ABSTRACT
Hamlet’s procrastination is evidence for Freud’s Oedipus complex—the son’s rivalry with father is indirectly detected in symptoms of inhibition. Freud also used it to explain the origins of the guilty conscience. Hamlet’s decision not to kill but send Claudius to hell is critically contentious. Is “immortal vengeance” evil or just a convention? Freud’s 1897 letter to Fliess on the oedipal subtext of Hamlet comes after the death of his father. His own self analysis was revealing his unconscious rivalry with his father. After World War I scholars of English literature accepted notions of conflict in the dynamic unconscious, of ambivalence and overdetermination, of symbolization as a way what was at deeper levels. By midcentury the academy had incorporated Freud’s concepts. They even grasped transference as an explanation of irrational displaced behavior and the adaptive function of symptoms. The Oedipus complex is a motivator for formation of the conscience in the individual and a system of laws in the tribe. A consequence is the repetition compulsion. In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Freud saw that we repeat the past in order not to remember it. Marjorie Garber approaches his theory of the Oedipus complex through Freud’s abandonment of the “seduction theory” of hysteria but he solaced himself by finding universal confirmation for the Oedipus complex in art and letters. One of its problems was that, although Oedipus doesn’t know who his father is, he’s not inhibited, nor does he repress anything. Freud rationalized difference in the mental life of these two epochs of civilization, saying modernity had seen the secular advance of repression in mankind.
