Jackie Watters Dr. Scheler ENGL 305 4 April, 2014 TITLE Hamlet is arguably one of the most studied and written about plays of all time. Different perspectives and thoughts have blossomed from this specific play, including the Psychoanalytic perspective. Sigmund Freud is an influential writer who developed different ideas for the Psychoanalytic perspective from his ideas and studies in Psychoanalysis. His ideas on melancholia and the Oedipus complex, which he believes is found in all humans, are directly relatable to some of the characters in Hamlet but not all. While either melancholia or mourning affect the majority of the characters in the play, Freud s Oedipus complex is sound in relation to male characters such as Hamlet but is not applicable for female characters like Ophelia. Because of Ophelia s inability to take on this problem, she becomes trapped in the dizzying state of melancholia until she kills herself at the end of the play. Freud s Mourning and Melancholia explains the differences between mourning and melancholia and reasons as to why these differences are formed. Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one (243). It is normal to feel loss and sadness when someone or something is taken out of a person s life but eventually this feeling goes away and daily life goes on. When the feeling of loss does not go away, the person will move from mourning to melancholia. Melancholia occurs in the ego when an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss (249). The person does not know who they are anymore and loses a part of himself or herself, not only the person or object
Watters 2 that was taken away. In mourning the person attaches the emotion to something or someone else while in melancholia it attaches to the ego, creating the loss of self. Hamlet includes characters that go through mourning and melancholia, most prominently Gertrude, who is done mourning, and Hamlet and Ophelia, who are both struggling with their own melancholia. Gertrude exemplifies Freud s idea of mourning since she was upset about her husband s death but has since moved on and relinquished her sadness as she advises Hamlet to do: Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted color off Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know st tis common, all that lives must die. (Shakespeare, 1.2.68-72) But neither Hamlet nor Ophelia are able to find a new person to replace their loss as the Queen has with her marriage to her brother-in-law. At first glance, Hamlet and Ophelia s melancholia seem to stem from a similar problem: the loss of those important to them. Hamlet loses his father to mortality, his mother to his incestuous uncle, She married O most wicked speed: to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets (1.2.156-157), his friends to his convincing uncle (5.2.12-70), and believes he cannot be with Ophelia because women cannot be trusted, I have heard of your paintings, well enough. God / hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another (3.2.141-142). Ophelia loses her brother when he leaves for France (1.3), then she loses Hamlet after he tells her to Get thee [to] a nunn ry (3.1.120), and finally Hamlet kills her father Polonius (3.4). As Freud describes: melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object ( Mourning and Melancholia 245) and it is true that these losses are what begin and carry on the melancholia that rages on within the two. Although their melancholia begins in a similar way,
Watters 3 their lives end differently: Hamlet shifts in and out of madness until he is killed by a poisonous sword unlike Ophelia who completely loses her mind and drowns herself. If Freud is correct in his thoughts on melancholia then Hamlet should have killed himself just as Ophelia did since their similar losses formed their melancholia. The reason Ophelia takes her own life while Hamlet keeps on surviving is found in another of Freud s essays titled The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells a general synopsis of the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and bases his theory off of the life events of the main character Oedipus. Through Oedipus actions, killing his father and marrying his mother, he explains that It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father (921). Freud sees this realization in all people from when they are children through adulthood. This relationship between the parents and child is what forms the rest of our sexual and hateful emotions for other people; the relationship creates the foundation of these emotions. It is this complex that separates Hamlet s melancholia from Ophelia s melancholia. When Hamlet speaks to his father s ghost it reveals the story of how he was killed by Claudius and gives Hamlet this command: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther (Shakespeare, 1.5.25). Throughout the rest of the play Hamlet cannot easily make a decision, especially pertaining to killing his uncle. Instead of killing him quickly, Hamlet makes excuses not to: Now might I do it [pat], now a is a-praying; / And now I ll do t and so a goes to heaven, / And so am I [reveng d] (3.3.73-75). Through the Oedipus complex, Freud reasons why Hamlet cannot kill the king: Hamlet is able to do anything except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father s place with his mother, the man who shows him the
Watters 4 repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish ( The interpretation of Dreams 923). Because everyone is born with this innate sense of sexual impulses and hatred, Hamlet cannot simply kill his uncle. But, at the same time, Hamlet cannot allow the man who killed his father to live because he must avenge his father. This inner turmoil that lingers throughout the play is what keeps Hamlet alive. He becomes focused on the decision to either kill his uncle or allow him to live, both adding onto his melancholic state and giving him something to focus on outside of his ego. Neither does Ophelia share in the indecisiveness that plagues Hamlet, nor does she have anything to funnel her melancholic energy into besides her own ego. The reason for this difference is the Oedipus complex does not and cannot occur with Ophelia. There is never any mention of her mother in the play. This means that she does not have a sexual impulse towards her mother that would make her hate her father. In fact, in the conversations Ophelia has with Polonius, she seems to have a close and trusting relationship with him since she listens to his advice and tells him I shall obey, my lord (Shakespeare, 1.4.136). But after she loses everyone, she does not have anywhere to put her depressed energy into, causing her to see herself as an object or nothing important. Only seeing herself as an object is how Freud explains why a person can suddenly kill themselves: The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of the object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego s original reaction to objects in the external world. ( Mourning and Melancholia 252)
Watters 5 This is what causes Ophelia s self-destruction and proves Freud wrong. Boom. Okay so I have to write a conclusion but im not feeling it right now because I need to add more stuff to my paper though I m not quite sure what? I was thinking maybe adding something about her crazy soliloquies that she says before she dies? Any thoughts on that? I think that will give me enough to work with. Thanks doll =)