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Page 162

of failed mourning: the loss of his father, whose murder and subsequent ghostly presence inhibit the process of mourning, and the loss of the maternal object through Gertrude’s marriage to Claudius.

Freud shifts away from this emphasis on melancholy in his writings on Hamlet, however, when he employs the play in the development of his theory of Oedipal desire and the unconscious. This movement can be detected within his letter to Fliess, in which Freud first works through his interpretation of Hamlet, as Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard have discussed at length (1993:18–26). In his letter to Fliess, Freud moves from a discussion of grief to one of Oedipal conflict in Hamlet. In the first part of the letter, Freud narrates a dream in which he visualizes his mother lying dead in a casket. Analyzing this dream, Lupton and Reinhard point out its relationship to the role of introjection in mourning, in which the subject “interiorize[s] emptiness in the effort to make the absent [object of loss] present” (18). The dream allegorizes the subject’s internal grief upon separation from the mother, for “the child experiences the mother’s absence as a sealed box or casket (Kasten), an image of interiorization, at once womb and tomb, commemorating the lost mother by preserving her as lost” (18). Within the same letter, Freud switches from this scene of primary traumatic loss (the emblematic moment in which the infant’s separation from the mother is envisioned), to one of the subsequent Oedipal dynamic (or triangle), in which the male child’s desire for his mother results in hostility directed at his rival, the father (Freud 1985:272). Perhaps unconsciously to avoid the painful scene of traumatic loss it suggests or to emphasize the paternal over the maternal in his theories, Freud ends up neglecting the role of mourning in his later writings on the Oedipal complex and in his reading of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (see Lupton and Reinhard 1993:15–26).

In his famous commentary on Hamlet from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argues that Shakespeare’s tragedy epitomizes Western civilization’s movement in the direction of repression.3 After discussing Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and the Oedipus myth as “primeval dream-material,” Freud examines Hamlet as a similar type of text, but one that demonstrates a deviation from the overt Oedipal desires exemplified in Greek tragedy and myth. In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus literally, though unknowingly, kills his father and marries his mother, crimes that are eventually made public. In Hamlet, however, the prince unconsciously desires what Oedipus actually does, and these

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