ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1897 Sigmund Freud’s mind was running on Hamlet. A letter he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in October contained the first exposition of the Oedipus complex, later to be elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) but here already fully articulated, both as it presents itself in Sophocles and, in a more repressed and hysterical fashion, in Hamlet:
Less than a month before, Freud had written to Fliess the famous letter in which he reveals his “great secret”—that he has abandoned the seduction theory: “I no longer believe in my neurotica.”2 Persuaded by the surprising frequency with which such seductions by fathers of children seemed to occur in his patients, and by the fact that the unconscious contains no “indications of reality,” he had determined that such acts were plausibly to be considered as fantasies rather than as personal history: “surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable”; “in all the cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.”3
