Freudian Analysis of Hamlet: Psychoanalytic Interpretations and Key Concepts - Prof. Alons, Apuntes de Literatura inglesa

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HAMLET and

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis: The Basics

• Key concepts : dreams, the conscious and the

unconscious, (sexual) repression, taboo, the

ego, the libido, Oedipus complex, Freudian slips

• Notion of language and the interpretation of

dreams as a gateway to the unconscious  the

“talking cure”

• Competing forces of reason vs emotion //

nature vs culture

Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the

Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913)

• (^) “The Horror of Incest”

KW: incest, totem

• (^) “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence”

KW: projection, ambivalence, cognitive dissonance,

procrastination

• (^) “Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought”

KW: animism, projection, phobia, repression

• (^) “The Return of Totemism in Childhood”

KW: Oedipus complex, sacrifice ritual, guilt

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory

• (^) Recovering the mythical figure of Oedipus Rex (circa

429 BC)  Freud uses the model through which to

design his psychoanalytic theory

• (^) Freud does NOT invent the concept of the unconscious  he establishes them as being more normal than traditionally believed
• (^) Belief in the DUALITY of the human mind
• (^) Structure of the psyche: a) The id: passionate, irrational, unknown, unconscious part of the psyche  home of the libido. Principle of pleasure. b) The ego: the predominantly rational, logical, orderly, mainly conscious part (though not everything is belongs to a conscious level). Reality Principle. c) The superego: a projection of the ego + the internalization of cultural & parental impositions and taboos ( conscience). Socially-driven / moralizing.

More key concepts:

• (^) Pleasure Principle (Id) : force that demands immediate gratification
• (^) Reality Principle (Ego): force that demands the assessment of external reality
• (^) Libido (Id): sexual drive and impulses
• (^) Eros (Id): life force and willingness to live
• (^) Death drive (Id): impulse towards death and self-destruction (later referred to as Thanatos )
• (^) Coping Mechanisms: conscious strategies through which to deal with anxieties, negative feelings, etc.
• (^) Defense Mechanisms (Ego): unconscious strategies that reduce the anxiety caused by impulses  distortion and manipulation of reality

On social taboos and repressed desires:

“Freud found that such wishes are more or less

characteristic of normal human development. In dreams,

particularly, Freud found ample evidence that such

wishes persisted.... Hence he conceived that natural

urges when identified as ‘wrong,’ may be repressed but

not obliterated.... In the unconscious, these urges take

on symbolic garb, regarded as nonsense by the waking

mind that does not recognize their significance.”

(Basler, Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature)

Psychoanalysis and literature

• (^) Freud explores the symbolism and aesthetic machanisms employed by writers and poets to explore the psyche of the creator.
• (^) “The Relation of a Poet to Daydreaming” (1908)
• (^) “The Uncanny” (1919)
• (^) Introductory Letters on Psycho-Analysis (1922)
• (^) Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909)  use of the oedipal complex to analyze and associate different texts and their creators
• (^) Ernest Jones’s “The Oedipal Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive” (1910)
• (^) Carl Jung’s understanding of literature not as the result of a repressed personal desire on the part of the writer, but as a manifestation of desires once held by the whole human race but now repressed because of the advent of civilization.

Role of the psychoanalytic literary critic:

• (^) To regard the literal surface as “manifest content” (that is, as “manifest dream” / “dream story”)  diagnosis
• (^) To analyze the latent, underlying content of the manifest content.
• (^) Analysis of condensation and displacement: 1) condensation: several thoughts and persons are condensed into a single manifestation or image in a dream story  SYMBOLIZED THROUGH METAPHORS 2) displacement: an anxiety, a wish or person is displaced into the image of another, to which it is connected through a series of associations  SYMBOLIZED THROUGH METONYMY
• (^) Some critics focus on how the literary work appeals to the reader’s repressed feelings  shift onto the psychology of the reader and reader-response theory

• (^) “When one looks at a poem psychoanalytically, one considers it as though it were a dream or as though some ideal patient (were speaking) from the couch in iambic pentameter... (One) looks for the general level or general levels of fantasy associated with the language. By level I mean the familiar stages of childhood development – oral (when desires for nourishment and infantile sexual desires overlap), anal (when infants receive their primary pleasure from defecation), urethal (when urinary functions are the locus of sexual pleasure), phallic (when the penis or, in girls, some penis substitute is of primary interest), oedipal.” (Holland, “The ‘Unconscious’ of Literature”, 1970)

Janet Adelman’s analysis of Gertrude

• (^) What does Gertrude’s sexuality represent? How is it linguistically reflected? What sorts of metaphors are used in Hamlet’s discourse to allude to such tainted sexuality?
• (^) Does Adelman defend an Oedipal complex or does she go beyond that?
• (^) Why does Hamlet have problems distinguishing between his father and Claudius?
• (^) Fear of the mother / idealization of the father
• (^) Does Adelman reflect on the psychology of Shakespeare himself?