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Otto Rank in his book, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," furnishes a beautiful and convincing example of such repression: It comes from a second drama based on a king's murder, "Julius Cæsar." I quote from the author's words: "A heightened significance and at the same time an incontrovertible conclusiveness is given to our whole conception and interpretation of the son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar by the circumstance that in the historical source, which Shakespeare evidently used and which he followed almost word for word, namely in Plutarch, it is shown that Cæsar considered Brutus his illegitimate son. In this sense Cæsar's outcry, which has become a catch-word, may be understood, which he may have uttered again and again when he saw Brutus pressing upon his body with drawn sword, 'And you too my son Brutus? With Shakespeare the wounded Cæsar merely calls out, 'Et tu Brute! Then fall, Cæsar! Shakespeare has set aside this son relationship of Brutus to Cæsar, though doubtless known to the poet, in his working out of the traditional sources. Not only is there deep psychic ground for the modifications to which the poet subjects the historical and traditional circumstances and characters or the conceptions of his predecessor, but also for the omissions from the sources. These originate from the repressive tendency toward the exposure of impulses which work painfully and which are restrained as a result of the repression, and this was doubtless the case with Shakespeare in regard to his strongly affective father complex." Rank has in the same work demonstrated that this father complex runs through all of Shakespeare's dramatic work, from his first work, "Titus Andronicus," down to his very last tragedy. I cannot go into detail on this important point for my task here is merely to explain Lady Macbeth's sleep walking, but any one who is interested may find overwhelming abundance of evidence in Rank's book on incest (Chapter
Otto Rank, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," 1912, Franz Deuticke. I discussed in a larger work, previous to Rank's book, how Heinrich von Kleist made the incest phantasies of his childhood the foundation of many poems.
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