ABSTRACT
Personal identity in Hamlet is historically rooted in uncertainty over the royal succession at the end of the Tudor era and the approaching death of old Queen Elizabeth. Also at stake was the Protestant Reformation in an England overlayering Catholic doctrines like Purgatory and the nature of demons believed to visit earth as ghosts. Psychoanalysis as applied epistemology links the questioning of truth and falsehood in the play with Freud’s search for the underlying causes of psychological phenomena he later called narcissism, transference, ego defenses, ambivalence, identification, and the Oedipus Complex. Freud’s ideas take their cue from Hamlet’s shame over his mother’s hasty remarriage, unmasked as his own envy of his father and stepfather in his famous Soliloquy 1, where shame causes him to wish his too too solid—sullied or sallied—flesh would melt. Unconscious mixed motivations, self-deception, repression, illusion, screen memories, and attitudes of entitlement are all probed and exemplified by Hamlet. Free association is both a tool of psychoanalytic exploration and a tool of literary criticism and deep reading—closely linked to the psychoanalyst’s tool of countertransference. They all focus on the question of whether Hamlet is an example of Freud’s “Exceptions.”
