im; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this hesitation, nor have the manifold attempts at interpretation succeeded in doing so" (Freud 306). Actually, Hamlet expresses a concern for his soul. Several times in the course of the play Hamlet worries about whether the Ghost is a device of the devil, sent to him in the midst of grief for his father. The Ghost "May be the devil; and the devil hath power / To assume a pleas ing shape, yea, and perhaps / . . . Abuses me to damn me" (II.ii). However, Freud's main purpose is not so much to lament the absence of dramatic motive for Hamlet's hesitation as to explain the motive pattern in the play in psychoanalytical terms. His view of Hamlet's famous inaction is that it is symptomatic of a repressed neurotic wish-fulfillment fantasy regarding the death of his father and sex with his mother. Hatred Hamlet feels for Claudius is psychologically mediated by the fact that the death of the father has been accomplished, but it is aggravated by the fact that a new father figure has supplanted the old, which maintains Hamlet in psychosexual, incestuous competition. Thus, says Freud, Hamlet can
do anything but take vengeance upon the man who . . . shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own child hood. The loathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish" (Freud 306).
Freud's analysis of Hamlet as a neurotic or hysterical personality based on repressed Oedipal desires can be more inferred than directly manifest. Such reference to incest as there is focuses on the biblical injunction against marrying one's brother's wife. Hamlet touches on this in the closet scene, analyzing the marriage and explaining its consequences, with a view toward redeeming her soul and urging her toward a better experience of her own history and de...