Hamlet and Oedipus is a study of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the titular character's famously inexplicable behaviours are subjected to investigation along psychoanalytic lines.
The study was written by Sigmund Freud's colleague and biographer Ernest Jones, following on from Freud's own commentary on the play in Chapter V of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).
In particular, Jones explains Hamlet's mysterious procrastination as a consequence of the Oedipus Complex: the son continually postpones the act of revenge because of the impossibly complicated psychodynamic situation in which he finds himself. Though he hates his fratricidal uncle, he nevertheless unconsciously identifies with him—for, having killed Hamlet's father and married his mother, Claudius has carried out what are Hamlet's own unconscious wishes. In addition, marriage to Hamlet's mother gives the uncle the unconscious status of the father—destructive impulses towards whom provoke great anxiety and meet with repression.
Jones' investigation was first published as "The Oedipus-Complex as An Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive" (in The American Journal of Psychology, January 1910); it was expanded to form a book-length study (Hamlet and Oedipus) in 1949.
Famous quotes containing the words hamlet and, hamlet and/or oedipus:
“They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Freudianism is much more nearly a religion than a science, inasmuch as the relation between analyst and patient has a great deal in common with that between priest and communicant at confessional, and such ideas as the Oedipus complex, the superego, the libido, and the id exert an effect upon the converted which is almost identical with what flows to the devout Christian from godhead, trinity, grace, and immortality.”
—Robert Nisbet (b. 1913)