Contested Will (25 page)
Authors: James Shapiro
Freud's letters to Fleiss convey the turbulence in his life following his father's death in 1896, a decisive year in the development of psychoanalysis, for it was at just this time that Freud abandoned his seduction theory in favour of an Oedipal one in accounting for his patients' hysteria and claims of sexual abuse. Freud's reflections during these months about Shakespeare and
Hamlet
are usually mentioned as a by-product of this theoretical shift, but the question of cause and effect turns out to be more complicated than that.
At this time Freud was strongly influenced by Georg Brandes's just published
William Shakespeare
(a book that meant so much to Freud that he brought it with him, decades later, when he had to
flee Austria). The connections that Brandes drew between Shakespeare's life and his art offer the fullest flowering of the approach popularised by the German and English Romantics: âIn giving expression to Hamlet's spiritual life', Brandes writes, Shakespeare
was enabled quite naturally to pour forth all that during the recent years had filled his heart and seethed in his brain. He could let this creation drink his inmost heart's blood; he could transfer to it the throbbing of his own pulses ⦠It is true that Hamlet's outward fortunes were different enough from his. He had not lost his father by assassination; his mother had not degraded herself. But all these details were only outward signs and symbols. He had lived through all of Hamlet's experience â all.
Brandes's very chapter headings â âThe Psychology of Hamlet' and âThe Personal Element in
Hamlet
' â spoke directly to Freud's interests. And Freud was won over by Brandes's account of Shakespeare's psychological state as he began writing
Hamlet
: âMany and various emotions crowded upon Shakespeare's mind in the year 1601,' Brandes writes, most of all John Shakespeare's death: âAll the years of his youth, spent at his father's side, revived in Shakespeare's mind, memories flocked in upon him, and the fundamental relation between son and father preoccupied his thoughts, and he fell to brooding over filial love and filial reverence.' For Brandes, the death of Shakespeare's father led directly to the birth of
Hamlet
: âHe lost his father, his earliest friend and protector, whose honor and repute were so close to his heart. In the same year,
Hamlet
began to form in Shakespeare's imagination.'
When in 1900 Freud described in
The Interpretation of Dreams
how he had arrived at his insights into the Oedipal complex and the workings of the unconscious, he acknowledged a debt:
it can of course only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that
Hamlet
was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his
bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare's own son who died at an early age bore the name of âHamnet,' which is identical with âHamlet.'
While there's no evidence to support Brandes's assertion that Shakespeare was deeply affected by his father's death, the same cannot be said of Freud's reaction to a similar loss. In early November 1896, two weeks after burying his father, Freud confessed to Fleiss that by âone of these dark pathways behind the official consciousness the old man's death has affected me deeply ⦠By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in [my] inner self the whole past has been reawakened by this event. I now feel quite uprooted.'
In the ensuing months Freud wrestled with conflicted feelings about his dead father, even as he undertook a sustained and unprecedented self-analysis. His ruthlessly honest letters to Fleiss from this time â letters that he never dreamed would see the light of day, and the replies to which he destroyed â record his creative leaps and stumbles as he moved toward a new theory of the unconscious. By the summer of 1897, Freud was experiencing what he might have described as Hamlet-like symptoms:
I have never yet imagined anything like my present spell of intellectual paralysis. Every line I write is torture ⦠I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, with odd states of mind not intelligible to consciousness â cloudy thoughts and vague doubts, with barely here and there a ray of light.
By August 1897, after visiting his father's grave, Freud was feeling more paralysed than ever. He was haunted by a dream about his father in which a sign appeared which read: âYou are requested to close the eyes.' Freud interpreted these words as an act of self-reproach, having to do with his âduty to the dead'. Freud was in mourning, wrestling with intellectual paralysis, trying to determine whether he had badly misunderstood himself, his father and how the mind worked.
The following month Freud abandoned the seduction theory. He confided his âgreat secret' to Fleiss: âI no longer believe in my
neurotica
,' for to accept it, Freud realised, meant implicating his own father in sexual abuse: âIn all cases, the
father
, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse.' Having rejected this as the cause of his own âlittle hysteria' â and that of his patients as well â Freud found himself once again at sea: âI have no idea of where I stand because I have not succeeded in gaining a theoretical understanding of repression and its interplay of forces.' He recognised his affinities with Hamlet at this moment, quoting to Fleiss the Prince's words about being âin readiness'. October would at last bring clarity, a new theory enabled and confirmed by the literary examples of
Oedipus
Rex
and
Hamlet
. Freud writes excitedly to Fleiss that
[a] single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood ⦠If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of
Oedipus Rex
. [The] Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself. Everyone in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils in horror from the dream fulfillment here transplanted into reality.
Sophocles' play provided the theory with a name, but it was
Hamlet
that grounded it in the workings of the author's mind:
Fleetingly, the thought passed through my head that the same thing might be at the bottom of
Hamlet
as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention, but believe, rather, that a
real event
stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero.
This is an astonishing claim. Freud suggests that Shakespeare didn't borrow or invent what Hamlet experiences, he lived it. A âreal event', the death of Shakespeare's father shortly before he wrote the play, triggered the ambivalent, Oedipal experiences in Shakespeare that were akin to those that Freud himself had
recently experienced following the death of his own father.
Self-analysis had enabled Freud, by extension, to analyse Shakespeare and identify in his play â much as he identified in the residue of his own dreams â traces of the deep Oedipal ambivalence Shakespeare experienced in the aftermath of his own father's death. His psychic kinship with both Hamlet and Shakespeare gave Freud confidence that he had successfully diagnosed the hysteria each had experienced. For Ernest Jones, it was âbut fitting that Freud should have solved the riddle of this Sphinx, as he has that of the Theban one'.
Freud was convinced that his Oedipal theory provided the long-sought explanation for Hamlet's delay: âHow better than through the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he himself had contemplated the same deed against his father out of passion for his mother, and â “use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?”' Other pieces of the Hamlet puzzle quickly fell into place:
His conscience is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? ⦠And does he not in the end, in the same marvelous way as my hysterical patients, bring down punishment on himself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?
Freud may have gone on to more famous case studies â Little Hans, Anna O., the Rat Man, Dora â but Shakespeare was in many ways his most consequential.
In our post-Freudian age all this may seem unremarkable, but Freud himself was keenly aware how bizarre this would sound to contemporaries, who were divided between two prevalent explanations for Hamlet's delay. Either the prince was paralysed by excessive thought or he was âpathologically irresolute'. Freud believed that until he came along âpeople have remained completely in the dark as to the hero's character' â necessarily so, for none had ever undergone the kind of self-analysis he had just pioneered.
Freud insisted on an essential distinction between
Oedipus
and
Hamlet
: while the Oedipal complex may be timeless, it manifested itself differently in the modern world. So that while âShakespeare's
Hamlet
has its roots in the same soil as
Oedipus Rex
', the âchanged treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind'. In Sophocles' play, âthe child's wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In
Hamlet
it remains repressed; and â just as in the case of a neurosis â we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences.'
Oedipus
Rex belongs to an older stage of civilisation.
Hamlet
, in contrast, is the product of a modern mind, and can therefore tell us much more about ourselves. But because of the âsecular advance of repression' in our psychic lives, only psychoanalysis allows us to get to the underlying causes of neurotic behaviour. Freud might have conceded that Shakespeare, and the early modern culture in which he lived and worked, stood somewhere between Sophocles' world and our own. He couldn't, though, if Shakespeare were to prove a star witness for his new theory. Freud's Hamlet had to be a truly modern man â and Shakespeare our contemporary.
The insights that led Freud to reject the seduction theory and solve the problem of
Hamlet
are not easily untangled. Freud couldn't readily abandon his view of
Hamlet
and what its author experienced following the death of his father without calling into question that which confirmed the rightness of his Oedipal theory. That was a lot to ask of a reading that stands or falls on whether
Hamlet
had been written after the death of John Shakespeare.
*
Years passed. Followers and patients flocked to Freud and psychoanalysis thrived.
Hamlet
became a canonical psychoanalytic text as well as a favourite subject of the Wednesday Psychological Society meetings, where Freud explored with his disciples how Shakespeare had written the play as âa reaction to the death of his
father'. Ernest Jones, the only native English speaker in Freud's inner circle, had committed himself to elaborating on this theory, first in a brief article in 1910 and eventually in his popular book, not published until 1949,
Hamlet and Oedipus
. He was at work on the subject in the early 1920s when he received an unwelcome letter. âBy an “accident,”' Freud wrote to him, âI was able to find out the notice of a new document about
Hamlet
, which must concern you as much as me.' Freud had read Georg Brandes's latest book,
Miniaturen
(1919), in which Brandes repudiated his earlier and for Freud crucial claim that Shakespeare had written
Hamlet
in 1601 in the wake of his father's death. It now appeared that their dating of the play, on which Freud's theory precariously rested, was wrong. Brandes had changed his mind following the discovery of marginal notes, scribbled by the Elizabethan writer Gabriel Harvey, which showed that
Hamlet
was written by early 1599 or at the very latest early 1601. Freud felt forced to concede that â
Hamlet
was enacted before the death of Spenser, in any case before the death of Essex, that is to say much earlier than was believed hitherto. Now, remember Shakespeare's father died in the same year 1601! Will you think of defending our theory?'
Jones wrote back coolly, promising to âinvestigate and report' on this development, which also threatened to undermine his own work. Before replying, he looked into what other literary scholars had made of this new evidence, especially Sidney Lee, the leading British Shakespearean of the day. Lee, for his own reasons, was also unwilling to abandon a late date for
Hamlet
, so came up with the ingenious if strained suggestion that it only
seemed
like Harvey was speaking about the deceased Spenser and Essex as if they were alive, because he was using âthe present tense in the historic fashion' â which allowed him to conclude that âNo light is therefore thrown by Harvey on the precise date of the composition or of the first performance of Shakespeare's
Hamlet
.' This, perhaps, explains Jones's confidence, and terminology, in reassuring Freud that âI do not find that the passages you quote absolutely prove the date, for they may be written in the historic present'.
Freud agreed that the evidence of Harvey's marginalia remained âfar too incomplete' to âsettle the matter'. But unlike Jones, Freud was unwilling to dig in his heels, knowing âthat there is much slippery ground in many of our applications from psychoanalysis to biography and literature'. He had already been forced to retract some speculative biographical conclusions about Leonardo da Vinci, and recognised that he might have to do the same with Shakespeare: âIt is the danger inherent in our method of concluding from faint traces, exploiting trifling signs.'
