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10/8/09
Evidence Missing for Freud’s Oedipal Interpretation of Hamlet
Hamlet is perhaps 16th century playwright William Shakespeare’s most widely interpreted work, for it has been eliciting various religious, philosophical, psychoanalytical and feminist interpretations for nearly the past half century. The character Hamlet’s wild and unpredictable behavior is often interpreted as having its source in melancholy-driven madness, but it is also often interpreted as manifestations of a deep inner struggle; early interpretations of
Hamlet often blamed the main character’s behavior on madness and insanity, but later interpretations begin to focus more on the nature of Hamlet’s inner conflict. Sigmund Freud revolutionized modern critics’ way of interpreting Hamlet’s inner struggle when he presented his theory of the “Oedipal Complex” using new interpretations of the ancient Greek tragedy,
Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to bolster his argument. Freud’s theory of the Oedipal
Complex explains how children have strong feelings of love towards one parent and strong feelings of hatred towards another, with the strong feelings of love often turning sexual and the strong feelings of hatred turning murderous in the “psychoneurotic” (Freud 920). In Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet, Hamlet’s hesitancy to act to revenge his father’s murder by his uncle is not due to insanity or noble inner turmoil, but by feelings of guilt over his own sexual desire for his mother. While the parallels that Freud draws between Oedipus Rex and Hamlet reveal that

Students Last Name Here 2 the two tragedies do indeed share a theme with universal implications, Freud’s argument that
Hamlet’s behavior was due to an Oedipal Complex ultimately fails, for while Hamlet’s behavior towards his mother can be interpreted as quasi-sexual, there is no evidence that this stems from a repressed desire to kill his father in order to posses his mother.
In his definitive work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents his psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipal Complex, stating that “[b]eing in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of physical impulses...which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of the later neurosis” (Freud 919).

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Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretatation of Dreams.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch., et al. New York: Norton, 2001. pp. 919-923.
Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet Prince of Denmark” William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994. 670-713. Print.
Wade, Carole, and Carol Tavris, Psychology. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 1998. Print.