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Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Point of View

Article · November 2016

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 : An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in English ISSN 2455-7544

www.daathvoyagejournal.com Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016

Hamlet: A Psychoanalytic Point of View

Dr. P. Prayer Elmo Raj
Assistant Professor,
PG & Research Department of English
Pachaiyappa’s College, Chennai

Abstract: Freudian exploration of the unconscious altered the interpretation of Hamlet,

Shakespeare’s seminal work. What was intended by Shakespeare to be performed on stage
took a significant turn when the fictional characters was introspected and inspected in a
psychoanalyst’s couch. This paper is an attempt to critically map the psychoanalytic approach
to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a psychopathetic drama. The tangled nature of Hamlet’s
unconscious, his oedipal desire and the autobiographical recoiling of the impossibility of
desire becomes the foundation for a psychoanalytic approach of Hamlet.

Key Words: Hamlet, Freud, Lacan, oedipal, desire, phallus, unconscious

In “Psychopathetic Characters on the Stage,” Freud historically presents the development of

western drama suggesting a decession from Aristotelian emphasis on catharsis of emotions
and tragedy as the stimulation of “terror and pity.” To invoke pity and fear and effect
catharsis of the emotions is “opening up sources of pleasure and enjoyment from within the
spehere of life, just as wit and the comic do from within the sphere of the intellect, through
the action of which many such sources had been inaccessible” (Freud, “Psychopathetic” 144).
The release effected by discharge and the sexual excitation that lift one’s psychical state
unlocks the different foundations of pleasure in our emotional life. The witness of
performance evokes in the adult, the hope of being gratified and aspire to “occupy a central
place in the stream of world events” (Freud, “Psychopathetic” 144) and “to feel, to act, to
mould the world in the light of his desire” (Freud, “Psychopathetic” 145)—wanting to be a

Vol.1, Special issue, November, 2016 Page 22

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