Cognitive Dissonance and Moral Injury in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: A Psychological Study of Guilt, Trauma, and Identity Collapse

Abstract

This study examines William Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the lens of Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory to explore the psychological dynamics of guilt, trauma, and identity collapse. Existing scholarship has addressed ambition, guilt, and hallucinations separately; however, limited attention has been given to an integrated framework combining cognitive dissonance and moral injury. The study addresses this gap by employing close textual analysis of key scenes, including the dagger vision and Banquo’s ghost, to validate how unresolved cognitive conflict shapes Macbeth’s psychological decline. The findings reveal an evolution from guilt to anxiety, paranoia, emotional numbness, and ultimately identity collapse, through which repeated ethical violations intensify cognitive dissonance into moral injury. Hallucinations, herein, are interpreted as manifestations of unresolved psychological tension reflecting the mind’s attempt to reconcile incompatible beliefs and actions. Additionally, the study contends that Shakespeare encodes psychological fragmentation through disrupted language, symbolic excess, and cognitive instability, hence anticipating modern understandings of trauma and moral injury. The paper underscores the contemporary relevance of Macbeth to mental health discourse, ethical leadership, and behavioral psychology while offering a unified psychological model of character disintegration.