii.39-43)

Apemantus’ grace is a denial of guilt:

Rich men sin, and I eat root.

(I.ii.72)

An eater of root rather than meat, Apemantus clings to vegetarian innocence. The position is not secure, since Apemantus and Timon in Act IV are taking from Mother Nature's plenteous bosom a form of nourishment which suggests the magical penis contained in a magical breast.

Alcibiades, on the other hand, willingly admits that he is both killer and cannibal. As a soldier he must simply differentiate between his friends and his enemies:

Timon to Alcibiades:
You had rather be at a breakfast of enemies than a dinner of friends.
Alcibiades:
So they were bleeding-new, my lord. There's no meat like ‘em.
I could wish my best friend at such a feast.

(I.ii. 76-83)

Apemantus, in Act I, is able to see what Alcibiades and Timon cannot comprehend, that friends are enemies because they flatter. Friends make Timon feel that he is magical, the housewife Nature, a container that is filled with nourishing roots. Timon angrily summarizes for the thieves the irrationality of man's greed:

Alcibiades:
We are not thieves but men that much do want.
Timon:
Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. Why should you want? Behold,
the earth hath roots. Within this mile break forth a hundred springs; The
oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips; The bounteous housewife Nature on
each bush Lays her full mess before you. Want! Why want?
First bandit:
We cannot live on grass, on berries, water
As beasts and birds and fishes.
Timon:
Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds and fishes: you must eat men.

(IV.iii. 217-28)

That critics are in “substantial agreement about the theme of the play, the Pauline warning that the love of money is the root of all evil”¹⁰ seems to me as questionable as the Christian truism: “It is better to give than to receive.” If we were to pinpoint one root of evil in the play it would be “meat,” man's need to eat men. But Shakespeare was not illustrating simple moral dictums. Again, we must note that literary approaches to Timon have asked the wrong questions: Was Timon good? Was he sincere? Was Shakespeare painting an evil world which could not respond to generosity? A better set of questions which would display some concern for Shakespeare's sophistication might be: Does Shakespeare give us any clues about Timon's giving, why he gave as he gave? what he gave? what expectations did he have concerning the rewards for such giving?

Giving in this play is the root of all evil, giving which masks the expectation of comparable “receiving,” giving which anticipates that all will be given back, the quid pro quo which stems from the illusion that one is an all-giver and therefore should be a recipient of all from others.

There is evidence in the play that Shakespeare was aware of the discrepancy between Timon's conscious “ideal” of giving all without expectation of an unlimited return (“much help”). Observe, for example, the two contradictory speeches in Act I, scene ii:

Timon (to Ventidius):
You mistake my love;
I gave it freely ever; and there's none
Can truly say he gives if he receives.

(I.ii.9-11)

First Lord:
Might we but have that happiness, my lord that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part
of our zeals, we should think ourselves forever perfect.
Timon:
O, no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided
that I shall have much help from you. How
had you been my friends else? Why have you that charitable title from thousands,
did not you chiefly belong to my heart?
I have told more of you to myself than
you can with modesty speak in your own behalf; and thus far I confirm you.

(I.ii. 86-97; emphasis added)

The double meanings of use, belong, told and confirm are revealed in later scenes when Timon sends his servants forth to collect a debt owed to him. Timon has given his heart, his meat. He expects to use the hearts of others. After all they belong to him. He has counted (told) them, bound (confirmed) them. “Why, I have often wish’d myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you” is, indeed, a sentimental, sloppy wish, appropriately accompanied by sentimental, sloppy tears (I.ii. 109-11). The heavily ironic contrast comes, of course, when Timon is poorer and comes nearer to none.

What we can say about Timon is that Shakespeare has made him human enough, so that some of his speeches reveal an internal conflict and confusion between conscious idealistic attitudes and unconscious, aggressive and libidinal wishes. The major wish, of course, is that in giving all, one should receive all back. Like Lear, who gave “all” to his daughters, Timon expected these undifferentiated recipients of his nourishment, to “give” to him in kind during his hour of need. What he did not recognize was the separate reality of those to whom he gave; they had repaid him in the gift which money could buy, flattery. That Timon felt he was giving “all” runs parallel with the omnipotent wish to take “all” away. The urine—like steaming water hurled at the ingrates, the steady stream of curses like Lear's efforts to direct the storm, the advice to whores and thieves, all are testimony to Timon's illusion that he could do enormous damage as well as enormous good. Timon and Lear are very similar in their sense of omnipotent power and their magical wishes to give and yet keep the whole:

My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend
And nothing brings me all things.

(V.i. 189-91)

The expectation of “all things” is the “root” of Timon's sickness, since only the infant imagines himself the center of a world, the possessor of a breast which contains All. It is a common, unconscious wish. And the confusion which arises between “all things” and “feasting,” “gold,” “the patronage of painters and poets,” “jewels,” “fame,” and “flattery,” is the commonest of all confusions. Lear assumed he “was all”; Timon, that he could have “all things.” Lear learned about human weakness and Timon about the vanity of “things.” But beneath those lessons is another, that nothing comes from nothing, that Timon, in his own imagination, gave nothing and therefore received nothing in return. In the simplest terms, true giving is receiving. In Timon's terms, either one is the bountiful breast which cannot be depleted or one is the empty, powerless babe, the open mouth, the sterile moon:

Alcibiades:
How came the noble Timon to this change?
Timon:
As the moon does, by wanting light to give. But then renew I could not,
like the moon; There were no suns to borrow of.

(IV.iii. 66-68)

This is one of those resonant statements that sets us searching. Is it a pun on sons? An oblique reference to Hamlet's death? Was that the loss which activated separation anxiety in Shakespeare? Or is it Timon's acknowledgment of human weakness, moon-deadness, the incapacity of man to be One, to give himself life-sustaining light?

Mother Earth yields worthless gold but not the “object” for which Timon seeks, the “all-giver,” the good ideal Cordelia, the continual feast of meat, music, and light. The feast, as a symbolic situation, was not present in Shakespeare's sources, nor the second dinner of warm water and smoke (urine and farts). The first act has convinced many a critic that Timon was good because he created a bubble, rosy pleasure world where he gave to each according to his needs. But when reality breaks in, depleted funds, a table which is not self-renewing, the all-giver who had the “world” as his “confectionary” falls from bliss into the opposite illusioned state, a dirty, chaotic “melancholia,” a state of famine, anger, and despair, a suicidal longing for purity and oblivion:

... his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

(V.i.218-21)

Although Mother Earth does yield a root or two, although Flavius renders loving service, although Alcibiades pities and even Apemantus tries to communicate, Timon's rage cannot be quelled. Being “out” has a quality which is almost as enjoyable as being “in.” It is another absolute position, a proud stance more pleasurable than the absolute power offered him by the senators:

Therefore, so please thee to return with us,
And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take
The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks,
Allow’d with absolute power, and thy good name
Live with authority. …

(V.i. 162-66)

But Timon, unlike Alcibiades, is not interested in reality. He represents finally that part in Shakespeare and in us which refuses to be satisfied by anything but “all.” If he can’t get all, he’ll give “all,” and if that fails, he’ll destroy all by destroying his own “allness.” His last spoken words, Lear-like, are a command to the sun:

Sun, hide thy beams!
Timon hath done his reign!

(V.i.226)

Notes

1. A. H. Woods, “Syphilis in Shakespeare's Tragedy of Timon of Athens.” The American Journal of Psychiatry. 91 (1934), 95-107.

2. Una Ellis-Fermor, “Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play,” RES, XVIII (July, 1942), 270-83.

3. I am drawing on the definition of primary process in the Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, ed. Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine. (New York: American Psychoanalytic Association, 1968).

   Also Arnold H. Modell, Object Love and Reality (New York, 1968), pp. 156-59 has a fuller explanation. Modell links Cassirer's concept of mythical thought to Freud's concept of the primary process.

   Roy Schafer's Aspects of Internalization is an invaluable summary of generalizations about primary process ideation. (New York: International University Press, 1968).

4. Robert Rogers, Metaphor: A Psychoanalytic View, (University of California Press: 1978), p. 16.

5. Minerva H. Neiditz, “Banishment: Separation and Loss in the Later Plays of Shakespeare,” (unpublished thesis, Univ. of Connecticut, 1974).

6. John Bowlby, “Separation Anxiety: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, I (1961), 258.

7. C. Murray Parkes, “Separation Anxiety: An Aspect of the Search for a Lost Object,” British Journal of Psychiatry, ed. M.H. Lader (Ashford, Kent: Headley Bros., Ltd. 1969).

8. The discussion about Posthumus begins with: “I cannot delve him to the root. His father …” (Cymbeline, I.i. 28). The predominant imagery is that of growth: trees, branches, leaves, etc.

9. Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety and Death (Boston, 1967). P. 179.

10. See comments by O.J. Campbell in the Reader's Encyclopedia, p. 875.