Hamlet and Freud
“Though conclusive evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida. (Eagleton, ix–x)
Is this because in so many ways Shakespeare got in first, anticipating many of the major concerns of later writers, or is it because they were themselves overwhelmingly influenced by him?
Hamlet has certainly featured in some of the key texts in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Marx developed a revolutionary Theory of History in the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) through a subversive reading of The Ghost of Hamlet’s father (see Stallybrass, ‘Mole’).
Freud famously first sketched his theory of The Oedipus complex (later developed in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1897 in which he argued that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare’s ‘unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero’ in this way (see Garber, 124–71).
More than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet has attracted psychoanalytic critics, and Hamlet and Ophelia have become respectively the iconic representatives of male and female instability.
In his identification of The ‘Ophelia Complex’, Gaston Bachelard discussed the symbolic connections between Women, Qwater and Death, seeing drowning as an appropriate merging into the female element for women, who are always associated with liquids: iss as and amniotic fluid. Visual images of Ophelia either about to drown or drowning became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century (see Figs 5 and 6, and 4.7.164–81n.).
w we Men may go mad for a p off of reasons, including mental and spiritual stress, but women’s madness is relentlessly associated with their bodies and their erotic desires. Melancholy was a fashionable disease among young men in London in the late sixteenth century, but it was associated with intellectual and imaginative genius in them, whereas ‘women’s melancholy was seen instead as biological and emotional in its origins’ (Showalter, 81; see also Schiesari).
The very word ‘hysteria’ implies a female physiological condition, originating as it does from the Greek hystera meaning womb.
King Lear, fighting off his own impending madness, equates ‘Hysterica passio’ with the medical condition involving feelings of suffocation and giddiness known to Elizabethans as ‘the mother’.
Stagings of Ophelia’s mad scene (4.5) have always been influenced by prevailing stereotypes of female insanity, from sentimental wistfulness in the eighteenth century to full-blown schizophrenia in the twentieth. To risk a very crude generalization, the Anglo-American Hamlet has often been read through Freud as primarily a domestic drama, with some productions to this day omitting Fortinbras and most of the play’s politics (this happened, for example, when John Caird directed Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre in London in 2000), while in other parts of the world, notably in eastern and east-central Europe during the dominance of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, Hamlet has been primarily a political play enacting the possibility of dissent from various forms of totalitarianism (see pp. 117–22; StÅ™Ãbrný; Shurbanov & Sokolova).
There is, of course, an irony here: would-be subversives in countries of the former Soviet Union have re-read Hamlet in order to rebel against the very regimes set up in the name of revolutionary Marxism: the ‘old mole’ quality of the play can undermine Stalinism as well as capitalism.
Psychoanalytic readings have been particularly influential in the United Kingdom and North America, as we shall illustrate from three representative examples.
Janet Adelman’s 1992 book, Suffocating Mothers, takes the same starting-point as John Caird’s production by explicitly eliminating the play’s politics. She sees the Henry IV plays and Julius Caesar as ‘oedipal dramas from which the chief object of contention [i.e. the mother] has been removed’, so that the father–son relationship can be explored in an uncomplicated way, and she continues: ‘Before Hamlet, this relationship tends to be enacted in the political rather than the domestic sphere’ (Adelman, 11).
Her powerful reading of Hamlet makes it exclusively a family drama. It foregrounds the return of the mother and the subsequent release of infantile fantasies and desires involving maternal malevolence and the submerged anxiety of the male regarding subjection to the female. Hamlet also becomes the watershed between the mother-free romantic comedies and the later tragedies, mainly by admitting the difficult and, for Shakespeare, inevitably tragic presence of a fully imagined female sexuality.
This is not to say that Gertrude herself is a completely realized character for Adelman; she sees her as ‘less powerful as an independent character than as the site for fantasies larger than she is’ (30) – fantasies concerning the need for masculine identity to free itself from the contaminated maternal body.
And it is those fantasies which set the scene for all the plays that follow: after Hamlet’s failure to bring back from the dead the good father who can stabilize female sexuality, the other tragedies ‘re-enact paternal absence’ (35) as the heroes struggle to define themselves in relation to women: ‘for the emergence of the annihilating mother in Hamlet will call forth a series of strategies for confining or converting her power’ (36). Jacqueline Rose puts politics back into Hamlet by tracing how influential male readers of the play, Ernest Jones as well as T.S. Eliot, have echoed Hamlet’s misogyny and blamed Gertrude for what they saw as the aesthetic and moral failings of the play overall.
Picking up on Eliot’s analogy for Hamlet as ‘the Mona Lisa of literature’, she argues that in his reading the question of the woman and the question of meaning go together. The problem with Hamlet is not just that the emotion it triggers is unreasonable and cannot be contained by the woman who is its cause, but that this excess of affect produces a problem of interpretation: how to read, or control by reading, a play whose inscrutability (like that of the Mona Lisa) has baffled – and seduced – so many critics. (Rose, 97–8)
Femininity itself becomes the problem within the play, and within attempts to interpret it, but paradoxically femininity is also seen as the source of creativity and the very principle of the aesthetic process in other psychoanalytic readings in which the process shifts from character to author: Shakespeare, unlike his hero, can be claimed to have effected a productive reconciliation with the feminine in his own nature.
For Marjorie Garber, our third example of the psychoanalytic approach, the play is more complicated: in her 1987 book, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality, she writes, ‘In Hamlet … Shakespeare instates the uncanny as sharply as he does the Oedipus complex’ (Garber, 127).
Freud’s sense of the uncanny depends on the revival of repressed infantile or primitive beliefs and the compulsion to repeat: ‘What, indeed, is revenge but the dramatization and acculturation of the repetition compulsion?’ (129). The father–son relationship is still central, but the Ghost becomes at least as important as the Queen.
Freud insisted (Interpretation of Dreams (1900); cited in Garber, 165) that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s own father in 1601 and not long after the death of his son Hamnet/Hamlet (in 1596), so was affected by his personal sense of bereavement (see, however, our discussion of dating on pp. 45–60) and his personal interest in a character obliged to transform his mourning into revenge. Garber draws on Jacques Lacan as well as on Freud, especially on his 1959 essay ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet’.
In this reading, the Ghost, as a marker of absence and a reminder of loss, becomes ‘the missing signifier, the veiled phallus’ (Garber, 130; see also Fink). But, if the Ghost is absence, invoking him and addressing him produces an effect of unbearable, petrifying presence: Garber draws parallels with the Father-Commendatore visiting statue in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but it is Hamlet who is turned into stone. And, in a dizzying final twist, Garber allegorizes not only Hamlet but ‘Shakespeare’ itself, the canon (‘ “Remember me!” The canon has been fixed against self-slaughter’: Garber, 176), as working through the same dynamic as the transference relationship in psychoanalytic practice. ‘The transferational relationship Freud describes as existing between the analyst and the patient is … precisely the kind of relation that exists between “Shakespeare” and western culture … “Shakespeare” is the love object of literary studies … The Ghost is Shakespeare’ (xiv, 176).
