Last night we watched a clip from Shakespeare's Hamlet, where Mel Gibson basically displaces all of his frustration and anger about his father's death upon his mother. Although this scene depicts Hamlet's disapproval of his mother's marriage to his uncle, there is also an underlying level of sexuality interwined with his madness. Many would agree that Hamlet's suffers some level of Freud's "Oedipus Complex", which is the idea that a son desires his own mother from birth. The father, according to Freud, is seen as a supposed threat to this dyadic relationship. However, in this case, Hamlet's father is dead, perhaps allowing these repressed desires to become reality. Hamlet never gets a chance to explore this realization; instead his mother quickly marries his Uncle Claudius. Even though his father is no longer alive, Hamlet views the union between his mother and Claudius as a threat, simiar to the one previously posed by his father. However, Hamlet must now follow the path of his father, destroying his uncle as well as become desirous for his mother. According to Freud, Hamlet is emulating his father because he has developed some sort of identification with him. In Freud's "Group Pyschology and Analysis of the Ego", he explains that emulation is the result of an individual's search to find their adult identity. By seeing the appartion of his father, Hamlet is allowing his "id" to reveal his repressed desires. Instead of recognizing this, he chooses to avenge his father's name and "protect" his mother, even though this scene clearly allows his desires to be revealed.
