Carl Goldberg, in his paper entitled “Why Hamlet Could Not Love,” expressed dissatisfaction with Freud's oedipal metaphor as sufficient explanation of Hamlet's conflict and character. The play, he said, is about words, and how Hamlet replaced his capacity to love with an exceptionally intuitive grasp of how to manipulate others, rather than reveal himself, through the use of words. That is, since the intolerable loss of his father and betrayal by his mother, uncle, and friends, Hamlet's brilliant and poetic words have come to substitute for personal relations leading to ineptitude, hesitancy, inaction, and aloneness. Love is destroyed, not enacted. Goldberg argued on the basis of “literary evidence” that existential shame, not unconscious guilt is fundamental to Hamlet's suffering and that this shame arises in the context of (1) Hamlet's unconscious identification with King Hamlet's unknowledged shame from his victimization and betrayal by