Shakespearean Criticism | Hamlet (Vol. 71) - Bennett Simon (essay date 2001)

Bennett Simon (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Simon, Bennett. “Hamlet and the Trauma Doctors: An Essay at Interpretation.” American Imago 58, no. 3 (2001): 707-22.

[In the following essay, Simon reviews the major trends in the psychoanalytic analysis of Hamlet, and interprets both the play and Hamlet's character on the basis of trauma theory.]

In the 400 years of Hamlet interpretation, psychoanalysis is a relative newcomer, only a century or so old. During that century, there have been notable shifts in the mode of interpreting the play, both in the critical world at large and in the narrower psychoanalytic world. In part, changes in the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play have had to do with shifts in dominant psychoanalytic paradigms—a process even more striking in the history of interpretation of Oedipus Rex than of Hamlet.¹ In part, however, changes in the dominant mode of literary critical...

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