The Shame of Hamlet and Oedipus*

I am concerned in this paper with shame and its existential consequences as a source of human suffering. I do not believe that shame is the only emotion peculiar to suffering. Other emotions, such as guilt, anger, envy, fear, and so forth, have often been identified as major themes in the pathos of suffering; shame, too often, has not. Moreover, in my view, Freud's excessive emphasis on guilt, the Oedipus complex, and repression theory has had an aversive influence on psychoanalytic practice.1 For this reason, as I will delineate in this paper, the patient suffering from experiences of shame is frequently misunderstood and, as a result, inadequately treated clinically.

In my exploration of how the moral masochism model evolved in psychoanalytic theory, I will discuss Freud's rationale in choosing the Oedipus myth as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. It will be shown that Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus complex in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is based on a limited selection of the components of the story and that vital features of the myth, necessary to a proper understanding of human suffering, were excluded from his purview. To demonstrate my thesis that shame and its existential consequences, rather than moral masochism, lie at the heart of our difficulty in understanding complex manifestations of human suffering far more often than the psychoanalytic literature suggests, I will reexamine Shakespeare's Hamlet, the “case study” used by Freud to