ABSTRACT
Into his mother’s closet Hamlet brings an old parental image, resurrecting old coping mechanisms—grandiosity, primitive disdain, paranoid projection, and splitting. The ultimate crisis is the contest of erotic love and mother love that follows the thrust of Hamlet’s dagger. It’s also a resolution of infantile conflict. An attempt to destroy the mother is according to Klein the defining developmental crisis. Carolyn Heilbrun sees Gertrude through the eyes of the academy. Across critical history there’s remarkable blindness to her actual words, lustful nowhere in the play. Kenneth Branagh directs Julie Christie perfectly. Hamlet is fighting yearning and rage toward women, with sexualized contempt. The Ghost’s interruption of his quasi-rape has oedipal implications. After the assault, he starts to have self reflection, insight into his grandiosity, his genuine repentance. Before the scene, Hamlet sees her as she was. Sad now, he sees her as she is. Unempathic parenting leaves behind fault lines in the self that fragment. Hyman Muslin notes Hamlet’s “self of despair” fragmenting under stress; but his use of Gertrude as a healing selfobject repairs himself. Winnicott understands the attempt to destroy the mother as normal. But mental health depends on the mother surviving as an inner object. Mother as a looking glass is apt here since Hamlet is replete with reflected images. A true self containing the “id impulses” is cloaked in a protective false self. The false self has achieved a deceptive false integrity. The problem with even the best false self is it cannot feel. At the end, Hamlet is no longer splitting. Sadder and wiser, he identifies with Yorick as he darkly jokes and grieves over Polonius.
