Using Freud's Psychology to Analyze Shakespeare's Hamlet

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Using Freud's Psychology to Analyze Shakespeare's Hamlet Psychology is not a new concept to human civilization. People have been interacting between each other creating cause and effect reactions between themselves since the creation of man. These reactions can have tremendous impacts on both parties involved in these relationships. How they deal with these reactions can be analyzed in a psychological manner. Scientists have been analyzing these relationships since the 1800s, and one of the most influential psychologists was a man named Dr. Sigmund Freud. This paper shall use one of Dr. Freud’s theories to analyze one of the most famous characters in English literature. That character is William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One of Freud’s most interesting theories was that of the Oedipus complex (this theory also has many other similar names, such Oedipal, etc.). The term was named after a character in a Greek play written by Sophocles about an ancient Greek king, Oedipus, who mistakenly killed his father and married his mother, with whom he was deeply in love with. The Oedipal stage was one of Freud’s psychosexual stages of development in a child, which came after the oral and anal stages and before the puberty stage. However, if an individual did not completely overcome a certain stage in his or her development, that individual would attempt, be it in a conscious or unconscious manner, to complete this stage at another point in his or her life. Associat... ... middle of paper ... ...ultimate infantile goal of capturing his father’s power and providing for his mother. Because of his dysfunction, he did not succeed and ultimately it was the instrument of his own death. Bibliography 1. Desmarais, Serge & Wood, Eileen & Wood, Ellen R. Green & Wood, Samuel E. (2005). Personality Theory and Assessment. In Young, M.J. (Ed.), The World of Psychology (pp.354-385). Toronto, Ontario: Pearson Allyn and Bacon. 2. Diyanni, Robert. (2002). Literature – Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. (pp. 1498-1500). 3. The Oedipal crisis. Retrieved 09-DEC-04. http://faculty.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/courses/definitions/oedipal.htm 4. The Oedipal Trajectory. Retrieved 09-DEC-04. http://faculty.uwb.edu/mgoldberg/courses/definitions/oedipal.htm Comments

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