Hamlet on the Couch

What Shakespeare Taught Freud

James E. Groves

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138556270
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351368681
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Hamlet on the Couch weaves a close reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet with a large variety of contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological theory, looking at the interplay of ideas between the two.

Hamlet can be read almost as a psychoanalytic case study and be used to understand and illustrate a range of core psychoanalytic concepts. Covering such basic psychoanalytic concepts as identity, transference and countertransference, the 'good-enough' mother, the compulsion to repeat and the death instinct, James E. Groves shows how Hamlet can shed new light on understanding psychoanalytic theory, and how psychoanalysis can in turn enrich our understanding of Shakespeare's work. Perhaps the most radical feature of psychoanalysis is its tradition of self-examination. Mirroring it, the book throughout uses an eclectic, subjective critical approach to study how the poetry of Hamlet creates its realistically flawed and believably complex characters.

Combining deep, insightful knowledge of Shakespeare and of psychoanalysis, Hamlet on the Couch will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as literary scholars.

1

WHO’S THERE?

A Question of Identity

It all begins in the dark. On the guard platform at Elsinore it is windy and cold. As the bell tolling midnight fades, Barnardo comes on duty. “Who’s there?” he cries, but he’s the one challenged: “Nay. Stand and unfold yourself.” Confused— then sheepish—Barnardo gives the watchword, “Long live the King.” The departing soldier greets Marcellus and Horatio who’ve come to hold the watch and look for “this thing” that has disturbed sentries two nights running.

T.S. Eliot called Hamlet an “artistic failure” but still thought the opening scene the finest in all drama. Jumpy sentinels, the changing of the guard. Footsteps. “Who’s there?” From the first line it asks what’s true, what’s there? Horatio is a philosopher, a seeker of truth, but he’s trusted by the military men, who address him by name several times. He’s embarrassed he’s come. They believe a figure resembling King Hamlet has appeared, silently walking up and down. “Tush, tush,” Horatio scoffs.

Enter the Ghost. Horatio flings up his arms, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?” Just as suddenly it turns and leaves. Shaking, Horatio wonders whether—because the late king’s image is in armor—this portends something for Denmark. Horatio’s name is a Latin pun—h plus oratio—and unlike the soldiers, Horatio has Latin. Demons must be addressed in the language of scholars. He lectures his anxious friends, recalling Rome and Julius Caesar, and another throne usurped. Again, Horatio mentions usurpation. Again, he’s interrupted.

Horatio

But soft—behold. Lo—where it comes again. I’ll cross it* though it blast me: Stay, Illusion! If thou hast any sound or use of voice, Speak to me. If there be any good thing to be done … Speak to me.

I.i.126 TLN 126–130
* head it off

Horatio spreads his arms, perhaps warding off the Ghost. Or he might be begging it not to leave. Stay, Illusion! The apparition lifts its head to speak but dawn is coming, the cock crows, and the figure slinks away. Pagan notions of the super-natural now blend with the narrative of Christianity. The men’s thoughts turn to Advent, and Horatio is skeptical. I do in part believe it. But he has an intuition, the Illusion will speak to Hamlet.

Time stands still. A few dozen lines are spoken between “midnight” and “dawn,” yet for the audience hours pass. A world is created whose version of time is the one we accept. Characters are differentiated in two dozen lines, all with such economy we feel this is real. The scene ends with Horatio’s character established, a renaissance man living the examined life. Hamlet is set in medieval Denmark, not the English Renaissance, but Shakespeare delights in anachronism. He was “wonderfully careless on matters of time and space.”¹

Something is rotten in Denmark—and, indeed, had been in England until around the time of Shakespeare’s birth. Elizabeth Tudor was not only religious herself but a brilliant practical theologian. The reign of her half sister, Mary, had reestablished Catholicism with a vengeance, and scores of heretics were burnt. But Queen Elizabeth prevented religious war with an ingenious strategy. Although she didn’t believe in such doctrines as Purgatory, she still allowed some rituals of the Church of Rome. To the dismay of Puritans, she removed from the Prayer Book passages offensive to Catholics, earning their grudging support. Her policy has been ironically summed up as, “Believe what you want—but pray from this book!” She allowed freedom of conscience within limits permitted by a sometimes treasonous Counter-Reformation.²

For Shakespeare’s audience royal England in the sixteenth century was about the legitimacy of the crown. History had taught that usurpation always lurks somewhere in the background. The culmination of the Tudor era was Elizabeth’s long and peaceable reign (1558–1603). Because of the lack of male heirs that plagued the Tudors, the succession was problematic, and inconvenient pretenders were beheaded. Audiences would know about Lady Jane Grey and Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots. Early performances of Hamlet overlapped another “public entertainment,” the ongoing treason and eventual execution of the Earl of Essex in 1601. These events may have enhanced the play’s popularity and accelerated publication of the First Quarto of Hamlet in 1603, which appears to have been pirated and rushed into print.³

Elizabeth Tudor was among the most educated people of her time, and one of the most capable rulers England ever had. Her choice of advisors was almost flawless. She prevented religious war by her own religious tolerance. With financier Thomas Gresham and First Secretary Sir William Cecil, she had purified the coinage of its brass (it had been repeatedly debased by her father, Henry VIII), stopped inflation, and brought her realm into unrivalled prosperity. Her thrift and dislike of bloodshed had spared the country from the rest of Europe’s continual religious wars. When Elizabeth did at last fight, against the Armada, she crushed Spain and became the most respected prince in Europe. She never married of course—except, as she said, to her kingdom and her own people. And she cannily refused to name a successor. So while they were watching Hamlet, those early audiences, the question was, who will succeed? Who’s there? The play is full of questions. Scholars tote up the times the word question is used (seventeen, more than any other play) or the number of question marks (seventy in the Graveyard scene). This seems odd but the contest of true and false beliefs running through Hamlet is a prime source of suspense and a major preoccupation of its hero.⁴

Truth is what psychoanalysis is about too. What’s out there in the dark, dangerous and indistinct? Is it behind us? Or inside? We might call psychoanalysis applied epistemology. Historically where psychoanalysis couldn’t effect a cure, it could at least question itself: What do we know and how do we know we know it? Freud toward the end of his life became more pessimistic—or realistic—and he called psychoanalysis one of those “impossible professions” like teaching, in which one can always be sure of disappointing results.

All of us are epistemologists, always deciding “is” versus “seems,” judgments so automatic we forget survival depends on them. Freud read Darwin with the aim of making the truth of psychoanalysis jibe with the truth of natural selection. But there’s a paradox: Perfectly truthful information can endanger survival if it’s disconnected from emotion. It would be easier if we only had to know facts, but there’s a trade off between raw data and emotionally processed meanings. Emotion evolved to sit in the middle of the brain, exaggerating one thing, minimizing another, diluting the heady liquor of concentrated fact. The intricate patterning of the social emotions shows that control of shame, guilt, anxiety, and vengefulness is crucial for survival, and it’s done through emotional distortion. Especially key to survival is accepting paradox and bearing uncertainty, which depends on self deception. And that is what in fact Hamlet is doing when we first meet him— fooling himself.

What diagnostic use do we make of Hamlet’s peevish behavior in the Council scene? Is his true nature exposed, or is his off putting behavior a defense, a regression?

In council, Claudius, the new Danish king, holds up a demand letter from Fortinbras, nephew to the Norwegian king: Prince Fortinbras, taking advantage of his old uncle’s infirmity, is raising an army in the far reaches of Norway to take back disputed territory between them. Claudius cleverly dispatches an ambassador to Old Norway reporting Fortinbras’s secret treasonous army. Then he turns to Laertes, son of chief minister Polonius, whose counsel he lavishly praises. Likewise fulsomely, he grants Laertes’s request to return to France.

Claudius now turns to Hamlet. But the heir apparent is downcast, in deep mourning. Claudius chides him, saying his “son” is beclouded. The Prince parries with a brilliant multilayered pun: He’s “too much in the sun,” adroitly deflecting “son” and undermining Claudius’s claim as stepfather. The Queen nips in to placate Hamlet.

Gertrude	Good Hamlet, … let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy veiled lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.
Hamlet	Aye, Madam, it is “common.”
Gertrude	If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet	Seems, Madam, nay it is. I know not “seems.” ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother … No, nor the fruitful river in the eye Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief That can denote me truly. These indeed seem For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show, These, but the trappings and the suits of woe.

I.ii.68 TLN 248–267

Gertrude is an intelligent, complex woman. Her problem is that she must balance a relationship with her new husband, the demands of a state threatened by invasion, and her job as exemplar of breeding and manners. These she must maintain during a sudden and very public tantrum of her adult son.⁵

“All that lives must die/Passing through nature to eternity” is as fine as any poetry in the play, and Gertrude spends it wisely. She knows the difference between being and seeming, as maternal figure for the whole empire. And her tactic works, she draws Hamlet’s fire, engages his intellect, and—very important—she lets him win. Once Hamlet’s into his lecture, his anger starts to cool and undergoes sublimation into poetry. He ends with intellectual defenses shored up and his ego neatly tied up, like the rhyming couplet that caps off the speech. Claudius, with smarmy solicitude, chides Hamlet to drop this “unmanly grief” and abruptly turns to the court to proclaim Hamlet his chosen heir. In a quick aside, he forbids the Prince’s return to school in Wittenberg. Gertrude seconds this as a mother’s plea. Flanked, Hamlet hangs back as the court sweeps out to a loud, drunken celebration.

Of the early scenes, this seems to give directors and actors the greatest latitude for interpretation—and error. In available Hamlet films there are corrections that beg to be made: This is a plenary council, not a wedding, the queen is not in white, there is no confetti. This is not the private quarters of the royal family, there is no lolling, sauntering, or pacing. Hamlet does not weep, here or anywhere in the play (with two possible exceptions and, if then, only continently). Hamlet wouldn’t sit in the King’s presence if he had broken legs; he will respect the throne in case he ever wears the crown and always keep the courtly high ground; he never turns his back to the King. Hamlet doesn’t have an antic disposition yet, he hasn’t seen the Ghost, he doesn’t cackle, giggle, or shout. He may imply disrespect with puns of sufficient subtlety (“Too much in the sun”) but anything over the line must be an aside (“More than kin and less than kind”). No one knows etiquette— or English—better than Hamlet. He always addresses Claudius and Gertrude with the formal pronoun.⁶

And the conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude is private. Openly asking him to “look like a friend on Denmark” would publicly acknowledge the family fracture. Claudius’s reproach about dead fathers is between him and Hamlet. Some productions have all this out in the open, but this scene is a mix of public announcements, two-person whispers, three-person sotto voce conversations, and private thoughts muttered under one’s breath. Such errors obscure the point of the scene. Hamlet is fighting to know the truth about himself and, simultaneously, trying to disown it.

Freud’s “dual instinct theory” positing libido and aggression as prime human motivators suffered from the limitations that always occur when concrete metaphors fail to capture the complexity of real life. Worse, Freud’s “pleasure principle” lacks traction in the clinical setting: It’s the masochistic departures from direct pleasure seeking that are interesting.⁷

But it is his closely observed clinical papers that are most fascinating. Freud disliked a certain self-deceiving personality type, one who knows the truth of what happened but avoids facing the moral weakness it engenders. In “The ‘Exceptions’” he depicts individuals with a deformation of character rooted in real suffering— earlier loss, accident, illness—something in their past he calls a circumstance of congenital disadvantage that leaves them with a characteristic stance toward the world, an attitude of entitlement.

Their neuroses were connected with some experience or suffering to which they had been subjected in their earliest childhood, one in respect of which they knew themselves to be guiltless, and which they could look upon as an unjust disadvantage imposed upon them. The privileges that they claimed as a result of this injustice, and the rebelliousness it engendered [make them refuse to] submit to a necessity which applies to everyone. “Nature has done me a grievous wrong. … Life owes me reparation for this, and I will see that I get it. I have a right to be an exception, to disregard the scruples by which others let themselves be held back.”⁸

Life owes me. This is what psychiatry calls “narcissistic personality disorder,” people who are selfish, grandiose, ruthless, unempathic, and aggrieved. There’s a distinctive flavor to the Exceptions. They seem to disgust Freud. They dwell on how unfair the world is and how u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Who’s There? A Question of Identity
• 2. The Ghost’s Commandment: Revenge My Shame
• 3. Freud’s “Family Romances”: Power and Belonging
• 4. “Some Vicious Mole of Nature”: Bad—or Just Unlucky?
• 5. Mad for Thy Love: Infected by the Social Emotions
• 6. Rossencraft & Gilderstone: Destiny’s Happy Dupes
• 7. The Fair Ophelia: Truth or Transference?
• 8. “Wild and Whirling Words”: Freud’s Phobia, Dora’s Dream
• 9. To Be or Not To Be? Conscience and the False Self
• 10. Hamlet Writes The Mousetrap: Method Acting and Metatheater
• 11. The Double Soliloquy: Freud’s “Compulsion To Repeat”
• 12. A Mirror in the Queen’s Closet: The Good Enough Mother
• 13. The Prince and His Brothers: War, Murder, and Manhood
• 14. “Readiness Is All. Let Be.” Disillusion and the Strength To Bear It
• 15. The Final Curtain: The Ghost and the Death Instinct
• A Note on Texts and Sources
• Selected Films of Hamlet
• Index