The psychology of the human mind is extremely interesting.
Okay, the truth is I only find it interesting because it explains love and hot steamy sex and all those other entities that all teenagers find interest in.
Or maybe it’s just me.
….
AWKKK WARRRD.
So. Ernest Jones analysis Hamlet from the psychological perspective. (Isn’t every analysis psychological though? Ooh. Deep.) According to him, Hamlet “never intended us to regard” him as “sane” so the “ ’mind o’erthrown’ must have some other meaning than its literal one.” Basically what everyone already knows, which is that Hamlet wants everyone to think he is insane but never truly is. This concept is further affirmed in Robert Bridges’s The Testament of Beauty described how Hamlet seemed insane as to confused people but never really left his reason.
Hamlet’s insight that “would take the world three subsequent centuries to reach” was granted to him by Shakespeare’s extraordinary powers of observation and over-all awesomeness. Hamlet, yet again, is then a very intelligent character. And this character is a perfect example of what Dover Wilson calls “that sense of frustration, futility, and human inadequacy.” I wonder if this is Wilson’s weird way of describing insanity or maybe he’s just onto a completely new topic of sanity and responsibility. Since Hamlet is a supreme example of these feelings that much of mankind recognizes personally, then Hamlet is a symbol for humanity and its negative feelings of inadequacy.
So in we go into the main idea of this analysis: Psychoneurosis and all its messed-up, lunatic, weird, Freudian (ergo the ‘weird’) glory. For those ignorant and unknowing of the concept ‘psychoneurosis’ (Never mind the fact that I myself just figured out it existed all but two minutes ago when I looked it up), it is state of mind where a person is thwarted by the unconscious part of their mind, the infant’s mind that was once hidden and yet still appears side by side with the adult mentality. Basically, their child-like state of mind never developed and is at odds with their more rational ‘adult’ mind. So you’re in constant internal mental conflict with yourself and unable to make decisions.
Maybe this is why Hamlet fails to ever come in agreement with himself? There is the slight possibility that this disease applies to him and when he was a kid he was in love with his mother. So of course, he was jealous of her affection towards his father and felt a bitter sense of replacement. Oedipus Complex, much? But there are three things that make this theory highly impossible. If this were true, either way he would be aware of that fact, which would make him being crazy implausible. (Fun Fact: Crazy people don’t actually know or even believe themselves to be crazy).
Just pretend you never know that former bit of enlightenment. Please.
The second one is that there’s no evidence of him recovering any memories from his childhood. Darn it.
And the last one is that his mother marrying Claudius wound deprive him of the same amount of affection as his dad’s presence did, so there’d be no reason for the histrionics. Because if this were to happen, he would be secretly glad of his father’s death and not casting evil glances and laser-beam glares at Claudius.
There goes our theory. How sad.
So the only thing that can explain his self-frustration and the delay in which he fills his father’s begs for revenge are that while he may try to follow through with parricide and incest, the thought of both actually disgust him. So he is not really crazy, but his display of lack of sanity isn’t just to confuse and trick other people. In the end, he is actually trying to make himself believe that he is crazy in order to justify his actions. But he views “Bestial Oblivion”, in other words, the incapability to remember (maybe a side-effect of insanity?...I wonder) with contempt. So he acts crazy to fool himself, and yet it doesn’t seem to work. It ends up as just being believed by others. But there is only so much you can take trying to seem a certain way until you finally end up becoming it.
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