"Tragedy and the Mind of the Infant"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Ernest Jones analyzes Shakespeare's "Hamlet" from a Freudian perspective, focusing on the latent sexual impulses that plague the Prince of Denmark. It shows that according to Jones, the sexual nature of the underlying turmoil in the play's protagonist leads to his mental illness and his desire for death.

From the Paper:

"Because his repressed feelings of incestuous love are met with equally powerful feelings of guilt, Hamlet's main struggle is between his conscience and his subconscious desires and impulses. Throughout the play, Hamlet teeters between taking decisive action and exacting revenge on Claudius and hesitating due to conflicted emotions. The resulting paralysis Hamlet exhibits is a direct result of the interplay between his unconscious motives and his conscious ones. Hamlet can be read as a Freudian play more than just for the theme of incest, therefore. The role of the unconscious in Shakespeare's Hamlet extends to Freud's concept of the death wish as well. Several key symbols and scenes in the play point to this theme. First, the ghost of the King is but a manifestation of the collective unconscious of Denmark. Most are unaware of what the precise cause of that which is "rotten in the state of Denmark," (I, iv., 67). Moreover, the King's ghost provides Hamlet with the impetus to seek death; it is the manifested voice of his death wish. Second, Hamlet's profound hostility toward women is borne of his repressed incestuous feelings and his guilt surrounding those feelings."

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