“Both Shakespeare criticism and psychoanalytic theory,” as Philip Armstrong put it, “each of which owes more to the other than is generally admitted” (Armstrong 1). Each is a means by help of which we can glean new, deeper and more comprehensive insights into our nature, as human beings, both as individuals and societies at large. Put it another way, literature and psychology have something in common: both stress the very fact that what would seem to us as very external is, in fact, rooted deeply within ourselves. What we claim to be fully aware of, therefore, may be (or is actually) unknown to us. Literature, throughout history, has been problematising our consciousness both of ourselves and of the world; it has been raising questions, whilst psychoanalysis has introduced new keys to answer these questions. One of these most basic keys is the concept of the unconscious or the socially intolerable thoughts and wishes repressed by the subject’s superego.
“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious” (Trilling 34), thus said Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939), whose works, most specifically “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), have been greatly influential upon our understandings of both psychology and literature. In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud argues that dreams encompass two contents: the “manifest content” − that is, the content that a person experiences in a dream, and the “latent content,” which is the content that can be revealed through interpretation. Likewise, a work of art can be regarded; there is always a “truth” that can be gleaned. Psychoanalysis and art, at this point, converge; they have in common many questions, the most significant of which is how to address, express and understand what is latent within human nature.
All human beings, according to Freud, have restrained desires and demands, most importantly what he calls, the “Oedipus Complex” – that is, a child’s desire to possess sexually his / her parent of the opposite sex, thereby rejecting and rivalling the other parent of the same sex of his / her own. “Like Oedipus,” Freud goes further, “we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality” (Freud 280). “No matter what sex you are, or your objects of desire and identifications,” as Thwaites put it, “your first love was always a woman” (Thwaites 98). It is in this sense that psychology problematises our constructed symmetrical notions of desire, love, life, individuality, society, sexual differences and family, thereby deconstructing not only our perceptions of literature, but also the self and the world as we perceive in and through literature.
Obvious from the name Freud has given to this group of the repressed, mental processes is the reference to the ancient Greek, mythical figure of Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, to which Freud likens William Shakespeare’s’ Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. “[One] of the great creations of tragic poetry,” Freud maintains, “[is] Shakespeare’s Hamlet, [which] has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex” (Freud 282).
In Hamlet, this wishful phantasy, according to Freud, “remains repressed…. [and] we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences” (Freud 282).
Reformulating Freud’s concept, Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981) defines the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other” – that is, desire comes into being in the presence of the ‘Other’; our deep feelings are constructed through others. Desire, for Lacan, is what we cannot satisfy; hence, the unconscious emerges through insisting on filling this gap. In this very sense, Lacan, as we shall see, regards Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a “tragedy of desire” (S4 11), and so is Othello in which the protagonist destroys the object he desires. Based upon these concepts of Freud and Lacan, among others, this paper attempts to look into Shakespeare’s configurations of Hamlet and Othello, as characters, in order to glean deeper insights into the wide array of psychoanalytical interpretations and implications manifested in them.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
“[T]he character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy,” as Coleridge pithily put it, “In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds” (Coleridge 343). It is out of this precise, insightful “mental philosophy,” or psychology, to put it in a more modern sense, that Shakespeare delineates the character of Hamlet in his Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Like Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the death occurs before the beginning of the tragedy. Here, Prince Hamlet, in the opening scene, appears to be long-faced; he has just returned from Germany, in order to attend the funeral of his father, the late King of Denmark. What rubbed salt into the wound is the news he comes to know. His mother, Queen Gertrude, has already joined his uncle Claudius in matrimony. He now knows that his father is already dead and his mother has remarried. This hasty marriage, Hamlet suspects, is a foul play, especially with Claudius having been declared King, even though Hamlet is, in fact, the legal heir to the throne. His suspicion, later on, intensifies when the ghost reveals to him who the murderer is.
It is, therefore, in light of this Gertrude-Hamlet-Claudius relationship that the character of Hamlet would be psychologically explored; it is from within this relationship that Hamlet’s Oedipus Complex manifests itself. Repulsed by Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius, Hamlet unambiguously strikes a comparison between mythical Niobe’s eternal mourning and his mother’s grief over his father:
“Like Niobe, all tears; why she, even she—
O God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer, —married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month?
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!” (Act I, Sc. II)
Niobe, according to the ancient Greek mythology, married Amphion, twin brother of Zethus – both were sons of Zeus and Antiope, and founded the city of Thebes. Niobe was punished for her pride; her sons were killed by Apollo, while her daughters were slayed by Artemis:
“Six daughters and six sturdy sons.
Apollo killed them with his silver bow,
And Artemis, showering arrows, angry with Niobe
Because she compared herself to beautiful Leto” (Iliad, Book 24: 652–5)
Niobe’s children were killed as a punishment for their mother’s pride – that is, because of Niobe’s sin. Hence, Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius seems, to Hamlet, to be a sin or, in Hamlet’s words, an act of incest:
“She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!” (Act I, Sc. II)
This quick reference to Niobe, then, implies several foreshadowing signals with regard to Hamlet, as a character, in this Shakespearean tragedy. First, Hamlet may mean that vengeance would be taken very soon, since “Niobe illustrates the favourite Greek theme that the gods are quick to take vengeance” (Encyclopædia Britannica – Web article). It is because of Gertrude’s marriage that her child, Hamlet, now feels as if he was slayed. This is, for Hamlet, what appears to be the “truth,” which implies that “there is a far deeper truth that he must discover” (Bushnell 71).
This “far deeper truth,” turns out to be Hamlet’s Oedipus Complex, which is deeply rooted into his unconscious knowledge that Claudius has replaced his father as an impediment to realisation of his repressed, Oedipal wish. Hamlet, in other words, feels that he has to take revenge for his father; therefore, he steps in his father’s place. Hamlet, in a sense, assumes his father’s characteristics, to which he is looking up, which would, in turn, reflect his endeavour, deeply within his psyche, to fulfil his Oedipal desires:
“Hamlet: Look here, upon this picture, and on this;
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man:
This was your husband. Look you now, what
follows:
Here is your husband; like a mildew’d ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? 65
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed.
And batten on this Moor? Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it love, for at your age
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble.
And waits upon the judgement; and what judgement” – (Act III, Sc. IV)
In view of this comparison, Hamlet makes between his father and his uncle, Hamlet seems to be installing himself as his father, a comparison in which his desire to substitute his father manifests itself. However, he is disappointed because there is already a figure substituting his father, and his abhorrence seems to be shifted. The focal point of his disgust is now Claudius, who has stepped in the place of his father. It seems, to Hamlet, that his Oedipal desire will not be fulfilled, at least in the near future. At this point, therefore, another psychological concept emerges – namely, that of “Splitting.”
Out of continuous fixation on his mother, Hamlet’s Oedipal conflict did not come to an end with his father’s death; his anxiety of castration is still aerated. His repressed desire for his mother’s attention is now competing with her marriage to Claudius. The typical, psychological response to this situation is “splitting” – that is, according to Rycroft, the process “by which a mental structure loses its integrity and becomes replaced by two or more part structures” (Rycroft 173). This, for Freud, is “the way a child seeks to retain good feelings and introject good objects,” as Melanie Klein put it, “whilst expelling bad objects and projecting bad feelings onto an external object” (Qtd. in Bokanowski & Lewkowicz xvii). Hamlet, in this sense, views his mother as a “good object” that he has to introject and from Claudius whom he sees as a “bad object.”
In order to do so, Hamlet feigns insanity, in order to camouflage his plot for avenging his father’s death or, rather, for taking revenge against the figure who emerges in place of his father. He succeeds in convincing others that he is insane. “I will be brief. Your noble son is mad,” Polonius speaks to Gertrude, “Mad call I it; for, to define true madness. /What is ‘t but to be nothing else but mad?” (Act II, Sc. II). He also convinces other characters that he has gone off his head because of his father’s death. In this way, he ultimately manages to eliminate Claudius, but without fulfilling his very latent desire for his mother. Speaking to Polonius, Ophelia explains how Hamlet looked when visiting her:
“Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d,
Ungarter’d, and down-gyved to his ancle;
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors, he comes before me” (Act II, Sc. I).
Throughout this endeavour, the look Hamlet feigns is not the only means he employs to convince other characters of his insanity, in order to achieve his covert goal. There is also the language that he very intentionally employs. The highly expressive, well-measured language he speaks is persuasive, indeed. He is, nevertheless, fully aware of how language fails to fathom the very depths of ourselves. He “recognizes the failures of language itself,” as Bushnell convincingly put it, “as it teaches us to go beyond speech to where… “the rest is silence”” (Bushnell 51).
At this point, Jacques Lacan maintains that there are further, Oedipal dimensions within the character of Hamlet. Stressing how language significantly contributes to constructing the way(s) the language-speaking subject perceives itself and the world as a whole, Lacan maintains that the “father” figure stands, before the child, as a contender for its mother’s love. However, it is through this “father” figure that the child is initiated into the Symbolic order of language and consequently the social order . The child has, therefore, to identify with the “father” figure, an identification that takes place only through the Oedipus complex. In this sense, “the unconscious,” for Lacan, “is structured like a language” (S11 20).
The child, to put it another way, has to get separate from the “mother” figure, during its learning of the symbolic order of language, a stage that, for Lacan, equals Freud’s Oedipus Complex. From this time forth, the child keeps unconsciously desiring to get back to the Imaginary order, a state in which it identified with the “mother” figure. It is also from this time that the child, as a speaking subject, keeps developing its self-perception through its encounters by and through language; it becomes increasingly conscious of the strictures and prohibitions that the “father” figure imposes, and there necessitates “repression and creates the unconscious” (Wright 109).
The twisted forms of language, according to Lacan, reveal Hamlet’s unconscious, repressed desire to return to the state of identification with his mother. His persistent suppression of the signified conceals the deep meanings of his words and reveals his unconsciously repressed desire for identification with the “mother” figure. “You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife” (Act III, Sc. IV), “Forgive me this my virtue” (Act III, Sc. IV) and “I must be cruel, only to be kind’ (Act III, Sc. IV). It is this “constant punning, word play, double entendre,” in Hamlet’s employment of language, according to Lacan, that Shakespeare creates psychological dimensions within this tragedy (S6 11).
Othello, the Moor of Venice
Entrapped in Iago’s plot, Othello, the Moor of Venice, slays his most beloved woman, Desdemona. He asphyxiates her and kills himself, because he once believed the “truth” that Iago had fabricated—that Desdemona had an affair with his lieutenant, Cassio. This is, in brief, the story of Shakespeare’s Othello; nevertheless, it is still the story of almost every one of us. “All men have in them the seeds of passion, the ineradicable egotism, the proneness to self-doubt, that we find in Othello,” as Elias Schwartz emphasises, “[These traits] exist universally, in the best as in the worst of men” (Schwartz 302). It is in light of the Iago-Othello-Desdemona-Cassio complicated relationship that the character of Othello can be psychoanalytically read as a universal figure.
As it is the case with Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Othello, according to André Green, “the Oedipus complex assumes its \’negative\’ form of male hostility against the female” (Ellmann 39). Even though there is almost no direct reference made to Othello’s mother, we come to know about her, through the story of her handkerchief that Othello hands to Desdemona:
“Othello: That’s a fault. That handkerchief
Did an Egyptian to my mother give,
She was a charmer and could almost read
The thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it
‘Twould make her amiable and subdue my father
Entirely to her love, but if she lost it
Or made gift of it, my father’s eye
Should hold her loathèd and his spirits should hunt
After new fancies. She, dying, gave it me
And bid me, when my fate would have me wived,
To give it her. I did so, and take heed on ’t,
Make it a darling like your precious eye.
To lose ’t or give ’t away were such perdition
As nothing else could match.” (Act III, Sc. IV)
Hence, Othello seems to be installing Desdemona in the position of his mother; he is ostensibly seeking the “mother” figure in Desdemona, a situation in which Othello’s Oedipus Complex first seems to be in his relationship with Desdemona’s father, Brabantio. However, Othello manages to remove this “father” figure, whereby he can marry Desdemona. Othello’s “father” figure, therefore, seems to be lurking somewhere else; it is, indeed, Othello himself. As in Hamlet, the dramatic conflict and tragic sense of loss are brought forth by Shakespeare’s “splitting” strategy. The “father” figure, in Hamlet, was split into the late King, Hamlet’s biological father, and Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and the new husband of his mother. By the same token, the character of Othello can be regarded as consisting of Othello and Iago, most especially in light of “the resemblance between the word ‘Iago’ and the word ‘ego’” (Raatzsch 1):
“Hamlet: … Alas! Thou echo’st me,
As if there were some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shown” (Act III, Sc. III).
This would also be the reason why Shakespeare has “given extraordinary care to the delineation of Iago’s character” (Schwartz 297). Iago, in this sense, according to Schwartz, can be seen as “a projection of Othello’s egotism” (Schwartz 299). This argument is further intensified by the reading offered by Arnie Perlstein, a reading in which Iago is claimed to have “homosexual love for Othello” (Perlstein – Web article). This love, according to Perlstein, is obliquely signalled in the way Iago addresses Othello:
“Othello: …Now art thou my lieutenant.
Iago: I am your own forever.” (Act III, Sc. IV)
Iago’s jealousy of Desdemona, accordingly, can be regarded as a revenge, which stems, according to Martin Wagh, from “the basic paranoid defence mechanism… against [his] repressed homosexuality” (Wagh, as qtd. in Rogers 206-7). This defence mechanism is therefore projected onto the figure of Othello. As a consequence, the Othello-Iago conflict can be viewed as “the dramatic portrayal of what is fundamentally an endopsychic conflict” (Rogers 206) – that is, a conflict that takes place in Othello’s unconscious, in an attempt by Othello to internalise the “father” figure lurking deeply within his unconscious. The reason behind this intrpsychic conflict is, in other words, the Othello’s psychic composition of Iago and Othello or, rather, of the id and superego, as hypothesised by Freud in his Psychic Apparatus.
According to the Freudian “psychic apparatus,” the psyche consists of three parts: the id, the ego and the superego. Encompassing biological instincts, the id works at an unconscious level, whereas the superego prompts behaviours that are socially tolerable and responsible. Between the id and the superego, the ego mediates . Iago, as the unconscious, id of Othello, reveals what has long been concealed from Othello’s consciousness. Othello is, in other words, “the human soul as it strives to be,” as J. I. M. Stewart believes, “and Iago is that which corrodes and subverts it from within” (Stewart, as qtd. in Rogers 209).
From the very moment he gave his mother’s handkerchief to Desdemona, Othello is ostensibly doubting himself, a state that has its roots in his castration anxiety. The handkerchief stands as a symbol for an everlasting, faithful sexual bondage that he desires to have with Desdemona:
“Make it a darling like your precious eye.
To lose ’t or give ’t away were such perdition
As nothing else could match” (Act III, Sc. IV).
Hence, Othello is setting a taboo— that is, loss of the handkerchief, in which “he fears some danger… [expressing] a generalized dread of women” (Freud 2354). This is further highlighted when Othello asks Desdemona, “Fetch me the handkerchief—my mind misgives” (Act III, Sc. IV: 80). This doubt intensifies the most at the moment he sees the handkerchief in Cassio’s hands, a moment after which Othello takes no long time before stabbing himself and going west.
Thus, all that Iago does is that he fosters the self-doubt lurking within Othello’s mind, and this self-doubt, again, stems from his anxiety castration, which takes place as a result of his Oedipus Complex, and which stands as the major cause behind his intrpsychic conflict. Therefore, this conflict must be settled. As Othello’s unconscious id, and in reply to Othello’s conscious question, “Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” (Act V, Sc. II), Iago replies, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (Act V, Sc. II), a reply that resonates Hamlet’s “The rest is silence.” Also, the last cry of Othello, “O, Desdemona dead, Desdemona dead, O, O!” (Act V, Sc. II), echoes the sound of “O” that Hamlets repeats while catching his last breath, “O, O, O, O.” It also seems to be echoing the “O” sound in Othello’s name, a sound that serves “to objectify in language Othello’s hollow self” (Lupton 95).