lassen drängt, da 1st es mit hundert Gründen schwanger, mit Gründen, die so leicht sind wie Seifenblasen, aber uns durch Selbstbetrug als höchst respektable, als zwingende Motive erscheinen, weil sie im Hohlspiegel unseres eigenen Gefühls zur riesigen Grösse hinaufgetäuscht werden," he writes "Nur gilt dies nicht, wie Kohler und andere glauben, wenn uns sittliche, von der Vernunft gebilligte Gefühle drängen (denn diese gestehen wir uns ein, hier bedarf es keines Vorwands), sondern lediglich bei Gefühlen, die aus unserem Naturell aufsteigen und deren Befriedigung der Vernunft widerstreitet." It only remains to add the obvious corollary that, as the herd unquestionably selects from the "natural" instincts the sexual ones on which to lay its heaviest ban, so is it the various psycho-sexual trends that most often are "repressed" by the individual. We have here an explanation of the clinical experience that the more intense and the more obscure is a given case of deep mental conflict the more certainly will it be found, on adequate analysis, to centre about a sexual problem. On the surface, of course, this does not appear so, for, by means of various psychological defensive mechanisms, the depression, doubt, and other manifestations of the conflict are transferred on to more acceptable subjects, such as the problems of immortality, future of the world, salvation of the soul, and so on.
Bearing these considerations in mind, let us return to Hamlet. It should now be evident that the conflict hypotheses above mentioned, which see Hamlet's "natural" instinct for revenge inhibited by an unconscious misgiving of a highly ethical kind, are based on ignorance of what actually happens in real life, for misgivings of this kind are in fact readily accessible to introspection. Hamlet's self-study would speedily have made him conscious of any such ethical misgivings, and although he might subsequently have ignored them, it would almost certainly have been by the aid of a process of rationalisation which would have enabled him to deceive himself into believing that such misgivings were really ill founded; he would in any case have remained conscious of the nature of them. We must therefore invert these hypotheses, and realise that the positive striving for revenge was to him the moral and social one, and that the suppressed negative striving against revenge arose in some hidden source connected with his more personal, "natural" instincts. The former striving has already been considered, and indeed is manifest in every speech in which Hamlet debates the matter; the second is, from its nature, more obscure and has next to be investigated.
This is perhaps most easily done by inquiring more intently into Hamlet's precise attitude towards the object of his vengeance, Claudius, and towards the crimes that have to be
