ABSTRACT
Guilt is the hidden force that drives character, history, and culture. Freud nominated it as the greatest problem in the development of civilization, the price we pay in loss of happiness. The German philosopher Nietzsche had already made the same point. Yet, this force, which is constitutive of what it is to be human, has become deeply obscure in a secular modern world in which traditional religious explanations of damnation, atonement, and redemption have lost their cogency. It is as if guilt and its powers have gone underground. Hamlet is a case in point: the greatest creation of the greatest Western writer, the character who has most fascinated the modern imagination, is paralysed by a guilt he does not understand. It is deeply embedded in his character – he was born guilty, guilty by disposition, his pervasive anxiety not linked to any crime he has committed. One of the tasks of this book will be to understand Hamlet as a case-study in depressive guilt.
