Bergmann Martin S. - The Unconscious in Shakespeares Plays

T his chapter on Hamlet carries a special responsibility in this book. It is Shakespeare's deepest and psychologically most complex play as well as the longest running at nearly 4000 words. It is one of the greatest works of world literature. Hamlet contains more than 600 words not found in previous works by Shakespeare and new to the English language (Greenblatt, 2004: p. 308). Shakespeare needed new words, mostly to express psychological concepts not put into words before. Previous tragedies had already established Shakespeare as an eminent playwright but Hamlet is a milestone in the exploration of human interiority. A psychological study of the new words Shakespeare created could be an enriching experience.

We compare Hamlet to an earlier Shakespeare character, Richard III. There is nothing ultimately mysterious about Richard, whereas we never fully understand Hamlet. Shakespeare made the discovery that characters are more interesting and lead richer inner lives when they do not fully know themselves.

Hamlet is also the first work of literature to receive a special psychoanalytic interpretation, establishing the first bridge between psychoanalysis, a method of cure for mental illness, and world literature. In this book it will also be used to establish the difference between the psychoanalytic interpretation and other interpretations.

Freud made his famous interpretation of Hamlet's inability to carry out the command of his father's ghost in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess on 15 October 1897 (Masson, 1985) and published it in his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Hamlet's paralysis of action was unconsciously based on the fact that he himself harboured the same wishes as his uncle: to kill his father and sexually possess his mother.

The play has been of special interest to psychoanalysts. First, while any significant work of literature can be interpreted from a psychoanalytic point of view, Hamlet seems to demand such an interpretation because Hamlet's inability to carry out the ghost's command to kill his uncle points to an unconscious conflict that psychoanalysis can explain.

The second reason is historical: when Freud first communicated his great discovery of the Oedipus complex to Fliess on 15 October 1897 he included the following observation:

I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood. If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex. the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one. (Masson, 1985: p. 272)

Since the discovery of the Oedipus complex ranks as Freud's single greatest discovery, this letter can claim to represent the birthday of psychoanalysis. It clearly shows that in his self-analysis Freud did not reach the full oedipal wish, only a mild derivative of it. What enabled Freud to discover the raw Oedipus complex was his familiarity with Oedipus Rex. In the same letter, Freud goes on to include Hamlet.

Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words, Thus conscience does make cowards of us all? How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his unclethe same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes? [This was a slip on Freud's part. Hamlet actually murders Polonius; Laertes later challenges Hamlet to the duel in which both are killed.] How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother, anduse every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping? His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? And his rejection of the instinct that seeks to beget children? And, finally, his transferral of the deed from his own father to Ophelia's? And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival? (ibid. pp. 272273)