Ernest Jones

“ In other words, whenever a person cannot bring himself to do something that every conscious consideration tells him he should do, it is always because for some reason he doesn't want to do it; this reason he will not own to himself and is only dimly if at all aware of. That is exactly the case with Hamlet. Time and again he works himself up, points out to himself his obvious duty, with the cruellest selfreproaches lashes himself to agonies of remorse, and once more falls away into inaction. ”

“ He eagerly seizes every excuse for occupying himself with any question rather than the performance of his duty, just as on a lesser plane a schoolboy faced with a distasteful task whittles away his time in arranging his books, sharpening his pencils, and fidgetting with any little occupation that will serve as a pretext for putting off the task.
Highly significant is the fact that the grounds Hamlet gives for his hesitancy are grounds none of which will stand a moment's serious consideration, and which continually change from one time to another. ”

“ The second and all-important respect in which Shakspere changed the story, and thus revolutionised the tragedy, is the vacillation and hesitancy he introduced into Hamlet's attitude towards his task, with the consequent paralysis of his action. In all the previous versions Hamlet was throughout a man of rapid decision and action, not–as with Shakspere' s version–in everything except in the task of vengeance. He had, as Shakspere' s Hamlet felt he should have, swept to his revenge unimpeded by any doubts or scruples, and had never flinched from the straightforward path of duty. ”

“ The very fact that Hamlet is content with the explanation arouses our gravest suspicions, for, as will presently be explained, from the very nature of the emotion he cannot be aware of the true cause of it. If we ask, not what ought to produce such soul-paralysing grief and distaste for life, but what in actual fact does produce it, we must go beyond this explanation and seek for some deeper cause. ”

“ More than this, every action he so reluctantly engages in for the fulfilment of his obvious task seems half-wittingly to be disposed in such a way as to provoke destiny, in that, by arousing the suspicion and hostility of his enemy, it defeats its own object and helps to encompass his own ruin. The conflict in his soul is to him insoluble, and the only steps he can make are those that inexorably draw him nearer and nearer to his doom. ”

“ Further, with young children it is easy to recognise that the dream represents the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. Now Freud maintains that the latent content of every dream represents nothing else than the imaginary fulfilment of an ungratified wish. In the child the wish is an ungratified one, but it has not undergone repression, that is to say it is not of such a nature as to be inacceptable in consciousness; in the adult the wish is not merely one that could not be gratified, but is of such a nature as to be inassimilable in consciousness, and so has become repressed. ”

“ Much as he hates him, he can never denounce him with the ardent indignation that boils straight from his blood when he reproaches his mother, for the more vigorously he denounces his uncle the more powerfully does he stimulate to activity his own unconscious and ' ' repressed ' ' complexes. He is therefore in a dilemma between on the one hand allowing his natural detestation of his uncle to have free play, a consummation which would make him aware of his own horrible wishes, and on the other ignoring the imperative call for vengeance that his obvious duty demands. ”

“ Intellectually of course he abhors both, but there can be no question as to which arouses in him the deeper loathing. Whereas the murder of his father evokes in him indignation, and a plain recognition of his obvious duty to avenge it, his mother's guilty conduct awakes in him the intensest horror. Furnivall [84] well remarks, in speaking of the Queen, "Her disgraceful adultery and incest, and treason to his noble father's memory, Hamlet has felt in his inmost soul. Compared to their ingrain die, Claudius' murder of his father–notwithstanding all his protestations–is only a skin-deep stain." ”

“ In such cases one is always safe in accepting the dubiously given point as unhesitatingly as the most vivid memory; the doubt is only one of the stages in the disguise of the underlying dream thoughts. ”

“ We are here once more reminded of events that may be observed in daily life by those who open their eyes to the facts. When the grandson in the myth avenges himself and his mother by slaying her tyrannical father, it is as though he clearly realised the motive of the persecution, for in truth he slays the man who endeavoured to possess and retain the mother's affection; thus in this sense we again come back to the father, and see that from the hero's point of view the distinction between the' father and grandfather is not so radical as it at first sight appears. ”

“ It has sometimes been alleged by Freud's opponents that his generalisation of all dreams representing a wish- fulfilment is the outcome of observing a few child dreams, and that his analyses merely consist in arbitrarily twisting the dream, to serve some private ends, until a wish can be read into it. We have seen that this absurd suggestion is historically untrue, for Freud came to the analysis of adult dreams from the analysis, not of child dreams, but of adult psycho-neuroses. ”

“ When in the play scene he replies to his mother's request to sit by her with the words, "No, good mother, here's metal more attractive," and proceeds to lie at Ophelia's feet, we seem to have a direct indication of this attitude, and his coarse familiarity and bandying of ambiguous jests with the woman he has recently so ruthlessly jilted are hardly intelligible unless we bear in mind that they were carried out under the heedful gaze of the Queen. It is as though Hamlet is unconsciously expressing to her the following thought: "You give yourself to other men whom you prefer to me. ”

“ We are beginning to see man not as the smooth, self-acting agent he pretends to be, but as he really is, a creature only dimly conscious of the various influences that mould his thought and action, and blindly resisting with all the means at his command the forces that are making for a higher and fuller consciousness. ”

“ I am aware that to those Shaksperian critics, who have enjoyed no special opportunities for penetrating into the obscurer sides of mental activities, and who base their views of human motive on the surface valuation given by the agents themselves–to whom all conduct whether good or evil at all events springs from conscious sources,–are likely to regard the suggestions put forward above as merely constituting one more of the extravagant and fanciful hypotheses of which the Hamlet literature in particular is so full. ”

“ In other words a child has to learn how to love just as it has to learn how to run, although the former function is so much more intricate and delicate in its adjustment than the latter that the development of it is a correspondingly slower and more involved process. The earliest sexual manifestations are so palpably non-adapted to what is generally considered the ultimate aim and object of the function, and are so general and tentative in contrast to the relative precision of the later manifestations, that the sexual nature of them is commonly not recognised at all. ”

“ The close relation between jealousy and the desire for the removal of a rival by death, as well as the common process of suppression of these feelings, is clearly illustrated in a remark of his to the effect that: "Many a noble and even great man has confessed that mingled with profound grief for the death and misfortune of their best friends, they were often appalled to find a vein of secret joy and satisfaction, as if their own sphere were larger or better." ”

“ We dream at night only about those matters that have most concerned us by day, though on account of the distortion that takes place in the dream-making this fact is not evident. Lastly it may be added that all the dreams occurring in a given night arise from the same group of latent dream thoughts, though they often present different aspects of these.
There are certain differences between the dreams of a young child and those of an adult. In the child, at all events before the age of four, no distortion takes place, so that the manifest content is identical with the latent content. ”

“ Man's belief that he is a self-conscious animal, alive to the desires that impel or inhibit his actions, and aware of all the springs of his conduct, is the last stronghold of that anthropomorphic outlook on life which so long has dominated his philosophy, his theology and, above all, his psychology. ”

“ Now, vagueness and obfuscation may or may not be characteristic of life in general, but they are certainly not the attributes of a successful drama. No disconnected and meaningless drama could have produced the effects on its audiences that Hamlet has continuously done for the past three centuries. The underlying meaning of the drama may be totally obscure, but that there is one, and one which touches on problems of vital interest to the human heart, is empirically demonstrated by the uniform success with which the drama appeals to the most diverse audiences. ”

“ In no branch of science can the testing of the results obtained by the use of an entirely new and difficult technique be satisfactorily submitted to an off-hand trial on the part of some one quite untrained in this, and it is strange that it does not occur to those who do not directly confirm Freud's conclusions as soon as they "try psycho-analysis" that the fact may be due, not, as they hastily infer, to the erroneousness of those conclusions, but to a more humble explanation, namely that they have not mastered the technique. ”

“ Most convincing proof of all that the tragedy cannot be interpreted as residing in difficulties produced by the external situation is Hamlet's own attitude toward his task. He never behaves as a man confronted with a straight-forward task, in which there are merely external difficulties to overcome. ”

“ To secure evidence that would convict the uncle in a court of law was from the nature of the case impossible, and no tragical situation can arise from an attempt to achieve the impossible, nor can the interest of the spectator be aroused for an obviously one-sided struggle. The external situation is similarly distorted for the needs of this hypothesis. On which side the people would have been in any conflict is clearly enough perceived by Claudius, who dare not even punish Hamlet for killing Polonius. ”

“ When, for instance, a married lady dreams that she is breakfasting alone with some man friend, the interpretation is often a simple matter. In the second place condensation, like the other distorting mechanisms, subserves the function of evading the censor of consciousness. This is a matter that will presently be further discussed, but it is plain that a repressed and inacceptable wish that two persons or places may resemble each other in an important respect, or may be interchanged, can be expressed in the manifest content of a dream by presenting an insignificant resemblance between the two. ”

“ Hence any problem as to the psychical origin of the mental processes, still more as to the meaning of the dream as a whole, is by the nature of things excluded as being non-existent, and any investigation along such lines is condemned as savouring of antiquated superstitions about the " reading of dreams " unworthy of educated people. To this attitude Freud, as must every consistent philosopher, stands in sharp opposition. ”

“ The long "repressed" desire to take his father's place in his mother's affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of some one usurping this place exactly as he himself had once longed to do. ”

“ Any one, however, who is interested in the psychology of wit, or familiar with the unconscious phantasies of hysterics or the flight of ideas met with in mania and other psychoses, will not find it strange that the superficial associations and preposterous plays on words so characteristic of those fields of mental activity are common enough in yet another field, namely that of dream formation. The question as to whether the associations that occur during dream analysis are made only then, and take no share in the actual formation of the dream, will not here be discussed ”

“ The tyrant who seeks to destroy the hero is then most commonly the grandfather, as in the legends of Cyrus, Gilgam, Perseus, Telephos and others, or the grand-uncle, as in those of Romulus and Remus and their Greek predecessors, Amphion and Zethos; less often is he the uncle, as in the Hamlet legend. When the decomposition is more complete, the tyrant is not of the same family as the father, though he may be socially related, as in the case of Abraham whose father Therachs was the tyrant Nimrod's commander-in-chief ”

“ Hamlet is the spirit of truth-seeking which realises itself historically as progress, Claudius is the type of evil and error, Ophelia is the Church, Polonius its Absolutism and Tradition, the Ghost is the ideal voice of Christianity, Fortinbras is Liberty, and so on. ”

“ Even in the last instance it enters into the dream only in a disguised form, and it can be shown that this disguise depends on the nature not of the stimulus but of the rest of the dream. The same stimulus may appear in different dreams, even of the same person, under quite different forms, and analysis of the dream regularly shows that the form adopted is altogether determined by the character and motive of the dream. In short, the dream makes use of the somatic stimulus or not, according to its needs, and only when this fulfils certain requirements. ”

“ In a dream the mental processes are dramatised so that the past and future are unrolled before our eyes in a present action; a wish, for instance, that relates to the future is seen realised in a present situation.
It is further well known that the manifest content of most dreams is predominantly, though not exclusively, of a visual nature, and the particular process of expressing in a dream various thoughts in the form of visual pictures Freud terms Regression, wishing to indicate by this the retrograde movement of abstract mental processes towards their primary perceptions. ”

“ Every student of clinical psychology knows that any such general weakening in energy is invariably due to another cause than intellectual scepticism, namely, to the functioning of abnormal unconscious complexes. This train of thought need not here be further developed, for it is really irrelevant to discuss the cause of Hamlet's general aboulia if, as will presently be maintained, this did not exist; the argument, then, must remain unconvincing except to those who already accept it. ”