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This recent study of Hamlet combines two major psychoanalytic views: Freud-Jones and Frederick Wertham, or the Oedipal and Oresteian theories, emphasizing respectively patricidal and matricidal motives. Hamlet's struggle, as Lidz sees it, is to resist his matricidal impulse and attempt to rehabilitate his mother, rescuing her from the heinous sin of marrying Claudius. Lidz widens the basic oedipal scheme to include many other triangular relationships, within and without the family, conveniently diagrammed on a chart of congruent triangles (p. 16).
Lidz maintains the conventional and unexamined assumption of much psychoanalytic criticism that literary characters are not distinct from real persons. His sentences typically take the character Hamlet as their subject and proceed to analyze his psyche, personality, motives, past history, future hopes. Although at one point Lidz admits that "we know nothing of Hamlet's early childhood" (p. 199)—implicitly assuming that it is only the knowledge and not the childhood that is absent—a few pages later he wonders if the Dane's melancholy derives from Gertrude's inattention "when he was a toddler" (p. 222). The author of The Person (1968)1 concludes that "like all persons, male and female, [Hamlet] had experienced a narcissistic blow in childhood." Ernest Jones also invented a childhood for Hamlet, and others have further elaborated the fictitious history. I keep hoping that psychoanalytic criticism will get beyond this sort of unacknowledged projection: perhaps then analysts could talk less about Hamlet and more about Hamlet.
The book is packed with paraphrase and plot summaries. Part One follows a format of retelling highlights from Act One to Act Five: a pastiche of paraphrase and unanalyzed quotation, separated into brief sections and introduced by headings that read like the bottom lines of silent movies ("Hamlet in Deep Mourning," "Hamlet Suffers Two Serious Traumas," "Polonius Orders Ophelia to Avoid Hamlet"). P