Civilization And It's Discontents: A Freudian Analysis Of Hamlet

The ideas put forth by Sigmund Freud in his work Civilization and It’s Discontents are able to help us understand Hamlet by William Shakespeare on a more subconscious level. The ideas such as the Oceanic Feeling, the Superego, Thanatos, and aggression are all key elements to the infamous closet scene in Hamlet’s Act 3, Scene 4. When Hamlet enters his mother’s closet in an attempt to restrict her from sleeping with Claudius, he ends up experiencing unconscious feelings of erotic desire, aggression, and violence. These feeling cease as the Ghost of King Hamlet enters and acts as Hamlet’s superego or moral compass which prohibits him from fulfilling his instinctual desires, in this case, they were of sex or violence. By applying a Freudian lens to Hamlet, a reader can better understand Shakespeare’s subconscious. Freud puts forth many ideas and theories in his work, but three of them in particular resonate with Hamlet and help us to understand it on a subconscious level. These ideas are the Oceanic Feeling, the Super-ego, Thanatos, and aggression. The Oceanic Feeling is …show more content…
It is the desire for connectedness- for no separation between oneself and an object, “a feeling of indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably to the external world as a whole” (Freud 9). It is also a desire for a sense of belonging and control, “and the ideational content of belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe-the same feeling as that described by my friend as ‘oceanic’” (Freud 14). This act of searching for the Oceanic Feeling is something that Freud would argue all humans attempt to do, and the fictitious character Hamlet is no exception. There are three more Freudian ideas that resonate throughout Hamlet: the Super-ego, Thanatos, and aggression. The Super-ego is