The Oedipal Complex in Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Freudian Analysis

Introduction: Hamlet and Psychoanalytic Interpretation

Of all the great works of William Shakespeare, arguably his masterpiece is Hamlet. It is also perhaps his most famous work. People who have never seen a production or read it still have a vague understanding of the play's basic plot. This is the story of a young prince of Denmark who is mourning his recently dead father — also named Hamlet — and who may or may not have seen his father's ghost, a specter claiming that the king was murdered by Prince Hamlet's Uncle Claudius. The uncle has very quickly seized the Danish throne and married Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude.

In the five hundred years since it was first written, Hamlet has been analyzed and criticized by some of the finest minds in academia, in fields ranging from English literature to Psychology and History. The play is rich enough to lend itself to a wide range of interpretations, each of which focuses on a different component of the story or a different character in order to generate new understanding from the classic work. Some psychological scholars study the play through the lens of mental illness — after all, Hamlet decides that the best way to determine whether King Claudius is guilty of regicide is to feign madness. Some psychologists debate whether Hamlet has truly lost his mind or is performing throughout. One more specific theory, applied to the play since the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, holds that Hamlet may have what Freud called an Oedipal Complex: a subconscious wish to kill his father and marry his mother, just as in the ancient story of Oedipus Rex. By examining the specific aspects of Freudian psychological theory dealing with the Oedipal Complex and applying them to the text, it becomes evident that there is real validity to the hypothesis that Hamlet is in the throes of this psychological condition.

Understanding the Oedipal Complex

The Oedipal Complex is a term for young men who, as stated, have a deeply complicated relationship with their parents. Freud argued that all children are born with a high level of intimacy with the mother. After all, children are born from the mother's body and gain nourishment through her. Some psychologists argue that infants do not even realize they are separate people from their mothers. Attachment to the father comes later, through interaction with the male parent — it is not innate in the way the mother-child relationship is (Childers 214). Problems arise when children are unable to fully separate themselves from the mother. In young men, this inability to separate leads to seriously negative emotions directed at the father, who is seen as the one responsible for the forced separation. There is a female version of this called the Electra Complex, in which females hate their mothers and love their fathers, though it has been accorded less credence in psychoanalytic literature.

According to Freud, sufferers of the complex share a desire analogous to that of King Oedipus in Sophocles' play. In Oedipus Rex, the title character is artificially separated from his mother shortly after birth because his father received a prophecy that his son would kill him. The servant assigned to kill the infant instead abandons the baby on a hillside, where he is eventually rescued and adopted by a different king and queen. In adulthood, Oedipus accidentally murders his father and marries his mother, Jocasta. He learns the truth only after they have long been married and have had several children — who are at once Oedipus's sons and daughters and his own siblings. Freud held that this scenario reflects what all young men desire, but on a subconscious level. Men do not necessarily wish to literally murder their fathers or have sexual relations with their mothers, but they do wish to be as close as possible to the mother. They also resent any rival's closeness with her, and since the father holds a morally sanctioned intimacy with the mother that is forbidden to the son, jealousy and hatred naturally follow. If the Complex is strong enough, the patient may come to loathe his father, seeking to push him away from the family so that the son can take his place.

Hamlet's Mourning and the Ghost

Interestingly, Sigmund Freud himself published work discussing the psychological dimensions of the play. In Hamlet, it is easy to see why so many readers view the play as depicting a person suffering from an Oedipal Complex. The first indication that Hamlet and his mother may have such a relationship appears in his discussions about his father. Hamlet is the only person in all of Denmark who still seems to be in mourning for the dead king, even though the king has been dead for only a relatively short time. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet laments that it is only two months since his father passed and yet everyone has moved on. During this same speech he makes explicit references to his parents' sexual relationship. He says, "Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him, / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on" (I.ii.143–45).

Some have argued that the reason Hamlet mourns his father so deeply is simply because of how much he loved him — and in Hamlet's own words, this is the impression he wishes to convey. However, when viewed through the lens of the Oedipal Complex, it can also be argued that Hamlet mourns because of a powerful feeling of guilt. If Hamlet does in fact want to be physically intimate with his mother, even on the most subconscious level, then he has long wished his father out of the way. Now, through no actual fault of his own, that secret desire has come to pass. He therefore blames himself for having silently wished for his father's death, believing himself responsible for what he initially takes to be an accident. If there is no other perpetrator, then he is himself to blame for having inwardly willed it — and this is a burden Hamlet cannot bear.

Conclusion: The Weight of the Evidence

Whether or not Prince Hamlet of Denmark has an Oedipal Complex is impossible to prove completely. His feelings for Queen Gertrude may represent nothing more than a son's love and a child's grief over a murdered father. However, the evidence of the text consistently points to something far more disturbing. Hamlet takes a striking degree of interest in his mother's sexual life and speaks of the outrage of her incestuous remarriage with greater urgency than he speaks of her lack of grief over her dead husband. This is not a normal mother-son relationship, at least not from the perspective of the prince. When the full arc of the play is read through a Freudian lens — the paralyzed hesitation, the rejection of Ophelia, the charged intimacy of the closet scene, and the final explosive violence triggered only by Gertrude's death — the Oedipal interpretation emerges as a coherent and compelling account of Hamlet's inner life.

Works Cited

Childers, Joseph W., and Gary Hentzi. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Tr. James Strachey. Avon, NY, 1965. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print.