Hamlet’s Delay

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Janet Adelman (1992) has offered a rich and insightful interpretation of Hamlet from a “preoedipal” point of view. However, I think her most telling observations regarding the psychology of Hamlet can be best seen, given the material of the play, as revealing the preoedipal regressions and nostalgia of an oedipally traumatized child. Along a somewhat similar vein, Avi Erlich’s (1977) interpretation of Hamlet’s delay as arising from his search for a “strong father” and his flight from heterosexual dangers could, given again the actual material of the play, be most persuasively construed in terms of the Oedipus complex.

In his paper “The Puberty Rites of Savages” (1915), speaking of early Greek tragedy, Theodor Reik observes, “Dionysus redeems guilt-laden humanity (i.e., the spectators) by the blood he sheds at his death. He takes upon himself the whole guilt; he is the really guilt-laden one; the spectators have no longer to fear punishment.” He notes that the spectators have “‘empathized’ with,” “identified themselves with,” the suffering hero and that, “In his punishment they complete the self-punishment of their own unconscious hostile and incestuous tendencies, and condemn those wishes.” He notes also the “identification of the spectators with the hero, as well as their psychical differentiation from him” and regards catharsis “as a means of objectivization,” by which he means, I believe, the transfer or relocation of the spectators’ crimes, together with the terror and pity they entail (as per Aristotle’s concept of catharsis), onto the tragic object. (See also Aristotle, trans. Sinclaire, 1962, and Else, 1970.).

It is not unusual, I might note, for creative thinkers to use one insight to deny another.