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TABLE DES SÉANCES 42 page

The first disturbing factor, that of more pronounced "repression," manifests itself by the same mechanisms that Freud has described in connection with normal dreams,[1] psychoneurotic symptoms, etc. The most interesting of these mechanisms in myth formation is that of "decomposition" (Auseinanderlegung), which is the opposite to the "condensation" (Verdichtung) mechanism so characteristic of normal dreams. Whereas in the latter process attributes of several individuals are fused in the creation of one figure, much as in the production of a composite photograph, in the former process various attributes of a given person are disunited and several individuals are invented, each endowed with one group of the original attributes. In this way one person, of complex character, gets replaced by several, each of whom possess a different aspect of the character that in a simpler form of the myth was combined in one being; usually the different individuals closely resemble one another in other respects, for instance in age. A good example of this process is seen by the figure of the tyrannical father becoming split into two, a father and a tyrant. The resolution of the original figure is most often incomplete, so that the two resulting ones stand in a close relation to each other, being indeed as a rule members of the same family. The tyrant who seeks to destroy the hero is then most commonly the grandfather, as in the legends of Cyrus, Gilgam, Perseus, Telephos and others, or the grand-uncle, as in those of Romulus and Remus and their Greek predecessors, Amphion and Zethos; less often is he the uncle, as in the Hamlet legend. When the decomposition is more complete, the tyrant is not of the same family as the father, though he may be socially related, as in the case of Abraham whose father Therachs was the tyrant Nimrod's commander-in-chief; as a rule the tyrant is in this sub-group a stranger, as in the cases of Moses and Pharaoh, Feridun and Zohäk, Jesus and Herod, and others. In the last two instances, and in many others, not only are the mother and son, but also the father, persecuted by the tyrant, and we thus reach a still more complex variant, well represented by the Feridun legend, in which the son adores his father and avenges him by slaying their common enemy. The picture of the son as avenger instead of as slayer of the father therefore illustrates the highest degree of psychological "repression," in which the true meaning of the story is concealed by the identical mechanism that in real life conceals "repressed" hostility and jealousy in so many families, namely, exaggerated solicitude, care and respect. The dutiful Laertes avenging his murdered father Polonius is probably also an instance of the same stage in the development of the myth. Suppressed hate towards a father would seem to be adequately concealed by being thus masked by devotion and desire to avenge, and Shakspere's modification of the Hamlet legend is the only instance in which intense "repression" has produced still further distortion of the hero's attitude; in this legend, however, the matter is more complicated by the unusual prominence of the love for the mother over the hate for the father, and by the appearance of other factors such as the relationship of the tyrant to the father and to the mother.



    1. See Abraham: Traum und Mythus, 1908.

Not only may the two above-mentioned attributes of the parent, fatherliness and tyranny, be split off so as to give rise to the creation of separate figures, but others also. For instance, the power and authority of the parent may be invested in the person of a king or other distinguished man, who may be contrasted with the lowly-born father.[1] In the present legend I think it probable that the figure of Polonius may be thus regarded as resulting from the "decomposition" of the parental archetype, and as representing a certain group of qualities which the young not infrequently find an irritating feature in their elders. The senile nonentity, concealed behind a show of fussy pomposity, who has developed a rare capacity to bore his audience with the repetition of sententious platitudes in which profound ignorance of life is but thinly disguised by a would-be worldly-wise air; the prying busybody whose meddling is, as usual, excused by his "well-meaning" intentions, constitutes a figure that is sympathetic only to those who submissively accept the world's estimate concerning the superiority of the merely decrepit.

    1. This important theme, which is fully dealt with by Freud and Rank, I have not here discussed, for it does not enter into the present legend. Abraham (Op. cit., S. 40) has interestingly pointed out the significance of it in the development of paranoiac delusions.

The second disturbing factor is that due to the interweaving of the main theme of jealousy and incest between parent and child with other allied ones of a similar kind. We noted above that in the simplest form of decomposition of the paternal attributes the tyrannical rle is most often relegated to the grandfather. It is no mere chance that this is so, and it is not fully to be accounted for by incompleteness of the decomposition. There is a deeper reason why the grandfather is most often chosen to play the part of tyrant, and this will be readily perceived when we recollect the large number of legends in which he has previously interposed all manner of obstacles to the marriage of his daughter. He opposes the advances of the would-be suitor, sets in his way various apparently impossible tasks and conditions – usually these are miraculously carried out by the lover, – and even locks up his daughter in an inaccessible spot, as in the legends of Gilgamos, Perseus, Romulus, Telephos and others. The motive is at bottom that he grudges to give up his daughter to another man, not wishing to part with her himself (Father-daughter complex). When his commands are disobeyed or circumvented, his love for his daughter turns to bitterness, and he pursues her and her offspring with insatiable hate. We are here once more reminded of events that may be observed in daily life by those who open their eyes to the facts. When the grandson in the myth avenges himself and his mother by slaying her tyrannical father, it is as though he clearly realised the motive of the persecution, for in truth he slays the man who endeavoured to possess and retain the mother's affection; thus in this sense we again come back to the father, and see that from the hero's point of view the distinction between the father and grandfather is not so radical as it at first sight appears. We perceive, therefore, that for two reasons the resolution of the original parent into a kind father and a tyrannical grandfather is not a very extensive one.

The foregoing considerations throw more light on the figure of Polonius in the present legend. In his attitude towards the relation between Ophelia and Hamlet are many of the traits that we have just mentioned to be characteristic of the Father-daughter complex, though by the mechanism of rationalisation they are here skilfully cloaked under the guise of worldly-wise advice. Hamlet's resentment towards him is thus doubly conditioned, in that first Polonius, by the mechanism of "decomposition," personates a group of obnoxious elderly attributes, and secondly presents the equally objectional attitude of the dog-in-the-manger father who grudges to others what he possesses, but cannot enjoy, himself. In this way, therefore, Polonius represents the repellant characteristics of both the father and the grandfather of mythology, and we are not surprised to find that, just as Perseus accidentally slew his grandfather Acrisios, who had locked up his daughter Danae so as to preserve her virginity, so does Hamlet "accidentally" slay Polonius, by a deed that resolves the situation as correctly from the dramatic as from the mythological point of view. With truth has this act been called the turning point of the play, for from then on the tragedy relentlessly proceeds to its culmination in the doom of the hero and his adversary.

The characteristics that constitute the Father-daughter complex are found in a similar one, the Brother-sister complex. This also may be seen in the present play, where the attitude of Laertes towards his sister Ophelia is quite indistinguishable from that of their father Polonius. Further, Hamlet not only keenly resents Laertes' open expression of his devoted affection for Ophelia – in the grave scene, – but at the end of the play kills him, as he had previously killed Polonius, in an accurate consummation of the mythological motve. That the Brother-sister complex was operative in the formation of the Hamlet legend is also evidenced by the incest between Claudius and the Queen, for from a religious point of view the two stood to each other in exactly the same relationship as do brother and sister. This conclusion may be further supported by the fol- lowing – avowedly more tentative – considerations. The preceding remark about the two main traits in Polonius, those characteristic of a pompous father of a son and a grudging father of a daughter, gives room for the supposition that his family was in a sense a rough duplicate of the main family in the legend. This notion of duplication of the principal characters will be mentioned in more detail in the next paragraph, and the present line of thought will then perhaps become clearer. In the sense here taken Laertes would therefore represent a brother of Hamlet, and Ophelia a sister. This being so, we would seem to trace a still deeper ground for the original motives of both Hamlet's misogynous turning from Ophelia, and his jealous resentment of Laertes. As, however, this theme of the relation between siblings is of only secondary interest in the Hamlet legend, discussion of it will be reserved for other legends in which it is more prominent (e.g., those of Cyrus, Karna, etc.).

The third factor to be considered is the process technically known to mythologists as "doubling" of the principal characters. The chief motive for its occurrence seems to be the desire to exalt the importance of these, and especially to glorify the hero, by decoratively filling in the stage with lay figures of colourless copies whose neutral movements contrast with the vivid activities of the principals. This factor is sometimes hard to distinguish from the first one, for a given multiplication of figures may subserve at the same time the function of decomposition and that of doubling. In general it may be said that the former function is more often fulfilled by the creation of a new person who is a relative of the principal characters, the latter by the creation of a person who is not a relative; this rule however has many exceptions. In the present legend Claudius seems to subserve both functions, and it is interesting to note that in many legends it is not the father's figure who is doubled by the creation of a brother, but the grandfather's. This is so in some versions of the Perseus legend, and, as was mentioned above, in those of Romulus and Amphion; in all three of these the creation of the king's brother, as in the Hamlet legend, subserves the functions of both decomposition and doubling. Good instances of the simple doubling processes are seen in the case of the maid of Pharaoh's daughter in the Moses legend, or of many of the figures in the Cyrus one.[1] Perhaps the purest examples of doubling in the present play are the colourless copies of Hamlet presented by the figures of Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo. Laertes and the younger Fortinbras, on the other hand, are examples of both doubling and decomposition of the main figure. The figure of Laertes is more complex than that of Fortinbras in that it is composed of three components instead of two; he evinces, namely, the influence of Brother-sister complex in a way that contrasts with the "repressed" form in which this is manifested in the central figures of the play. Hamlet's jealousy of Laertes' interference in connection with Ophelia is further to be compared with his resentment of the meddling of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. These are therefore only copies of the Brother of mythology, and, like him, are killed by the hero; in them is further to be detected a play on the "Twin" motive so often found in mythology, but which need not be further developed here. Both Laertes and Fortinbras represent one "decomposed" aspect of the hero, namely that concerned with revenge for a murdered or injured father.

    1. This is very clearly pointed out by Rank, Op.cit., S. 84, 85.

It is instructive to note that neither of them shew any sign of inhibition in the performance of this task, and that with neither is any reference made to his mother. In Hamlet, on the other hand, in whom "repressed" love for the mother is even more powerful than "repressed" hostility towards the father, inhi- bition appears; this is because the stronger complex is stimulated by the fact that the object of revenge owes his guilt to the desire to win the mother.

The important subject of the actual mode of origin of myths and legends, and the relation of them to infantile fantasies, will not here be considered,[1] as our interest in the topic is secondary to the main one of the play of Hamlet as given to us by Shakspere. Enough perhaps has been said of the comparative mythology of the Hamlet legend to shew that in it are to be found ample indications of the working of all forms of incestuous fantasy. We may summarise the foregoing considerations of this part of the subject by saying that the main theme of this story is a highly elaborated and distorted account of a boy's love for his mother and consequent jealousy of and hostility towards his father; the allied one in which the sister and brother respectively play the same part as the mother and father in the main theme is also told, though with secondary interest.

Last of all in this connection may be mentioned on account of its general psychological interest a matter which has provoked much discussion, namely Hamlet's so-called "simulation of madness."[2] The traits in Hamlet's behaviour thus designated are brought to expression by Shakspere in such a refined and subtle way as to be not very transpicuous unless one studies them in the original saga. In the play Hamlet's feigning mainly takes the form of fine irony, and serves the purpose of enabling him to express contempt and hostility in an indirect and disguised form (indirekte Darstellung). His conversations with Polonius beautifully illustrate the mechanism. The irony in the play is a transmutation of the still more concealed mode of expression adopted in the saga, where the hero's audience commonly fails to apprehend his meaning. Of this, Saxo Grammaticus writes,[3] "He was loth to be thought prone to lying about any matter, and wished to be held a stranger to falsehood; and accordingly he mingled craft and candour in such wise that, though his words did not lack truth, yet there was nothing to betoken the truth and betray how far his keeness went." Here Hamlet plainly adopts his curious behaviour in order to further his scheme of revenge, to which, as we shall presently note, he had in the saga whole-heartedly devoted himself.

    1. Those interested in this subject are referred to the writings of Freud, Abraham, Rank and Riklin.
    2. My attention was kindly called to this point by a personal communication from Professor Freud.
    3. Quoted after Loening: Op. cit., S. 249.

The actual mode of operation of his simulation here is very instructive to observe, for it gives us the clue to a deeper psychological interpretation of the process. His conduct in this respect has three characteristics, first the obscure and disguised manner of speech just referred to, secondly a demeanour of indolent inertia and purposelessness, and thirdly conduct of childish and at times almost imbecillic foolishness (Dummstellen); the third of these is well exemplified by the way he rides into the palace seated backwards on a donkey. His motive in so acting was, by playing the part of a harmless fool, to deceive the king and court as to his projects of revenge, and unobserved to get to know their plans and intentions; in this he admirably succeeded. It has been maintained that even in the play this motive of spying on the king and disarming his suspicions was at work, but even if this was the case, and there are grave reasons for doubting it,[1] it is certainly more evident in the saga. Now, in observing the kind of foolishness simulated by Hamlet in the saga, we cannot help being impressed by the childish characteristics it throughout manifests, and Freud points out how accurately it resembles a certain type of demeanour adopted at times by some children. The motive with these children is further a like one, namely to simulate innocence and an exaggerated childishness, even foolishness, in order to delude their elders into regarding them as being "too young to understand" and even into altogether ignoring their presence. The reason for the artifice with such children most frequently is that by this means they may view and overhear various private things which they are not supposed to. It need hardly be said that the curiosity thus indulged in is in most cases concerned with matters of a directly sexual nature; even marital embraces are in this way investigated by quite young children far more frequently than is generally supposed. The subject is one that would bear much exposition, but it would be too far from the main theme of this essay to render justifiable its inclusion here.

It is highly instructive now to note the respects in which Shakspere's plot deviates from that of the original saga; we are, of course, not here concerned with the poetic and literary representation, which not merely revivified an old story, but created an entirely new work of genius. The changes are mainly two[2] in number.

    1. See on the point Loening. Loc. cit., and S. 387.
    2. Lesser points, important as they are, cannot here be followed out. Such is for instance the way Shakspere accepts Belleforest's alteration of the original saga in making the Queen commit incest during the life of her first husband. The significance of this will be obvious to those who have followed the argument above presented.

The first is as follows: in the saga Claudius(or Fengo, as he is here called) had murdered his brother in public, so that the deed was generally known, and further had with lies and false witnesses sought to justify it in that he pretended it was done to save the Queen from the threats of her husband.[1] This view he successfully imposed on the nation so that, as Belleforest[2] has it, "his sin found excuse among the people and was considered justice by the nobility – so that instead of prosecuting him as one guilty of parricide[3] and incest, all of the courtiers applauded him and flattered him on his good fortune." When Shakspere altered this to a secret murder known only to Hamlet it would seem as though it was done, consciously or unconsciously, to minimise the external difficulties of Hamlet's task, for it is obviously harder to rouse a nation to condemn a crime that has been openly explained and universally forgiven than one which has been guiltily concealed. If Shakspere had retained the original plot in this respect there would have been more excuse for the Klein-Werder hypothesis, though it is to be observed that even in the saga Hamlet unhesitatingly executed his task, herculean as it was. Shakspere's rendering makes still more conspicuous Hamlet's recalcitrancy, in that it disposes of the only justifiable plea for non-action.

    1. Those who are acquainted with Freud's work will have no difficulty in discerning the sadistic origin of this pretext. (See Sammlung kleiner Schriften, Zweite Folge, 1909, S. 169.) The interpretation of an overheard coitus as an act of violence offered to the mother is frequently an aggravating cause of hostility towards the father.
    2. Quoted after Loening, Op. cit., S. 248.
    3. This should of course be fratricide, though the word parricide was occasionally used in old French to denote a murder of any elder relative. It is conceivable that the mistake is a "Verschreiben," unconsciously motived in Freud's sense. (See Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1907, Cap. VI.)

The second and all-important respect in which Shakspere changed the story, and thus revolutionised the tragedy, is the vacillation and hesitancy he introduced into Hamlet's attitude towards his task, with the consequent paralysis of his action. In all the previous versions Hamlet was throughout a man of rapid decision and action, not – as with Shakspere's version – in everything except in the task of vengeance. He had, as Shakspere's Hamlet felt he should have, swept to his revenge unimpeded by any doubts or scruples, and had never flinched from the straightforward path of duty. With him duty and natural inclination went hand in hand; from his heart he wanted to do that which he believed he ought to do, and was thus harmoniously impelled by both the summons of his conscience and the cry of his blood. There was none of the deep-reaching conflict that was so disastrous to Shakspere's Hamlet. It is as though Shakspere had read the previous story and realised that had he been placed in a similar situation he would not have found the path of action so obvious as was supposed, but on the contrary would have been torn in a conflict which was all the more intense for the fact that he could not explain its nature. In this transformation Shakspere exactly reversed the plot of the tragedy, for, whereas in the saga this consisted in the overcoming external difficulties and dangers by a single-hearted hero, in the play these are removed and the plot lies in the fateful unrolling of the consequences that result from an internal conflict in the hero's soul. From the struggles of the hero issue dangers which at first did not exist, but which, as the effect of his untoward essays, loom increasingly portentous until at the end they close and involve him in final destruction. More than this, every action he so reluctantly engages in for the fulfilment of his obvious task seems half-wittingly to be disposed in such a way as to provoke destiny, in that, by arousing suspicion and hostility in his enemy, it defeats its own object and helps to encompass his own ruin. The conflict in his soul is to him insoluble, and the only steps he can make are those that inexorably draw him nearer and nearer to his doom. In him, as in every victim of a powerful unconscious conflict, the Will to Death is fundamentally stronger than the Will to Life, and his struggle is at heart one long despairing fight against suicide, the least intolerable solution of the problem. Being unable to free himself from the ascendency of his past he can travel – to Death. In thus vividly exhibiting the desperate but unavailing struggle of a strong man against Fate, Shakspere achieved the very essence of the Greek conception of tragedy.

There is therefore reason to believe that the new life which Shakspere poured into the old tragedy was the outcome of inspirations that took their origin in the deepest and most hidden parts of his mind. He responded to the peculiar appeal of the story by projecting into it his profoundest thoughts in a way that has ever since wrung wonder from all who have heard or read the tragedy. It is only fitting that the greatest work of the world-poet should have been concerned with the deepest problem and the intensest conflict that has occupied the mind of man since the beginning of time, the revolt of youth and of the impulse to love against the restraints imposed by the jealous eld.

 


 

18 Mars 1959 Table des séances

 

HAMLET ( 3 )

 

 

Les principes analytiques sont tout de même tels que, pour arriver au but, il ne faut pas se bousculer. Peut-être certains d'entre vous croient-ils…

je pense qu'il n'y en a

pas beaucoup de cette sorte

…que nous sommes loin de la clinique.

 

Ce n'est pas vrai du tout !

Nous y sommes en plein parce que ce dont il s'agit étant de situer le sens du désir, du désir humain,

ce mode de repérage auquel nous procédons…

sur ce qui est, au reste, depuis le début,

un des grands thèmes de la pensée analytique

…est quelque chose qui ne saurait d'aucune façon nous détourner de ce qui est de nous requis comme le plus urgent.

 

Il a été dit beaucoup de choses sur HAMLET,

et j'y ai fait allusion la dernière fois.

J'ai essayé de montrer l'épaisseur de l'accumulation des commentaires sur HAMLET.

 

Il m'est arrivé, dans l'intervalle, un document après lequel je gémissais dans mon désir de perfectionnisme,

à savoir le Hamlet and Œdipus d'Ernest JONES.[68]

Je l'ai lu pour m'apercevoir qu'en somme, JONES avait tenu son bouquin au courant de ce qui s'est passé depuis 1909. Et ce n'est plus à LŒNING [69] qu'il fait allusion comme référence recommandable, mais à

Dover WILSON [70] qui a écrit beaucoup sur HAMLET et qui a fort bien écrit.

Dans l'intervalle, comme j'avais lu moi-même

une partie de l'œuvre de Dover WILSON, je crois

que je vous en ai donné à peu près la substance.

 

C'est plutôt un certain recul qu'il s'agirait

de prendre maintenant par rapport à tout cela,

à la spéculation de JONES qui, je dois le dire,

est fort pénétrante et - on peut dire - dans l'ensemble, d'un autre style que tout ce qui, dans la famille analytique, a pu être écrit, ajouté sur le sujet.

 

Il fait des remarques très justes que je me trouve simplement reprendre en l'occasion.

 

Il fait en particulier cette remarque de simple bon sens qu'HAMLET n'est pas un personnage réel et que, tout de même, nous poser les questions les plus profondes concernant le caractère d'HAMLET, c'est peut-être quelque chose qui mérite qu'on s'y arrête un peu plus sérieusement qu'on ne le fait d'habitude.

 

Comme toujours, quand nous sommes dans un domaine

qui concerne :

- d'une part notre exploration,

- et aussi d'autre part un objet,

il y a une double voie à suivre.

 

Notre voie nous engage dans une certaine spéculation fondée sur l'idée que nous nous faisons de l'objet.

 

Il est bien évident qu'il y a des choses, je dirais, à déblayer au tout premier plan.

En particulier, par exemple, que ce à quoi nous avons affaire dans les œuvres d'art…

et spécialement dans les œuvres dramatiques

…ce sont des caractères, au sens où on l'entend en français.

 

Des caractères, c'est­à-dire quelque chose dont nous supposons que l'auteur, lui, en possède toute l'épaisseur, qu'il a fait un bonhomme, un caractère et il serait censé nous émouvoir par la transmission des caractères de ce caractère.

Et par cette seule signalisation, nous serions déjà introduits à une espèce de réalité supposée

qui serait au-delà de ce qu'il nous est donné

dans l'œuvre d'art.

 

Je dirai qu'HAMLET a déjà cette propriété

très importante de nous faire sentir à quel point, cette vue pourtant commune que nous appliquons à tout propos spontanément quand il s'agit d'une œuvre d'art, est tout de même tout au moins sinon à réfuter, du moins à suspendre.

 

Car en fait, dans tout art il y a deux points sur lesquels nous pouvons nous accrocher solidement de la main, comme à des repères absolument certains, c'est qu'il ne suffit pas de dire comme je l'ai dit, qu'HAMLET est une espèce de miroir où chacun s'est vu à sa façon, lecteur ou spectateur.

 

Mais laissons les spectateurs qui sont insondables…

 

En tout cas la diversité des interprétations critiques qui en ont été données suggère qu'il y a quelque mystère, car la somme de ce qui a été avancé, affirmé à propos d'HAMLET, est à proprement parler inconciliable, contradictoire, je pense déjà vous l'avoir suffisamment montré la dernière fois.

 

J'ai articulé que la diversité des interprétations était strictement de l'ordre du contraire au contraire.


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