Freud and Hamlet

When I read Hamlet, I can't help but think of Sigmund Freud -- probably not for the reasons you're thinking, though.

I don't care much for Oedipal interpretations of the play; there's nothing in it, in my reading, that lends credence to the notion that Hamlet wants to get with Gertrude himself, that that is why he hesitates in his quest for revenge -- nor does it make sense that an admixture of rage (for his father's murder) and jealousy (because he himself wanted to be the one to supplant his father) would give him pause -- rather, all the more reason to kill the dirty bastard who stands in his way. There are plenty of other explanations for Hamlet's pause -- the conflict between the warrior's desire for revenge and the Christian's desire for mercy and God's judgment; the uncertainty over the true nature of the ghost; the fact that Claudius appears to be praying when Hamlet comes upon him, ready to do the deed, and Hamlet's understanding that revenge at such a moment, were Claudius really praying, might send his enemy directly to heaven while his murdered father languishes in purgatory -- all of this in addition to the primary fact that Hamlet is himself a man of thought, not a man of action, and that for him "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Rather, Freud serves other purposes in relation to Hamlet. It may seem easy these days to dismiss Freud as a misguided, coke-snorting fantasist from a by-gone era, but to do so would be to overlook the powerful impact that he made on modern consciousness -- and his take on modern consciousness certainly involves that earliest of moderns: Hamlet, who is, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare's "least archaic" character.

Once you strip away the fancy details of Freud's theories, you're left with two essential ideas. One is that human consciousness is fragmented. More than anyone else, Freud, who trafficked in the language of myths, is responsible for destroying that falsest of myths: that the mind is a single, unified entity. Descartes' mind-body duality is the predecessor for this idea, but also a dead end in its inability to fully understand the relationship between mind and body. Freud's understanding of the fractured mind is the true mark of the modern; Freud may not have invented this notion, but he popularized it. Of the Renaissance writers I know, only Montaigne and Shakespeare seem to articulate a notion on par with the modern view of the fragmented consciousness. With Montaigne, such an understanding quietly underscores the whole of his essays. With Shakespeare, this understanding is the prominent characteristic of his most famous hero. Shakespeare and Freud both understood that it is very much a human quality of mind to hold simultaneously multiple conflicting desires -- to want to do something and not want to do it, to wish for something and know that we shouldn't have it, to weigh both sides of a matter and feel compelling qualities on either -- to feel ourselves ripped to shreds by the centrifugal forces of our own minds. The specifics of id, ego, and superego are less relevant than the fact that there are varied aspects of the mind representing various influences. We take such an understanding for granted now -- the ambiguity of character, the complexity of mind -- but this is the revolutionary quality that Hamlet stood for, a quality that Freud explicated most successfully in prose. Such an understanding of the complexity of character gives the lie to Polonius' stoical maxim that if you are true "to thine own self ... Thou canst not then be false to any man." To which self must one be true? Hamlet is perhaps the first character in all of literature to be so untethered to any solid notion of self. He's a free agent of thought. When stoical maxims fall short, as they do in his famous soliloquy on suicide, Hamlet ranges off into undiscovered territories of thought. He cannot be true to himself, because he has no central core to which he might be true. His only self is limitless thought, and in this context the idea that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" takes on not only a proto-Romantic aspect but also a vertiginous quality as well, the quality of existential nausea. (I may be riffing off of A. D. Nuttall here; he introduced me to the notion of stoicism in Hamlet in Shakespeare the Thinker.)

When Hamlet does find himself -- or rather creates himself -- it is after his encounter with a Player who teaches him to act out an emotion and another encounter with a rival prince who teaches him how to act out a deed. In the meantime, Hamlet talks, and here we see the precursor of Freud's other significant idea: that it is in talk that we discover ourselves. The Freudian notion is of course famous in caricature for enacting several generations of New Yorker cartoon characters who take to the long leather couch to speak to their shrink. Psychoanalysis has been writ on a larger mass-market scale, though, for more up-to-date audiences. First the talking cure graduated (via the middle school of Phil Donahue) to the Oprah Winfrey Show: instead of taking it to your shrink, you could take it to a television audience of millions. Now, we can take it to our blogs, as well -- no reservations for the production studio required. Hamlet didn't have the Viennese doctor -- nor Oprah, nor the entire membership directory of Facebook -- to hear him; instead, he had us -- that audience whom he addresses so directly in his final speech, but whom he has really been talking to all along in his many famous soliloquys. The art of the soliloquy is the art of self discovery and self-invention, and is that not what Freud wanted his patients to do? To lie down on the couch and soliloquize, to invent their own tragic personas ....

And in the case of Hamlet, the talking cure works. In Act V, he is ready to face his destiny, whatever that may be: "the readiness is all." It may well be that Hamlet didn't have a destiny until he had talked it all out.

I'm sure that many lives have been needlessly complicated by the bombasticism of primitive psychoanalysis. But who could resist the lure of seeing themselves cast as Elektra, as Oedipus ... as Hamlet?