Hamlet's Delay

This paper raises a question about Freud's understanding of Hamlet and offers a fresh psychoanalytic perspective on the play, emphasizing the psychological use made of Hamlet by the audience. It suggests Hamlet and Claudius both serve as sacrificial objects, scapegoats, for the audience, embodying, through a mechanism of both identification and disidentification, the fulfillment, punishment, and renunciation of the audience's forbidden (i.e. Oedipal) wishes. The play is thus seen to represent unconsciously a rite of sacrifice in which both Claudius and Hamlet, both the father and the son, are led, albeit circuitously, to the slaughter. The need for delay on the part of Hamlet is thus seen to arise not merely from Hamlet's psychology, whatever the audience may project onto it, but ultimately from the function (both sadistic and defensive) that the sacrificial spectacle, the play as a whole, serves for the audience. The paper also speculates somewhat on the role of tragic heroes and heroines in general, and points to the unconscious collusion that permits author and audience to make use of them. Finally, in an addendum, the paper discusses the work of René Girard, a nonpsychoanalytic thinker whose ideas nonetheless are somewhat similar to those presented here.