The Oedipal Complex In Hamlet

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The Oedipal complex in Hamlet In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Hamlet is "burdened with his own mind" (Chute), leading the nineteenth century psychoanalysts to diagnose the poor boy post mortem. Sigmund Freud theorized that Hamlet suffered from the Oedipus complex. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, see Hamlet's relationship with his mother in a totally different light. Eliot thinks that Hamlet is just disgusted with his mother. Neither of these men is fully correct in their assertions, due to their over complication and oversimplification of Hamlet (respectively).

According to Freud (in An Outline of Psychoanalysis), there are a series of stages in a male child's libidinous development. (The libido is sexual desire.) The first stage is oral; second, sadistic-anal; third, phallic. From this last phase stems the Oedipal phase, where, according to Freud, all boys harbour a secret desire to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. He quotes Diederot: "If the little savage were left to himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his mother."

Hamlet is a perfect example of this then; he "came to grief over the task of punishing someone else for what coincided with the substance of his own Oedipal wish..." (Freud-SC). Hamlet could not kill Claudius because he was jealous of him; Claudius was living out what Hamlet secretly desired to do himself.

At the end of Act One, Hamlet agrees with his (dead) father and decides to enact revenge on his Uncle Claudius ("Oh villain, villain... Now to my word"; I.5.112). He wants to kill him (murder being the nature of revenge, after all), but he delays, and does not, until Claudius' murder of his...