Hamlet and Psychoanalytic Experience

Hamlet draws us into its rendered world, enabling us to experience it with depth, awareness, and resonance, in a mode we recognize as aesthetic. By way of Shakespeare's play—primarily the first act—and a detailed case study, aesthetic and psychoanalytic experience are compared, to suggest that, for our own analytic discourse, we revalue Freud's unease that his case studies read like short stories.

On the cold battlements of Elsinore, a soldier, coming to the relief of another on watch, asks edgily into the dark: “Who's there?” Grateful to meet, they are joined by a third and by Horatio, a close friend of Hamlet's. Together they talk uneasily about something eerie. For two nights, the late King Hamlet's ghost has appeared, arrayed in full armor but saying nothing. Horatio, university-educated and skeptical, has come expecting to distinguish between what must be their fearful fantasies and actuality. When lo, the ghost appears again: solemn, impressive, and undeniable. Horatio coaxes and pleads with it to speak, to announce its purpose, but it will not. The group speculate that armed thus for battle, the ghost may fear that young Fortinbras of Norway aims to recapture land King Hamlet had wrested from the Norwegian's father. The king's ghost—we will eventually learn—will speak only to his son, to reveal that he has been murdered by his brother Claudius and that it is Hamlet's task—if ever he his dear father loved— to take revenge. Claudius also has seduced the queen (whether before