The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive

Ernest Jones's 1910 paper in The American Journal of Psychology develops at length a hypothesis Freud had sketched in a footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which Jones notes had not been critically discussed since. Jones surveys the large, mostly German, body of criticism on why Hamlet delays avenging his father. He sorts the explanations into three groups: a temperament unfit for action (Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge); external obstacles that make the task nearly impossible (Klein, Werder); and some feature of the task that makes it repugnant to Hamlet. Against the first two he argues from the play itself. Hamlet acts decisively in everything except the revenge, and the Laertes episode shows how readily the people could have been turned against Claudius. Jones concludes that Hamlet at heart does not want to do the deed and does not know why. The shifting pretexts he offers are rationalisations, and his state is a 'specific aboulia', an inability to will one particular act. Ethical or religious scruples would be open to introspection, so the hidden motive must be a repressed 'natural' trend. Jones identifies it as the Œdipus complex: a childhood wish to take the father's place in the mother's affection. By murdering the father and marrying the mother, Claudius has carried out Hamlet's own repressed wishes, so denouncing and killing him would mean facing them. The duty to kill the uncle is bound up with the repressed impulse to kill the mother's husband, and is inhibited along with it. Jones reads Hamlet's revulsion from Ophelia, his disgust at his mother's sexuality and his hostility to Polonius in the same light. He then places the story among the hero myths studied by Rank and Abraham, in which a son displaces a rival father. Using the mechanisms of 'decomposition' and 'doubling', he reads Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Fortinbras and others as split-off aspects of the parental or heroic figures. Comparing the play with Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest, he notes two changes Shakespeare made: the murder becomes secret, removing the external obstacles, and the hero now hesitates. Together they turn a tale of outward adventure into one of inner conflict. Jones links this change to the death of Shakespeare's father in 1601, shortly before the play was written. He holds that hero, poet and audience are all moved by a conflict whose source none of them knows. Jones later expanded the essay, eventually into the book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949).