Hamlet Essay Response #1 - Did Freud Get it Right?

In his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud analyzes Hamlet, but focuses his analysis not on Hamlet or his father, or even Shakespeare himself; instead, Freud studies Hamlet's relationship with his late father and his surrogate one. This relationship is hugely significant to the action of the play, as Hamlet's conflict with Claudius is the basis for the majority of death in the play. Hamlet first makes an attempt to murder his step-father, but is thwarted by himself. According to Freud, Hamlet initially cannot take revenge on Claudius because he is "the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized." Even when commanded to act by the ghost of his own father, Hamlet is too committed to Claudius as his new father to carry out his planned murder– if we are to believe Freud.

In truth, though, Hamlet has given readers ample evidence of his hatred for Claudius, and his murder of the late king Hamlet, and his marriage to Gertrude. Everything that Freud holds up as evidence of Hamlet's attachment to Claudius, Hamlet has repeatedly denounced as the very reasons for his determination to ruin Claudius! Hamlet's devotion to his father is far from misplaced, as his reaction to his father's ghost – with love, obedience, and rapt attention – shows his devotion clearly. What is more, Hamlet remembers everything his father's ghost told him, including his suffering for lack of last rites, and has taken this so much to heart that he remembers it even as he prepares to end Claudius' life, and stops. His self-restraint is caused only out of love for his father, and out of determination for his revenge to be whole, as his father's ghost wished it to be. When he does get his opportunity for revenge, he shows that he is committed fully to his task, killing Claudius once with a lethal wound and twice again with poison. As questionable as his actions, and his sanity, may be, no one could doubt his motives. No one could doubt his loyalty to his true father – no one, it seems, except Freud.

Freud imagines himself the unimaginably smart, all-seeing psychologist of Hamlet, admitting that anything related to his interpretation of Hamlet's character would have "remain[ed] unconscious in Hamlet's mind" and therefore has no proof or any definitive basis in Shakespeare's actual work – essentially admitting that his argument is merely his own fancy, regardless of Shakespeare's intent. He does imagine Shakespeare's intent, as well, noting that the play was written shortly after the author's own father died, and that Shakespeare named an infant son of his Hamnet, which is undeniably similar to the name of the play and its eponymous hero. Still, he goes no farther than to comment on Shakespeare's likely "bereavement" at his father's death; Freud only implies that Shakespeare had a misplaced affection for his father, and confusion as to which father-figure to obey, never attempting to propose such a reality outright. Indeed, such a suggestion is equally preposterous when applied to the author as it is to the character. Though Freud may have concocted a brilliant interpretation, there is too much evidence opposing him for it to be easily accepted.