Freud’s Oedipus Complex
Psychology is not a new concept to human civilization. People have been interacting between each other creating cause and effect reactions between themselves since the creation of man. These reactions can have tremendous impacts on both parties involved in these relationships. How they deal with these reactions can be analyzed in a psychological manner. Scientists have been analyzing these relationships since the 1800s, and one of the most influential psychologists was a man named Dr. Sigmund Freud. This paper shall use one of Dr. Freud’s theories to analyze one of the most famous characters in English literature. That character is William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
One of Freud’s most interesting theories was that of the Oedipus complex (this theory also has many other similar names, such Oedipal, etc.). The term was named after a character in a Greek play written by Sophocles about an ancient Greek king, Oedipus, who mistakenly killed his father and married his mother, with whom he was deeply in love with. The Oedipal stage was one of Freud’s psychosexual stages of development in a child, which came after the oral and anal stages and before the puberty stage. However, if an individual did not completely overcome a certain stage in his or her development, that individual would attempt, be it in a conscious or unconscious manner, to complete this stage at another point in his or her life. Associated in this stage was the need for a son to feel loved by his mother. The son would do anything to be caressed by his mother, to be kissed, hugged, or generally to feel loved and needed. This type of love is very sexual in nature, something that every mammal is accustomed with, be it known or unknown to the true nature of the child. However, the child’s mother cannot love him constantly because another male other than the child loves her. This other man in the mother’s life is the child’s father. He is privileged to sleep with the mother in a separate bed and love her there, when the child is forced to sleep in his own bed alone. This creates a feeling of jealousy within the child, which turns into a form of hate towards the father. The child would do anything within his means to replace his father and become his mother’s individual attention receiver. The boy’s own father therefore becomes his archenemy.
