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desires remain secret and private. Freud concludes that Hamlet, written at a much later point in the development of European culture, indicates the movement of Western civilization toward the repression of such transgressive longings. Comparing Shakespeare’s tragedy with Sophocles’, Freud argues that the Oedipus myth appears in a latent (present but not evident) rather than manifest (present and evident) form in the cultural dream-text of Hamlet. Viewed in comparison with Oedipus Rex, Hamlet thus provides the ‘‘intertextual lens through which the ‘Oedipal’ in Oedipus comes into—and goes out of —focus” (Lupton and Reinhard 1993:32). Freud writes:

Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful phantasy that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and—just as in the case of a neurosis—we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences.

(Freud 1974:4:264)

For Freud, because Hamlet’s Oedipal desires (to eliminate the father and sexually fulfill the mother) are unconscious and covert, they indicate the increased role of repression in the modern subject and civilization. As Jacques Lacan later puts it in his own interpretation of Hamlet, “Freud himself indicated, perhaps in a somewhat fin de siècle way, that for some reason when we lived out the Oedipal dream, it was destined to be in a warped form, and there’s surely an echo of that in Hamlet” (1993:44). Accordingly, Lacan continues, Freud’s reading of Shakespeare’s play “justifies and deepens our understanding of Hamlet as possibly illustrating a decadent form of the Oedipal situation, its decline” for “[i]t’s not simply that the subject wanted, desired to kill his father and to violate his mother, but that that is in the unconscious” (45). For Lacan, Freud’s analysis of Hamlet tells us a great deal about Freud’s Oedipal theory itself. Lacan suggests that the main emphasis in Freud’s Oedipal theory is the notion of the unconscious. Freud’s reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy stresses that modern Western civilization has repressed Oedipal desire and relegated it to the unconscious.

Following his discussion of Hamlet as cultural dream-text, Freud

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