Custom essays on Psychoanalysis

Simply speaking, psychological criticism is the effort to implement the psychoanalysis in its different forms in the interpretation of literature works. Shakespeare’s plays are among the favorites of psychoanalytic critics because of their popularity and wide range of characters. One of the first psychoanalysts who criticized the Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” was Sigmund Freud. He used the characters of the play to explain his theories on repression, his views on individual and social development, and so on. In particular, Freud used the character of Hamlet to discuss the Oedipus complex. This complex was called with the name of mythological Greek king Oedipus, which married his own mother after killing his father. This term determines the sexual feeling of infant to his mother.
Janet Adelman puts the image of the mother on the central place in her approach to Hamlet’s oedipal issues. She points that in early Shakespearean plays the image of father was the factor of son’s individuality shaping, and in “Hamlet” the image of the father takes on a sexual role. According to Adelman, Gertrude’s sexuality “is literally the sign of her betrayal and of her husband’s death.” Hamlet response to mother’s sexuality is jealousy to his uncle.
Really, the problem of mother’s new marriage disturbs Hamlet a lot more then the loss of throne and power. Nevertheless, Adelman’s idea of Gertrude as the symbol of uncontrolled female sexuality that can destroy Hamlet seems to be groundless. In the play Gertrude is the least threat for Hamlet, all other characters are ahead, including Ophelia. The latest contradicts to idea of subjection of male to female as the buried fantasy of Hamlet: he doesn’t subject to Ophelia, just the opposite, he dominates in their conversation.

References
Adelman, Janet. “Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare’s Plays, HAMLET to THE TEMPEST”. New York and London: Routledge, 1992
Schwartz, M.M. (1997). Literature. Psychoanal Q., 66:361-364
Hardy M. Cook, “The Shakespeare Newsletter” 42.2 (no. 213,
Summer 1992): 29-30.