Hamlet's Perfection by William Kerrigan Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994,  xvi + 179 pp., $29.95.

The scientific meetings of the American College of Psychoanalysts are divided into two parts, two formal presentations and colloquia. The study group that I have been associated with for a number of years is that on the family and is led by Ted Lidz, of Yale. He suggested that a relevant topic for the group to consider in the light that it shed on the family would be Shakespearean plays. First among these is Hamlet, and, in May 1994, we had a session on Hamlet in which Lidz's book Hamlet's Enemy—Madness and Myth in Hamlet was prominently reviewed. In this colloquium, we discussed at length the Freud-Jones oedipal approach to the Hamlet story and contrasted it with Lidz's approach, which emphasizes Hamlet's anger at his mother, Gertrude, for her betrayal of the father and consequently of himself.

This is by way of a long introduction to the review of William Kerrigan's Hamlet's Perfection. When I first saw this title I was excited that Kerrigan would be au-courant with current psychoanalytic theory and not only would deal with the Freud-Jones oedipal formulation that Hamlet was unable to act because he had the same destructive impulses against his father that his uncle did but also would include some of the exciting work done in self psychology and the whole area of narcissism begun by Heinz Kohut. After all, the word perfection is related to a narcissistic issue and I was therefore looking forward to an exposition of that approach.

Alas, I was doubly disappointed. Not only was Kerrigan not familiar with Lidz's book at all, but there was no reference to Kohut and self psychology. Rather, psychoanalytic references referred only to the traditional Oedipus complex that Freud adumbrated in The Interpretation of Dreams. As is well known, Freud was very excited to find an explanation of Hamlet's tragic indecision when he could not act out his parallel oedipal fantasies (fratricide) and