Macbeth, The Trickster Archetype and Symbolic Life

What happens when symbolic language is mistaken for instruction

When I was a teenager studying Macbeth in the mid-1990s, our class travelled to Theatr Clwyd in North Wales to see a production that was stark and minimalist. I remember a black box on the stage and dry ice drifting across the floor. It appealed to my teenage wish to be sophisticated; it felt like "real theatre." The atmosphere was dreamlike, as though the play were unfolding somewhere between waking life and nightmare. The production ran at a relentless pace, without an interval. The Shakespearean language was dense and distant. I had almost no idea what they were saying.

But despite the pretentiousness, the play and the actors did their work. Something in me shifted. I realised I understood what was happening on stage: the pull of ambition, the desperation, the panic. Even though large parts of the language were beyond me, I was following the play without fully understanding the words. The experience felt magical.

Meaning does not always begin with explanation. Sometimes it begins with participation.

Since then I have remained wary of the impulse to pin down what a poem, story or work of art means too quickly. Often it is enough simply to experience it: to notice what it stirs, what questions begin to form, what images linger. Meaning unfolds gradually through curiosity and play. Meaning reinvents itself over and over again. It is a flirt. It changes its mind and returns in altered form.

This attitude can appear at odds with the analytic task, which is often described as making the unconscious conscious through interpretation. Theory can imply that if one simply gets the interpretation right, the work is done. Yet in practice, analysis rarely begins with explanation. The first task of the analyst is not to declare what something means but to listen in a way that allows meaning to emerge. Tone, rhythm, metaphor, silence and bodily atmosphere are often understood before they can be articulated. Interpretation, when it comes, grows out of that prior experience, and once it appears it functions less as a destination than as a living question . Not was my childhood good or bad, and whose fault is it, but how might my experiences be shaping me still? When are my understandings of the world supporting me, and when are they trapping me?

In this light, Macbeth is a story about a man who cannot practise that kind of listening. It is often read as a tragedy of ambition, but it can also be understood as a tragedy about language. About what happens when symbolic speech is mistaken for instruction.

The play opens with three witches. Their first words establish the atmosphere of the world we are about to enter: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." This line is often quoted as eerie atmosphere, yet it performs a deeper function. It tells us that the world of the play operates in a different register of language. Moral categories blur. Words double back on themselves. Meaning refuses to settle.

In mythic terms the witches resemble trickster figures. Their speech recalls Hermes, the messenger-god who moves between worlds carrying communications that require interpretation. Hermes is not the god of certainty. He is the god of thresholds, riddles, ambiguity and translation.

The trickster occupies a similarly difficult position in Jung's writing. He keeps the figure in the shadow, not as a moral warning but as an acknowledgement of its amoral, destabilising force. The trickster teaches through reversal rather than clarity. If someone wants to understand racism, the trickster does not offer insight; he exposes and makes large your psyche's own capacity for prejudice. If someone wants to understand homophobia, the trickster may lead them into homophobic enactments they believe are virtuous, only to reveal the contradictions beneath the surface. Pride comes before the fall. True pride, a genuine and sacred belief in being on the right side of history. The pedagogy is indirect and often uncomfortable. The trickster reveals the gap between self-image and shadow, between conscious intention and unconscious participation. My analyst used to say to me - yes libby don't you just hate judgemental people, they are the worst. It took me a long time to get the joke. Whether for groups or individuals, the trickster's function is not to punish but to expose complexity and hubris: the psyche learns through encountering its own capacity for error, contradiction and self-deception.

Seen through this lens, the witches' speech does not command; it unsettles. They open a symbolic field in which meaning must be discovered rather than imposed. Macbeth's tragedy begins the moment he refuses that field. He collapses ambiguity into action, symbol into instruction, possibility into mandate. The prophecy becomes not something to contemplate but something to fulfil. The murder of Duncan marks the moment when symbolic language is forced into literal reality, and once that collapse occurs, the tragedy begins to unfold in earnest. Symbolic language allows hesitation, reflection and play. Literal language demands resolution. When Macbeth loses the capacity to inhabit ambiguity, the world begins to narrow around him.

That narrowing has a logic of its own. Having broken the political and moral order of Scotland, Macbeth does not retreat from the act, he identifies with it, becoming the man who has overturned the natural order. And once the ego has justified a disruptive act as necessary or inevitable, doubt stops being a thought and becomes a threat.

To reconsider the murder would unravel the story that made it bearable in the first place. The question shifts from was this necessary? to was this wrong? and to be wrong, at this depth, risks becoming a verdict on the self, not just the act. So every subsequent threat must be foreclosed before the question can even be asked. Banquo must die. Macduff's family must die. The rebel becomes the tyrant not out of cruelty for its own sake, but because he can no longer afford uncertainty.

Later in the play Macbeth returns to the witches seeking reassurance. By this point he no longer wants possibility. He wants certainty. The witches provide three new prophecies: no man born of woman will harm him; he will not be defeated until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane. Macbeth hears these statements literally and experiences them as guarantees of invincibility.

Yet the witches have not abandoned symbolic language. Their words remain ambiguous. Birnam Wood does indeed move to Dunsinane when Malcolm's soldiers advance disguised with branches cut from the forest. Macbeth is killed by Macduff, who was delivered by Caesarean section and therefore technically "not born of woman." The witches deceive Macbeth without ever lying to him. Their speech remains symbolic throughout. It is Macbeth's symbolic capacity that collapses.

The psychic cost of that collapse appears most vividly in Lady Macbeth. Early in the play she helps transform Macbeth's hesitation into action — ambivalence is reframed as weakness, certainty as a moral imperative. But the psyche rarely cooperates indefinitely with such simplifications, and what cannot be held symbolically often returns through the body. Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene reveals a mind attempting to process what conscious language can no longer contain. Her repeated gestures of hand-washing enact a form of embodied thinking. The hands that once dismissed guilt now compulsively attempt to cleanse themselves. "Out, damned spot." In this moment the body speaks what the conscious mind cannot symbolise. The psyche attempting to restore symbolic life through fragmentation, repetition and haunted speech. But the wager has already been made. The symbolic field has already collapsed.

What struck me most strongly in that theatre was the sound of the language moving through the actors' bodies. Shakespeare's meaning did not reside solely in the words. It unfolded through tone, rhythm, breath and gesture. A line spoken playfully carries a different meaning from the same line spoken in accusation. A prophecy delivered lightly lands differently from one delivered as command. The body registers these tonal shifts long before the intellect begins analysing them.

Language operates within a social grammar. Words carry meaning not only through definition but through register: irony, sincerity, humour, threat, tenderness. Symbolic elasticity depends on the freedom to move between these registers. When tone becomes rigid, language begins to harden.

Seen from this perspective, Macbeth becomes a tragedy about the loss of symbolic play. At the beginning of the play, language is fluid and ambiguous; the witches speak in riddles and the world feels dreamlike and unstable. As the play progresses, the atmosphere tightens. Speech becomes cautious. Power becomes paranoid. Meaning hardens.

Macbeth's tragedy is not only that he murders a king. It is that he loses the capacity to live with ambiguity. Once that capacity disappears, every word must become an action. Every prophecy becomes a command. Every uncertainty becomes a threat.

Meaning does not always arrive through explanation. It often appears first as atmosphere, tone or intuition - something sensed before it can be named. As a student sitting in the darkened theatre I did not yet understand Shakespeare's language fully, but the play was already working symbolically. Experience came first; curiosity followed; interpretation emerged in its own time.

Symbolic life requires the capacity to remain with ambiguity, to allow words, images and stories to work on us before we rush to fix their meaning. Macbeth cannot tolerate that uncertainty, and once he loses the ability to inhabit that space, the world around him becomes increasingly rigid, haunted and violent.

And so the tragedy unfolds not only because of what Macbeth does, but because he cannot live with meanings that refuse to become instructions.