ABSTRACT
Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s deepest and psychologically most complex play as well as the longest running at nearly 4000 words. Hamlet is also the work of literature to receive a special psychoanalytic interpretation, establishing the bridge between psychoanalysis, a method of cure for mental illness, and world literature. The play has been of special interest to psychoanalysts. While any significant work of literature can be interpreted from a psychoanalytic point of view, Hamlet seems to demand such an interpretation because Hamlet’s inability to carry out the ghost’s command to kill his uncle points to an unconscious conflict that psychoanalysis can explain. In Hamlet the Oedipus complex appears as a symptom, the inability to act, which Sigmund Freud interpreted as due to guilt. The graveyard scene contains a psychoanalytic insight: a repressed childhood homosexual memory inhibits both mourning and the capacity to love a woman.
