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Life Arts    H4'ed 7/23/13

Critchley and Webster Study Hamlet's Complicated Grief

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Thomas Farrell
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This second kind of love is the kind of love that Anthony de Mello describes in his book THE WAY TO LOVE, mentioned above. Elsewhere, Critchley and Webster refer to "the force of desire" (page 192). In effect, they see desire as the life-force.

 

For understandable reasons, Critchley and Webster discuss Freud's 1917 paper "Mourning and Melancholia" in detail (pages 119-125). Freud refers to "normal mourning" as involving a process of psychical working through. But melancholia cannot begin this work. In addition, melancholia involves a disturbance in self-regard. According to Critchley and Webster, "Freud speculates that if the attachment to the lost object [Hamlet's father] is fundamentally narcissistic, this leaves one vulnerable to melancholia" (page 124). Hamlet is the melancholic Dane. "One might say that the beloved cannot be seen in his or her difference in order to begin the work on what was loved and what was lost" (page 124).

 

The authors also say, "Mourning is the pivot between the selfish sequestering of narcissism and the integrity of desire. As Freud indicates, however briefly, HAMLET can be read as containing this unfolding story, the tragedy and sublimity of desire" (page 129).

 

As Critchley and Webster dig deeper into the psychodynamics of Hamlet's melancholia, they note how he is identified with his mother's desires. They point out that "Hamlet will be compelled to either repeat or work through his relation to his mother's desire" (page 168).

 

According to them, Hamlet's "[d]esire must cut through this mirroring melancholic identification. Some act of mourning must cut through this pride of injury in relation to his mother" (page 168).

 

In early childhood, the child needs the mirroring that the mother-figure and father-figure and other adults usually provide. We might say that the Child Within (also known as the Inner Child) carries the remembrance of this early mirroring experience. Thus the young Hamlet's Child Within carries the remembrance of the mirroring that his mother had provided him with earlier in life. But in the optimal development during his teenage years, he should have learned experientially how to relinquish his remembrance of her early mirroring. Evidently, he did not learn this.

 

Even the ghost of Hamlet's father beseeches young Hamlet to step back, to purify his desire of his preoccupation with his mother (page 169). But the ghost's beseeching is of no avail.

 

When Critchley and Webster turn to Jacques Lacan's discussion of HAMLET, they say, "The violence of Hamlet is the violence of failed mourning" (page 131). They repeat that mourning "is the pivot between narcissism and desire. The narcissistic capture that Hamlet embodies -- this locked, internal tension of inhibition, the pride in the sense of injury -- shows the necessity of desire, its point of relief" (page 133).

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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