Hamlet and Freud

“Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person.” (Freud, p. 438) In this scene in “Hamlet” we see this tie stand out between Hamlet and his mother. As Hamlet is able to channel the identification of his father and confront his mother on the death of his father, as it does take a sexual tone (as Hamlet shows his mother a locket with a picture of his father and a another with the picture of his father’s brother, while lying on top of her). This similar argument as made in the article, “Mother and Child: The Erotic Bond” by Linda Marin. In this article she turns the table and focuses on the erotic bond a mother creates with her son, “Still, it seems mothers do something equally silencing in the day-to-day way we do not speak of our erotic feelings toward those most desirable of objects, our children. We say our kids are cute, of course, or beautiful or remarkable, and we endlessly detail their behaviors and idiosyncrasies, but rarely do we acknowledge the erotic component of our own feelings in these observations of them.” In this clip of hamlet we see the acknowledgement of this eroticism and the consequences that come from it. Having the bond between mother and son disappears as Hamlet takes a dominant role over his mother in his attempt to have her confess and having the sexual tone become almost sexual force and mimicry of fornication (since it does appear that Hamlet is almost raping his mother). According to Freud, this scene alone shows us that that the early attraction between Hamlet and his mother never went away, as Hamlet obviously created a sexual tie between him and his as mother and identification tie between him and his father, as the father is obviously the model he is trying so hard to mimic. At the climax of this scene we see Hamlet losing steam on the dominance over his mother but as soon he sees the image of his father he remembers what he came there to do (to get the confession from his mother about the death of his father). And soon is back on track and leaves his mother with a warning to confess or suffer the consequences. Leaving his mother an emotional wreck, while not exactly accomplishing what he originally set out to do, he does accomplish in establishing a dominant stance between him and his mother.

Works Cited

“Marin, Linda.” Mother and Child: The Erotic Bond. 1994. Web. 4 April 2010

Freud, Sigmund. “Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Maichael. Victoria, Aus.: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. 438-440. Print.