The Psychology of Teen Hamlets: Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion

The Psychosis and Ambiguity of Hamlet's Character Presently, they fill gossip magazines, blogs and television shows, consuming the imaginations, hearts and thoughts of many children and adults alike. Celebrities all over the world capture the attention and fascination of many due to their unique personalities and crazy antics. These antics are documented, filmed, and stalked because of their appeal to the fantasies and desires of the "common" people who are not celebrities. These fantasies are enthralled with the "larger-than-life" characters such gossip outlets portray the individuals as. Even today, the general public is fascinated with individual characters because they believe they can somehow relate to that person's character. The pull of one's character goes beyond modern-day celebrities and extends into television characters, movie stars and literary figures. One such notable character comes from playwright William Shakespeare in the seventeenth century --a character with as many personas and as much dramatic flair as any modern-day celebrity: Hamlet.

2016

This paper is an attempt at understanding the 'psychoanalytical' approach to literature and its application in Shakespeare's "Hamlet: The Prince of Denmark".

There is something about Hamlet that is deeply familiar. However, a review of performance history over the last 100 years or so demonstrates that the Hamlet audiences and critics have come to “recognise” and value most highly came into being through specific staging interventions that secured a firm association between the play, Freudian psychoanalysis and the troubled interiority associated with modern subjectivity. It may be obvious to audiences, since Freud, that Hamlet is caught in a vortex of tormented, inward-looking indecision and Oedipal self-doubt, but he only became that with the help of centuries of interpretation, informed by the preoccupations of post-Enlightenment Europe and Freudian and post-Freudian theories of subjectivity and sexuality. This article examines the ways in which Freud’s cultural successors have fostered an understanding of Hamlet’s interiority excised from its social context. I argue that the many distinct “Hamlets” generated within countless interpretative contexts across the globe have opened the critical gap between what we think we might know about Hamlet and the less explored ways in which this play may continue to provoke social critique and inspire reflection. “Indigenised” Hamlets are far removed from what has emerged out of a cultural and philosophical tradition that still looks to Freud for its interpretative framework. They demonstrate that what we “recognise” in Hamlet is as provisional, as located, and as specific as the cultural context in which we have come to “know” him, and ourselves.

Journal of Romanian Literary Studies, 2024

Over the centuries, "Hamlet" has been the subject of countless critical approaches from brilliant scholarly thinkers, from Samuel Johnson to Harold Bloom. The present article strives to investigate from an interdisciplinary critical perspective how Hamlet's psyche is affected by the appearance of his father's ghost. Drawing on sources as diverse as neo-classical, romantic, and psychoanalytical criticism, the article explores the inner changes that shift Hamlet's perception of the nature of his Self, resulting in the instability of his relationship with other characters. The second section investigates the particularities of Hamlet's desire concerning the women of the play to show how his malignant desire destroys familial and romantic bonds, finally leading to his traumatic influence on other characters such as Ophelia and Gertrude.

Having discussed two of the basic approaches to literary understanding, the traditional and the formalistic, we now examine a third interpretive perspective, the psychological. Of all the critical approaches to literature, this has been one of the most controversial, the most abused, and-for many readers-the least appreciated. Yet, for all the difficulties involved in its proper application to interpretive analysis, the psychological approach can be fascinating and rewarding. Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to account briefly for the misunderstanding of psychological criticism; (2) to outline the psychological theory most commonly used as an interpretive tool by modern critics; and (3) to show by examples how readers may apply this mode of interpretation to enhance their understanding and appreciation of literature.

Usually, a word that represents the negation of another word tends to maintain its opposite meaning in mind; for example, ‘unclear’ would negate how ‘clear’ something is, as ‘unfair’ would do with ‘fair’. So then, ‘uncanny’, one would assume, would be that which is ‘not canny’ – ‘canny’ being synonymous with words like: ‘shrewd’ ‘prudent’ and ‘skilled’. It is worth noting that ‘uncanny’ has assumed different connotations, to the extent that to say ‘this is uncanny’ is not to say ‘this is not canny’. In essence, the only relation between uncanny and canny is that they are derivatives of knowledge, ‘ken’. Yet, etymology is not the only interesting aspect of this word. Its concept, that is the question of ‘the uncanny’, problematizes notions of awareness in as much as it destabilizes the definitions of the familiar, what Freud calls “Heimlich.” ‘The uncanny’ calls into question what is known or accepted when what is accepted cannot explain the why of its acceptance.

will reveal "who's there": in the text, on the stage and in the awareness of both ourselves and the play's protagonists.