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2 - Freud's Mousetrap
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
We do not like the real Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds.
A. C. BradleyIf psychoanalysis begins with a letter – one in which Freud tells his friend Fliess, on 15 October 1897, of his discovery of the Oedipus complex – its origin also marks its immediate entanglement with literature. For, in the same letter, Freud speaks of finding the first ‘response’ to his discovery, the first confirmation of the new knowledge, in a literary text – indeed, we might say, in the literary text: Shakespeare's Hamlet. What Freud begins as a casual afterthought ends up sketching a whole theory of the artwork's Ursprung, one that will set the agenda for decades of so-called ‘applied’ psychoanalysis:
Fleetingly the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero. How does Hamlet the hysteric justify his words ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all’? How does he explain his irresolution in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle – the same man who send his courtiers to their death without a scruple and who is positively precipitate in murdering Laertes? How better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother.
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- James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis , pp. 31 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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