ABSTRACT
Hamlet is being used to tell us the truth about truth, in this case the almost tautological truth of the existence and importance of the true self. There is something there, in D. W. Winnicott's case, to betray, and in E. L. Freud's case, to misrepresent. Hamlet the character makes a mockery, in a sense, of Polonius's advice to his own son, Laertes, "to thine own self be true". When Shakespeare turns up in psychoanalysis, it is often Hamlet; and when Hamlet turns up, the play is usually used to say something about knowing and truth: its difficulty, its impossibility, its uncertain status and definition. Winnicott's Hamlet is paralysed neither by old-fashioned doubt nor by new-fashioned oedipal conflict; he is dissociated. He is supposed to illustrate this dissociation of male and female elements.
