ABSTRACT
We terminate with Hamlet and Freud by analyzing the Ghost, the play’s most complex character after Hamlet. It also disposes of Freud’s Oedipus complex. In his “Theme of the Three Caskets,” Death is a pagan goddess. Shakespeare’s plays allegorically represent the three relationships a man has with woman—the mother, the mate, and Mother Earth. Freud not only saw sex and death in Hamlet but the inevitable struggle between fathers and sons. Hamlet coincided with John Shakespeare’s death, and he thought it stirred in William a universal oedipal ambivalence. Freud thought oedipal motifs in Hamlet reflected the playwright’s relationship with his son too. We compared the narcissism of the Ghost and the unconscious shame of Alice Miller’s “prisoners of childhood.” There is also, destructive narcissism interwoven with the controversial “death instinct” introduced in 1920. Melanie Klein, one of his few followers to embrace the concept, insisted on aggression as the primary drive in the earliest stage of infancy, her “paranoid position.” When this primal rage is blocked it thwarts healthy development of the newborn from the “paranoid position” into the “depressive position” of the toddler. She worried primal rage reemerging in the transference would destroy a psychoanalysis.
