William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has had a significant impact on the field of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud developed his ideas about the Oedipus complex through an analysis of Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Freud's ideas were further developed by Ernest Jones, whose work was, in its turn, influential on twentieth century performances of Shakespeare's play. Jacques Lacan departed from Freud, and also used Hamlet's situation in the development of his ideas of human desires. The characters Hamlet and Ophelia have become iconic representations of male and female instability. Psychoanalytic ideas other than Freud's have included Gaston Bachelard's Ophelia complex, and speculations that Prince Hamlet's anxiety derives from a fear that Claudius might be his biological father.
Background
Hamlet has featured in some of the key texts of psychoanalysis, and the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia have become iconic representations of, respectively, male and female instability. Gaston Bachelard's concept of the Ophelia complex related to the symbolic connections between women, water and death, which particularly merge in a representation of a drowning. Elaine Showalter saw Ophelia as a potent archetype of the connection between female insanity and sexuality: that men may go mad for any number of reasons; but that female madness is relentlessly regarded as related to their bodies and sexual desires. Sigmund Freud developed his ideas about the Oedipus complex, later expostulated in his The Interpretation of Dreams, from analysing Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare's Hamlet. He concluded that "Shakespeare's unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero." Freud's ideas about Hamlet were later expanded and adapted by Ernest Jones, and directly influenced some twentieth century productions, including Tyrone Guthrie's 1937 Hamlet starring Laurence Olivier. Jacques Lacan departed from Freud in his Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet, in which he perceived the Ghost as 'the missing signifier, the veiled phallus'. And more recently Tom MacFaul's Problem Fathers in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama explored the possibility (derived from a suggestion which had been made by Harold Bloom) that Hamlet's anxiety stems from a fear that Claudius, and not Old Hamlet, was his real father.
Sigmund Freud
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