The Phantom of Hamlet or the Sixth Act
Preceded by the Intermission of "Truth"
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19394046 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nicolas Abraham, Nicholas Rand |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 2 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | diacritics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0300-7162 • E-ISSN: 1080-6539 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/465217 |
| OpenAlex | W2325827406 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
The final scene of The Tragedy of Hamlet does not close the dramatic action; it simply cuts it off. Sophocles' s Oedipus the King purified the soul, as Freud has shown, by directly uncovering the Unconscious. Not so Shakespeare's play. Quite the reverse. The action, laced with visions and intrigues, simulation and madness, grinds to a halt stripped of protagonists. As the curtain falls, only corpses and riddles are left, silent like the night of Elsinore. Having lost all hope of seeing the mystery unraveled, the spectator remains bewildered. This play, staged more often than any other, initiates an unconscious process, keeps it alive, yet fails to put it to rest. The state of mind that is provoked endures long after the play has ended; it forces itself upon us like an inescapable necessity emanating from some unknown source. It takes a psychoanalyst to experience similar uneasiness, occasioned in particular by those visitors to the couch who, unbeknownst to themselves, carry the concealed shame of their families. These people are prey to strange and incongruous words or acts, transferred from events unknown to them, events whose initiator was an other
Art · Imaging phantom · Literature · Radiology · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Medicine · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1990 - 2023 (34) |
| Highly cited | No |