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In the 400 years of Hamlet interpretation, psychoanalysis is a relative newcomer, only a century or so old. During that century, there have been notable shifts in the mode of interpreting the play, both in the critical world at large and in the narrower psychoanalytic world. In part, changes in the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play have had to do with shifts in dominant psychoanalytic paradigms—a process even more striking in the history of interpretation of Oedipus Rex than of Hamlet.1 In part, however, changes in the dominant mode of literary critical interpretations of the play have set the stage, as it were, for new psychoanalytic approaches.2
I would like, in this essay, to review several broad trends in the history of interpretation of the play and to locate within those trends some dominant themes in psychoanalytic interpretation. In that context, I then want to offer my own late-twentieth-century psychoanalytic interpretation—both of Hamlet and Hamlet—based on trauma theory.
My fundamental thesis is that psychoanalytic interpretations, particularly those of individual characters in the play, rely on a long-standing “medical model.” This is most prominent in regard to the question of Hamlet's insanity—whether it is real, feigned, or both. The medical model goes back at least to 1778, according to the New Variorum edition, when a certain Dr. Akenside is said to have been the first physician “to assert that Hamlet's insanity is real” (Furness 1877, 195).3 Much energy has gone into diagnosing the precise nature of Hamlet's melancholy and Ophelia's madness. Like King Lear and Lady Macbeth, both characters gradually became exemplars of derangement for clinical medicine to the point where a nineteenth-century asylum doctor could write that he had admitted “many Ophelias” to his ward (Showalter 1985, 86).