This paper seeks to take issue with Freud’s visitations to Hamlet, the vicissitudes of the Oedipal in Freudian analyses, the text and the meaning/s thereof, with a focalised interest in Freud’s essay ‘On Repression in Hamlet.’ It seeks to delineate the basic tenets ingrained in Freud’s essay, the critical readings in psychoanalytic literary criticism with reference to Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet’s visits to the ‘Oedipal’ shrine and the reverential treatment meted out as evinced by the essay and a close analysis of the text. The aim of the paper, therefore, is to initiate a critical dialogue with Freud’s essay, examine its validity in the face of the gargantuan critical literature produced on the subject and establish a concrete argument posited in favor of/against Freud’s vantage point.
Consistently pairing Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in his psychoanalytical approaches to literature, Freud simultaneously determines and confirms his most perceptive and arguably the most influential clinical observation of the Oedipal complex. This is evinced in his letters to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, about the effect of these plays:
Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.
(Letter to W. Fliess, 15 October 1897, in Freud, 1985; qtd. in 1989: 38)
Freud discusses this complex in his first published manifesto The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and elaborates on Hamlet’s character and how the Oedipal surfaces in his consciousness vis-à-vis an incestuous craving for the mother and an overwhelming desire to be a substitute father-figure. Freud explains these feelings vis-à-vis a growing and disturbing identification with the guilty uncle and argues how the repression of the Oedipal in Hamlet, as against an enactment in Oedipus Rex, serves as an evasion strategy for the superego and how the dormant yet dominating force of Hamlet’s character, coupled with his quasi-effective search for a new moral order seeks to make incursions into the realm of the imaginative to live out the fantasy vicariously. This is achieved by the numerous poetical and dramatic detours and heightens the pathetic, helpless stance of his psychopathological irresolution.
Whilst most critics, reviewers and the large group of people in the literary arena loosely termed ‘Shakespeare scholars’ would agree with Herbert Muller’s observation that Freud’s “basic contribution is as original as it is incontestable and beyond the power of criticism to destroy,” some of the recent critical approaches have seemed to demur from Freud’s hypothesis for several reasons. The most prominent among them, and for the purposes of this paper, the most apt too, being Hamlet’s soliloquies. However, the critical eye needs to be aware that whilst reading Hamlet and arguing from a critical vantage-point, what one critiques is the material from a hybrid, conflated text that contains the worked and re-worked editions of the Quarto and Folio texts. Thus, it is matter of little surprise that the same instrument (soliloquies) both confirms as well as refutes (albeit in partial measure) Freudian analysis. The paper seeks to present a reading in unison, so as to reiterate on the universally known fact of ‘multiplicity of meaning in literary texts’, all the more true when a Shakespearean text is being evaluated and assessed.
Hamlet’s soliloquies are the nominals of Shakespeare’s most evocative and articulate representation of the ‘inner world’ of a character, hithertofore unprecedented. What Shakespeare builds in terms of gradation from the first, second and third soliloquies that affirm the coda of suicide, inaction and the most supercilious exhortation of self into a state of action respectively to the fourth and oft-quoted crucial soliloquy ‘To be, or not to be’ is the acute dilemma of the protagonist hero and the metamorphosis of his procrastination into his idyllic and utopic vision of a higher and ‘fair/just’ moral order. Several critics such as Harold C. Goddard, Peter Alexander and especially James Shapiro have traced this vision to the demise and gradual replacement of the old chivalric code with a post-chivalric concept of honor. Such a schema, although unnamed, have made critics view Hamlet in an altogether new light. He has been appreciated for his undeterred, unstinting endeavour to come to grips with an unflawed, un-distorted and lucid understanding of himself and his world, as against the cowardice that marked earlier critical readings of him. Whilst Freudian critics have often understood the fierce and powerful import of the language of Hamlet’s soliloquies to be the outlet for the repressed ‘id’ and the enactment of the restrained and subdued libidinal energy, in contrast to the socially subscribed containment of the same, what they have seemed to miss out is how the verbatim translation of the intense self-loathing is more an expression/desire for a state of lack/lacuna of/for these scruples. Whilst Freud seems to emphasise on the innate and natural essence/character of such feelings, he seems to discount on the psychological wrestling that an acknowledgement of such feelings causes in the subject. Thus, this paper confirms the Freudian reading of Shakespeare’s play, whilst also expanding on the other interpretations offered by seeming to reconcile the two opposing strains of critical approaches on the same subject matter, deploying the same instrument for substantiating their claims. Whilst this paper notes the critical endeavour to trace Hamlet’s soliloquies along a different path than Freud’s, it seeks to collate the ways to offer an integrated, fuller and wholesome plurification of significances in the journey to the text.
How, then, is such a denouement to be resolved and settled is subject matter for another paper. However, it is blatant that whilst it is impossible to do away with/castigate Freud altogether from our critical journeys to Hamlet and psychoanalytic literary criticism, there is in fact, despite the myriad homages to the psychoanalyst and the bard, a plausible and possible avenue for engagements in critical dialogues of the kind initiated in the rubric of this paper. Such dialogues do not, by any means, tend to be definitive or authoritative readings, but serve to illuminate the ‘gaps’ or ‘silences’ within literary criticism and open up similar channels for further enriching and informative discussion.
Works Cited
Alexander, Peter. Hamlet: Father and Son. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, Vol 4/5. 1900.
Freud, Sigmund. The Collected Letters of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. New York and London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Stearns, Marshall W. ‘Hamlet and Freud’, College English, Vol. 10, no. 5. 1949.
