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In 1923 Ernest Jones's 'Psycho-Analytic Study of Hamlet' (based on earlier essays, 1910 and 1911) was published as Chapter I of his Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, which was reviewed in this Journal. To-day, a shortened form of it appears together with the text of the play.
He first speaks of the play as a creation, in relation to its author, showing the penetration and comprehensiveness of Shakespeare's understanding of obsessional neurosis, its symptoms, its symbolism, and the deeper depression underlying it. He illustrates the origin of Hamlet's (hitherto unexplained) hesitation and indecision in the ambivalence of an unresolved and repressed Oedipus complex. He stresses the importance of the Oedipal ideas in relation to both parents, the main emphasis (as other writers have recognized) being on the incestuous ideas, without which the murder of the king would have been of less importance, but more simply and directly avenged.
Finally, he compares the plot of the play with those of the earlier plays and sagas from which Shakespeare derived it. In this way he shows how Shakespeare's interest was in the subtle drawing of a character of this particular type, rather than the more obvious 'man of action' feigning madness for political reasons, not psychological ones, portrayed in them.
The longer essay, besides giving more detail and multiplying references and quotations, develops the theme of the psychic splitting and duplicating of objects in Hamlet's relations to Laertes, Horatio, Ophelia, and Polonius. In the shortened version much of this is left out.
The text of the play (described only on the dustcover) is 'a carefully edited combination of the Quarto and Folio texts, aiming at presenting the closest approximation to what Shakespeare wrote'. The editor's name does not appear anywhere, but the many misprints, both in the text of