ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet’s character is subtle and complex. If Shakespeare seems to stress Hamlet’s honesty and maturity of character as opposed to all the character pathology that surrounds him he knows that character is part of the conflict and ambiguity of the human condition, a condition that cannot be “perfect”. Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary creations, is a kind of everyman, and for this reason, his character is ideally suited for an attempted psychoanalytic “reading” of its universalities and complexities. F. Baudry, in a comprehensive review and thoughtful critique of the evolution of the concept of character in Sigmund Freud’s writings, shows convincingly that what Freud believed character to be, depends on which phase of Freud’s theoretical deliberations is being considered. The relationship between instinct in both symptom and character may be more obvious in child analysis than in adult analysis and yet there are adults whose characters are more sphincter rigidities than sublimated disguises.
