Hamlet's Internal Conflict

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Love is a bond two people share connected by emotions. When you love a person, it may or may not be attached with conditions. To be in love with another human being is a deeper union connected by strong passion linked to certain stipulations or understood promises. Some of these stipulations or conditions may include; loyalty, honesty, trustworthiness and wholehearted commitment. If those promises are broken, the devastation can spin your life and state of mind out of control.

Being in love with one of your parents, strange as is may sound, may not be so far fetched. A parent and their son and/or daughter share a bond of emotions that are worshiped from the child’s view. Parents’ share a love that is unconditional. Children, however, share love through levels of expectation that is held higher than any other, conditional love. They have yet to grasp the concept of unconditional love. Becoming devastated as though their world has been torn apart when those expectations and beliefs are broken, children undergo a series of uncontrollable emotions. These feelings may include confusion, anger driven by outrage and sometimes even violence once that relationship is shattered.

The child begins to question everything they have been shown or told and those whom they have close relationships, displaying distrust. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, there are many different possible interpretations as to why Hamlet develops personality and character changes. Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis, was the first to suggest the existence of the Oedipus theory or complex. Freud suggests, “that children have a subconscious feeling of competition and even hatred toward the parent of the same sex, and feelings of romantic...

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...en. Hamlet demonstrated a sort of competition toward King Hamlet. Instead of immediately confronting the Queen about her infidelity, Hamlet had to be for certain that his mother was guilty of such accusations. The type of love Hamlet showed toward his mother, unknowingly, was far from a son’s love for his mother. Hamlet revealed hidden signs of being in love with his mother and is the reason he endured emotional agony. In a sense, we are all powerless to love.

WORKS CITED

Chiriac, Jean. “Discovery of the Oedipus Complex.” Sigmund Freud’s Self-

Analysis. 2009. Harvard University Press. 1 Feb 2010 < http://

www.freudfile.org/self_analysis_continue.html>.

Durband, Alan. Shakespeare Made Easy: Hamlet. New York: Barron, 1986.

JRank Psychology Encyclopedia. “Psychoanalysis.” Psychoanalysis and the

development of personality. Net Industries. 2010.

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