Castration Anxiety and the Mirror Stage: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Shakespeare's Othello
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article mainly applies two psychoanalytic notions to Shakespeare's tragedy Othello (1622), namely castration anxiety and the mirror stage. It argues that Othello is strengthened by Desdemona and his high military rank as the general of the Venetian army. Against common postcolonial readings of the play, we argue that Othello experiences castration anxiety metaphorically, i.e. he gets anxious about losing such things that make him strong in Venice. In addition, Othello goes through the mirror stage metaphorically as well. He makes the assumptions that he is backed up by his military rank and his wife, that Iago is honest with him, and that the absence of the handkerchief—which signifies loyalty to him—indicates that his wife is unfaithful to him. After he believes Iago's lie that his wife has an affair with Cassio, Othello gets so anxious that he kills his wife, and after realizing that his assumptions have been all false and that he is castrated and no longer attached to his wife and his post, he self-destructively commits suicide. Othello’s anxiety about losing his authority and his shattered self-image as a betrayed husband are ultimately intertwined. Hence, this article offers fresh insights into Shakespearean plays by reading one representative piece, Othello , against some trends in literary theory not known during Shakespeare’s times but universal in their application to literary texts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".