How does hamlet die
These primal desires become repressed in order for the human to grow into an adult and to become a healthy and functioning member of civilization. Such repression is, in fact, vital and necessary, according to Freud, if the human wants to survive in the world. Since feelings remain unorganized and primal for the child, he harbors raw desires to displace and to even murder the father in order to gain unfettered access to the mother.Īccording to Freud, as the child grows out of the Latent stage, in which sexual desire is not coherent, and enters a stage of more sexual awareness in the preteen years, the growth into adolescence requires that the child repress the primal desires he had for his mother and the primal and murderous desires he has toward the father. Because of this, the father becomes the child’s sexual rival for the mother. At sometime between the ages of 2 and 5, the child becomes traumatically aware that his father sleeps with the mother. The 1 – 2 year old child does not have the cognition or experience to know that his chaotic feelings for the mother are sexual. In Freud’s theory, the child’s first sexual attachment is to the mother and the mother’s body. His answer is that, combined with the dreams men continue to experience, men continue to experience residual effects of their earliest trauma: the desire as a child to sleep with his mother while coming to the recognition that the father stands in the way. In a true sense of tragic determinism, Oedipus had no idea that he had killed his father and slept with his mother, nor could he have probably known.įreud wonders in his book, why has this play continued to be one of the most popular plays up until today worldwide? What is it about Oedipus the King that continues to fascinate, obsess and haunt theater goers? He does so by addressing one of the most famous of ancient Greek tragedies, Oedipus the King. In that play, Oedipus unwittingly kills his father, wins over his mother as the new king of Thebes, and sires children with her, only to learn the horrific truth of his actions at the end of the play. Whether you agree with Freud or not, we must contend with his argument since it has inspired such a rash of interpretation, both in criticism and in performance.įreud addresses dreams children and men often have in which they are sexually enamored with their mothers. Although his analysis takes up no more than two pages, it has inspired perhaps more volumes of critical interpretation of Hamlet than any other interpretation. Perhaps no piece of critical work on Hamlet has grown more famous–or infamous–than Freud’s brief analysis of the play in his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Originally a footnote, Freud revised the first edition of his book and placed his analysis of Hamlet in the body of his work.
There he is, Sigmund Freud, inventing a new language of the mind that we have yet of which to get out from under.