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The centuries of critical and psychological debate occasioned by Shakespeare's Hamlet have centered largely around whether young Hamlet's madness was truly feigned or was, in fact, real, i.e., the question of diagnosis; and the reasons behind his procrastination and apparent inability to revenge his father's murder, i.e., the question of psychodynamics.
The tone of modern psychological criticism of Hamlet was set by Freud (1900) in The Interpretation of Dreams. Speaking of Hamlet's procrastination, he says:
“What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his father's ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish. Here I have translated into conscious terms what was bound to remain Hamlet's mind; and if anyone is inclined to call him a hysteric, I can only accept the fact as one that is implied by my interpretation.”
This interpretation of Hamlet's indecision, procrastination, and paralysis of action in revenging his father's murder as being based on repressed and unresolved Oedipal wishes, and the consequent