Incestuous Desires

Last night I had a dream. Wow, that sounded too much like Martin Luther King, Jr. I have a dream… I had one of those dreams that creep in our sleep from night to night, and then it fades away, and one must write it before it goes to oblivion. So now I’m here, writing words and trying to remember the details of this dream. I fell asleep while reading Hamlet’s Act III scene iv, and let me tell you that Hamlet’s details go beyond what we can touch with our fingers. Anyways, in my dream there were two people: Freud and Sophocles. Freud argued to Sophocles that Hamlet is intimately related to Oedipus, one of Sophocles most significant characters.

While they talked, there was a particular sentence that kept coming to my mind: “Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, / Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse, / and let him, for a pair of reechy kisses / Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, / Make you to ravel all this matter out / That I essentially am not in madness, / But mad in craft” (III, iv, 204-210). And then, they kept talking, and talking. I could hear Freud telling Sophocles that Hamlet harbors an unconscious desire to sexually enjoy his mother. As well, that all men unconsciously desire their mothers in such way, and hence, are subject to beheld the so-called Oedipus complex. Oedipus? Oh, that explains why Sophocles is in my dream. Maybe its coherent to see Freud, due to the fact Mr. Tangen once mentioned something about Freud’s psychoanalysis being somewhat related to Hamlet, I thought. I don’t know if Freud is right, but anyways, that argument is quite astonishing. Afterwards, he came back to his main argument, saying Hamlet and Oedipus are intimately related, but while Oedipus actually performs this sexual fantasy, Hamlet deceives the unconscious desire to do so. As a result, Hamlet is seen to repress his desires and conclude that he is no better than his uncle Claudius.

Suddenly, Freud was gone and another person, unknown to me, appeared. Who is that? I thought, but instantly he introduced himself to Sophocles, ‘Mr. Sophocles, what an honor to meet you, I am Ernest Jones.’ I thought about that name… Ernest Jones, Ernest Jones, no, no idea. Anyways, he started talking with Sophocles about the same thing: Hamlet and Oedipus. In this case, he based his argument on Hamlet’s repugnance of Gertrude’s incestuous relationship with Claudius, while at the same time, fearing his death. Wow, incestuous. That one must be an important word. Thus far, I’ve seen it like ten times mentioned by Hamlet. Incestuous. And then he disappeared again, and then Sophocles. Now it was just my mind in the dream, I guess I’m dreaming no more, I thought…

Now, I didn’t know if I was still dreaming, but my mind was rushing through thoughts and ideas. I thought about Hamlet’s inexplicable procrastination as a direct outcome of that “Oedipus complex.” He is continually postponing his act of revenge (we saw he was unable to kill Claudius in the previous scene), due to his complicated psychodynamic situation in which he finds himself: the uncertainty of thought against action, the impossibility of it, the ‘to be or not to be.’