Repression, Melancholia, and the Death Drive: An Integrated Freudian Reading of Hamlet (Published)
This article provides a Freudian psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, focusing on the prince’s delay in avenging his father’s murder. Employing a structural approach grounded in Classical Freudian theory, the study examines how Oedipal identification, melancholic incorporation, and the death drive interact to produce Hamlet’s inaction and the play’s tragic resolution. Methodologically, the research combines close textual analysis of soliloquies, key dialogues, and dramatic events with theoretical insights from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/2003) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/2003), supplemented by contemporary psychoanalytic scholarship. Findings reveal that Hamlet’s procrastination is not intellectual or moral but psychically determined: Claudius externalizes repressed patricidal desire, Gertrude embodies maternal ambivalence, and Ophelia functions as a displaced object of libido and aggression. Repetition compulsion and fixation on mortality structure his soliloquies and actions, culminating in revenge coinciding with self-destruction. The study demonstrates the centrality of unconscious structures in shaping character motivation, narrative delay, and thematic development. Implications extend to psychoanalytic literary criticism, affect theory, and interdisciplinary Shakespeare studies. Future research may explore comparative Oedipal dynamics in other tragedies, performative enactments of repression, and intersections with cognitive literary studies and trauma theory.
Keywords: Freud, Oedipus complex, Shakespeare, death drive, melancholia, repression, tragedy