Hamlet will be recognised as a wonderfully accurate picture of a particular mental state that is often loosely and incorrectly classified under the name of "neurasthenia."[1] Analysis of such states always reveals the operative activity of some forgotten group of mental processes, which on account of their inacceptable nature have been "repressed" from the subject's consciousness. Therefore if Hamlet has been plunged into this abnormal state by the news of his mother's second marriage it must be because the news has awakened into activity some slumbering memory, which is so painful that it may not become conscious.
For some deep-seated reason, which is to him inacceptable, Hamlet is plunged into anguish at the thought of his father being replaced in his mother's affection by some one else. It is as though his devotion to his mother had made him so jealous for her affection that he had found it hard enough to share this even with his father, and could not endure to share it with still another man. Against this thought, suggestive as it is, may be urged three objections. First, if it were in itself a full statement of the case, Hamlet would easily have become aware of the jealousy, whereas we have concluded that the mental process we are seeking is hidden from him; secondly, we see in it no evidence of the arousing of an old and forgotten memory; and thirdly, Hamlet is being deprived by Claudius of no greater share of the Queen's affection than he had been by his own father, for the two brothers made exactly similar claims in this respect, namely those of a loved husband. The last-named objection, however, has led us to the heart of the situation. How if, in fact, Hamlet had in years gone by bitterly resented having to share his mother's affection even with his father, had regarded him as a rival, and had secretly wished him out of the way so that he might enjoy undisputed the monopoly of that affection? If such thoughts had been present to him in his child days they evidently would have been gradually suppressed, and all traces of them obliterated, by filial piety and other educative influences. The actual realisation of his early wish in the death of his father would then have stimulated into activity these suppressed memories, which would have produced, in the form of depression and other suffering, an obscure aftermath of his childhood's conflict.
I am aware that to those Shaksperian critics, who have enjoyed no special opportunities for penetrating into the obscurer sides of mental activities, and who base their views of human motive on the surface valuation given by the agents them-
- ↑ Hamlet's state of mind more accurately corresponds, as Freud has pointed out, with that characteristic of a certain form of hysteria.
