Tardy Sons: Hamlet, Freud, and Filial Ambivalence

Abstract

This essay explores the mutual implication of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Freudian psychoanalysis as works of mourning. More particularly, it takes up how both the play and a series of Freud's writings — from early letters to Fliess to the Interpretation of Dreams to “Mourning and Melancholia” to Beyond the Pleasure Principle — themselves explore mourning as the almost impossible burden of a son trying to shed the authority of the dead but still potent father. In that sense, mourning has less to do with grief as traditionally conceived than with ambivalence, even hostility, toward the dead. It is an emotive experience that, in repressed form, manifests first as identification with the dead. The essay thus documents the complex “working-through” by which, in response to their fathers' deaths, two “tardy sons” finally arrive at a place of self-identification, a site from which they refuse the burden of living out — of repeating — the existence of the one who came before. Seen from this vantage, Shakespeare (through his tragic hero) and Freud both offer existential meditations on the need to originate our own lives even as they concede that, at the place of the origin, our lives are at once our own and not our own.

Twisted Civility: Comparing Courtesy, Coercion and Shaming in Southeast Asian Cities and Beyond

“…To take up a classic example, familiar both to numerous student essayists and to professional scholars, Shakespeare's Hamlet is considered ambivalent because he both loves his mother as maternal figure and resents her for her part in the death and replacement of his father (Barnaby 2013). As this example would imply, ambivalence can entail painful and irreconcilable conflict, but the tragic consequences that emerge are largely the product of psychological tension between opposed affective states and normative judgements, famously expressed as the tension Hamlet bemoans in his existential soliloquy: "to be or not to be" (Peterson 1987).…”

“After the Event”: Freud’s Uncanny and The Anxiety of Origins

“…Admittedly trying to use Freud's own ruminations to articulate a meaning of the uncanny that he would have rejected, I offer what follows as a way of addressing the question that Derrida, in my essay's second epigraph, sees as already marked by belatedness ("it is too late to deny"), 2 For a brief discussion of "the child's ambivalence toward his father" in relation to repetition compulsion, see Hertz (1979, p. 303). The son's ambivalence toward his father in relation to Freud's understanding of the uncanny is a key issue in Kofman (1991); for discussion of this issue in Freud's thought more generally, see Barnaby (2013).…”