ABSTRACT
Hamlet’s antic disposition can hide revenge; he swings between normal and an antic disposition. Harry Levin said he needs a new persona. Critics question the necessity for his madness, but he has a strong identification with jester Yorick, so it’s natural to his character. Is the manic theme left over from the lost Ur-Hamlet and madness inserted whole? Hamlet wouldn’t be Hamlet without the question of psychosis. The pivot of the poetry is changes in Hamlet’s mental state. Oscar Wilde once asked whether in Hamlet scholarship the critics were actually mad—or only pretending to be. If Hamlet is “Freud’s mentor” then Polonius is Freud’s alter ego. Freud references him comparing psychoanalytic “constructions” to psychotic delusions. “The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy” of Harold Searles is what Hamlet does to Polonius. Freud spells out his theory of drama as sexual release. The culmination is “psychopathological drama,” Hamlet being the first. Only neurotic individuals can relish psychopathological drama. He traces katharsis in Aristotle’s sense and proceeds to its sexual endpoint climaxing in his discovery of incest in the Oedipus complex. But what if the anxiety of influence caused Freud to commit psychoanalytic “misprision,” in Harold Bloom’s terms?
