Hamlet and the Oedipal Complex
Hamlet and the Oedipal Complex
Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet provides an ideal case study of the Oedipal complex; Prince Hamlet’s confused emotions and mixed loyalties describe the psyche of one whose problems are rooted within his mother. Hamlet yearns to seek revenge on the killer of his mother’s husband and longs to fix his mother in the ways he believes she has faltered. All of his problems stem from her, and her situation as wife of Hamlet’s uncle.
The Oedipal complex which all men experience, the unconscious hostility to kill one’s father for the love of one’s mother, is a source or unrelenting confusion and angst to the subject. In Hamlet’s case, this unrest is peaked by the death of his father; his mother is now available in a way that was never before possible. While he doesn’t consciously have any desire for his mother, he subconsciously wishes to restrain her sexual instinct.
To a boy, his mother is immaculate, without blemish. Hamlet, however, sees his mother as a fraudulent traitor. By marrying his uncle, Hamlet thinks his mother has disgraced herself and him as well. He believes he is the product of two parents: his flawless father, and his mother, whom he has labeled a whore. The fact that both parents, not just the one of his choosing, produced him disgraces his name. Hamlet views his mother’s fall from grace as his own. Furthermore, without his father to protect him, he must relate much more closely to his reprehensible mother. As Janet Adelman deftly states in her Psychoanalytic criticism of the play:
Hamlet’s father has become unavailable to him, not only through the fact of his death but also through the complex vulnerability that his death demonstrates. This father cannot protect his son; and his disappearance in effect throws Hamlet into the domain of the engulfing mother, awakening all the fears incident to the primary mother-child bond. Here, as in Shakespeare’s later plays, the loss of the father turns out in fact to mean the psychic domination of the mother: in the end, it is the specter of his mother, not his uncle-father, who paralyzes his will.
Clearly, Hamlet’s obsession with his mother regulates all of his decisions, thoughts, and functions.
Hamlet, however, has a solution to his problem; he believes that by exacting revenge on his father’s murderer, he will simultaneously bring honor to his father...