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The Abdication of Edward VIII: A Psycho-Historical Explanation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
Extract
The abdication of King Edward VIII of England in December, 1936, shocked and fascinated people all over the world. No other monarch in modern British history since George III has found himself unable to fulfill his hereditary task. Biographers, historians, and playwrights have described in detail the events preceding the dramatic announcement that the King of England had decided to renounce his position in favor of his brother, the Duke of York. Yet none of these accounts attempts to explain Edward's behavior in terms of dynamic psychology, despite the fact that the available data suggests intriguing possibilities regarding the unconscious motivation for his actions.
The following interpretation of the behavior of Edward VIII offers a hypothesis together with historical evidence which bears it out. The repeated use of qualifying adjectives and phrases would only detract from the impact of this interpretation, but the fact that psycho-historical explanations must remain necessarily theoretical is acknowledged at the outset. In spite of the inherent limitations in the historian's use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the behavior of an individual, the application of dynamic psychology to biographical data can bring new insights into puzzling actions like Edward's abdication.
A psycho-biographical approach, focusing on the unconscious, non-rational dimension of Edward's behavior, suggests that the abdication was a final gesture by which he secured possession of a mother figure whom he was able to please, and so he triumphed symbolically over his father. The outstanding psychological characteristic of Edward's development appears to have been the problem of unresolved Oedipal anxiety which governed his relations with women and eventually dictated his choice of a wife.
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References
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