ABSTRACT
Disillusion and the ego strength to bear it as a developmental task are illustrated through Hamlet’s changed personality on returning to Denmark, in the Graveyard scene. Disillusion permeates Donald Winnicott’s analysis of the little girl called the Piggle and Harry Guntrip’s analysis with Winnicott (following one with British object relations school founder, Ronald Fairbairn). In his most important late paper, “Analysis, Terminable and Interminable,” Freud admitted the limitations of psychoanalysis, an “impossible profession,” like teaching or public service in which one is bound to have disappointing results. Freud is disillusioned by the difficulty of neutralizing the negative transference; there are analyses that simply cannot be brought to a conclusion. There’s a demonic element in humanity and no matter how much positive libido exists, an “independently emerging tendency to conflict” can defeat it, a negativity with some “element of free aggressiveness,” independent of the ego. For example, the day Hamlet arrives back in Denmark, he and Horatio enter a graveyard where a gravedigger sings of love and death. Finally, after Hamlet’s own death, Horatio, standing amid the blood and corpses, becomes three dimensional. Instead of a dramatic prop, he’s now voice of the hero.
