Psychoanalysis of Prince Hamlet

2014

Devender Sharma
Independent Researcher
In Guidance of Mr. Devendra Sharma
 Psychoanalysis of Prince Hamlet

A Shakespearean Tragedy has been defined as a story of exceptional calamity

leading to the death of a man occupying a high position or status. A tragedy by
Shakespeare is concerned chiefly with one man, and is a tale of suffering and
misfortunes leading to that man‟s death and of the deaths of a few others also. The hero
must be a man holding a lofty position and commanding respect; and the suffering or
misfortunes must be of an extraordinary kind so as to produce strong tragic feelings,
especially the feelings of pity, awe, and terror. Hamlet‟ is primarily and chiefly the
tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet was a well-known, honoured and well
beloved figure in the political life of Denmark of the time at which the incidents of the
play are supposed to have taken place. The play depicts the mental suffering and
torture which Hamlet endures as a result of what he rightly considers to be the
shameless conduct of his mother in getting remarried within two months of the death of
her first husband and in having married this time a man who is in every respect inferior
to her first husband. It is the conduct of his mother which leads him to the following
generalization: “Frailty, thy name is woman”.

The eminent Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud produced a seminal work

entitled the Interpretation of Dreams which contains the idea that dreams allow psychic
exploration of the soul, that dreams contain psychological meanings which can be
arrived at by interpretation. Freud states that every dream will reveal itself as a
psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a
specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state? According to Freud‟s original
formulations dreams have two contents, a manifest content which is the dream that one
actually experiences and a latent content which is the meaning of the dream as
discovered by interpretation.

Literature can be thought of in the same manner, as a figment of the imagination

whose underlying truth can be discovered through interpretation. A piece of literature
may have a truth to tell but it can may remain hidden to us until such time as we
interpret its signs. According to Freud there are three router into the unconscious;
dreams, parapraxes (or slips of the tongue) and jokes and it is evident that
psychoanalysis asks us to pay a lot of attention to language, in puns, slips of the tongue
etc. this suggests how psychoanalysis is directly related to literary criticism, since both
kinds of analysis focus on close readings of language. Therefore, by understanding
Freudian theory, we can gain a deeper understanding of literature.

According to Freud‟s „the Interpretation of Dreams‟ we all have repressed wishes

and desires. One of the most common of these repressed desires is the wish to sexually
possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the same sex parent. Freud
named this theory the Oedipus Complex (which he discusses in detail in an essay
entitled some Psychical consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the
Sexes). This was named after the mythical Oedipus Rex who killed his father and
married his mother without knowing that they were his parents. In Oedipus Rex the
basic wish fantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams, in
Hamlet‟ it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence only through the effects
which proceed from it.

Freud proceeds from his recognition of what he perceives to be a fundamental

contradiction in the text: “the play is built up on Hamlet‟s hesitations over fulfilling the
task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motive for these
hesitations”. He considers Goethe‟s paralysis from over-intellectualization‟ explanation
as well as the idea that Hamlet is a pathologically irresolute character‟. He rejects both,
citing the evidence that the play presents of Hamlet‟s ability to take action: his impulsive
murder of Polonius and his Machiavellian murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Instead, Freud argues, Hamlet‟s inhibition against taking vengeance on Claudius has an
unconscious origin.

In an anticipation of his later theories of the Oedipus complex, Freud suggests

that Claudius has shown Hamlet “the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized”
(his desire to kill his father and take his father‟s place with his mother). Confronted with
this image of his own repressed desires, Hamlet responds with “self-reproaches” and
“scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the
sinner whom he is to punish”. Freud goes on to suggest that Hamlet‟s apparent
“distaste for sexuality”, as expressed in his conversation with Ophellia (presumably in
the „nunnery scene‟ rather than during the play within-a-play), “fits in well” with this
interpretation.

Since this theory, „closet scene‟ in which Hamlet confronts his mother in her
private quarters has been portrayed in a sexual light in several performances Hamlet is
played as scolding his mother for having sex with Claudius while simultaneously lover
and hates about his mother. Ophellia‟s madness after her father‟s death may be read
through the Freudian lens as a reaction to the death of her hoped for lover, her father.
Her unrequited love for him suddenly slain is too much for her and she drifts into
insanity.

In addition to the brief psychoanalysis of Hamlet, Freud offers a correlation with

Shakespeare‟s own life: Hamlet was written in the wake of the death of his father (in
1601), which revived his own repressed childhood wishes; Freud also points to the
identity of Shakespeare‟s dead son Hamnet and the name „Hamlet‟ “Just as Hamlet
deals with the relation of a son to his parents”, Freud concludes, “so Macbeth (written at
approximately the same period) is concerned with the subject of childlessness”. Having
made these suggestions, however, Freud offers a caveat: he has unpacked only one of
the many motives and impulses operating in the author‟s mind, albeit, Freud claims, one
that operates from “the deepest layer”.

Later in the same book, having used psychoanalysis to explain Hamlet, Freud
uses Hamlet to explain the nature of dreams: in disguising himself as a madman and
adopting the license of the fool, Hamlet “was behaving Justas dreams do in reality {:}
concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility”. When we
sleep, each of us adopts an „antic disposition‟.

Hamlet is even more disgusted due to the fact that Claudius is his Father‟s
brother and to Hamlet this seems to be incestuous, indeed the ghost of Hamlet‟s Father
calls Claudius that incestuous, that adulterate beast. This remarks seems to add a
spark of jealousy to Hamlet‟s anger which is manifested in the sniping remarks that he
makes to Claudius.

- King Claudius: But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son

- Hamlet: {Aside} A little more than kin, and less than kind.

In the opening scenes of Hamlet the family unit has been altered to include
Claudius as the father which places Hamlet in the rather difficult position of having in
choose between the two father figures. In order to assume a masculine identity Hamlet
must take on the characteristic of his father and, due to the fact that he is confronted by
two father figures, Hamlet must kill the false father (a situation that Shakespeare had
previously used to effect in Henry IV). Hamlet has clearly idolized his father for years
(comparing him to Hyperion, the Sun-king) a fact borne out by the impassioned speech
which he delivers to his mother when he compares to his father to Claudius.

Therefore, when Hamlet‟s father is murdered and Gertrude remarries rather too
swiftly for Hamlet‟s liking, He feels that he must avenge his father‟s death in his role as
a dutiful son. In doing so Hamlet can gain the respect of his father and act out the role
of main authority figure which his father has done. That is to say that Hamlet could take
on the characteristic of the father he had idolized whereby mentally fulfilling the wishes
of the Odipus Complex. Wish fulfillment is the desire unconsciously motivated, to attain
those thing that provide us with pleasure. This pleasure may or may not be the best
thing for our psyche but this does not stop the id from desiring it and ego from trying to
keep the id happy.

In her work suffocating Mothers‟ Janet Adelman states that Hamlet is a play that
centres on the crisis of the masculine subject and its “radical confrontation with the
sexualized maternal body”, foregrounds male anxiety about mothers, female sexualities
and hence, sexuality itself. Hamlet‟s relationship with his mother is obviously the most
important aspect of this play but while this is the case, we know very little about
Gertrude herself. She is not a powerful character and the play shows very little of her
true persona. She is not a wicketed woman and she is not a bad mother to Hamlet,
vowing to help him and using her last breath to address her son rather than her
husband Gertrude is a woman who knows exactly what is going and never says
anything. She knows how her husband killed and by who but realizes that it is good idea
to remain silent on this matter.

According to Freud, whatever route is taken into the unconscious what you find
there almost always about sex. The contents of the unconscious consists primarily of
sexual desire which have been repressed. Freud states that sexual desires are
instinctual, and that they appear in the most fundamental acts in the process of
nurturing, like in a mother nursing an infant. The instincts for food, warmth, and comfort,
which have survival value for an infant, also produce pleasure which Freud defines
specifically as sexual pleasure. He says our first experiences of our bodies are
organized through how we experience sexual pleasure. He divides the infant‟s
experience of its body into certain erotogenic zones, the first of which is the mouth, as
the baby feels sexual pleasure in his mouth while nursing because the act of sucking is
pleasurable, the baby forms a bond with the mother that goes beyond satisfying the
baby‟s hunger.

Hamlet contains many elements that would later show up in Gothic Literature.
From the growing madness of prince Hamlet, to the violent ending to the constant
reminders of the death, to, even, more subtly, the notions of humankind and its structure
and the viewpoints on women, Hamlet evokes many things that would recur in what is
widely regarded as the first piece of Gothic literature, Horce Walpol‟s „The Castle of
Otranto‟, and in other Gothic works. Hamlet formulate a compelling theory of the play
that places the prince at the centre of the Renaissance conflict between Ancient and
Christian notions of Heroism. Cantor says that the Renaissance signified, “rebirth of
classical antiquity within a Christian culture”. But such a rebirth brought with it a deep
contradiction: Christ‟s teachings of humility and meekness are in direct conflict in the
ancient ethos that is best represented by Achilles‟ violent action in the „Iliad‟.

For Cantor, the character of Hamlet exists exactly where two worlds collide. He is
in one sense drawn towards the active side of heroism by his father‟s legacy and the
need for revenge. Simultaneously though, he is pulled to words a religious existence
and in some sense sees his father‟s return as a ghost as justification for just such a
belief. The conflict is perhaps most evidence in Act-III, scene III when Hamlet has the
opportunity to kill the praying Claudius. He restrains himself though, justifying his further
hesitation with the following lines.

“Now might I do it pat, now „a is a praying;/And now I will do it – and so „a goes to

heaven,/And so am I revenged.”
 Hamlet is in a sense the inscrutable and enigmatic world within which human
beings had to orient themselves for the first time. We are each characters in a play just
like Gertrude, Polonius and the rest – where they are trying to grasp Hamlet, we are
trying to grasp Hamlet. Whatever interpretation we walk away with though, whether it be
existential, religious or feminist, it will necessarily be incomplete. For Mack, human
beings will always remain in an “aspect of bafflement, moving in darkness on a rampart
between two worlds.

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Bibliography
Adelman, J. Suffocating Mothers (Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare‟s Plays.

Freud, S “The Interpretation of Dreams”