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Example research essay topic: Guildenstern Are Dead Interpretation Of Dreams - 1,562 words

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... murder of Old Hamlet was an impulse-, id-driven act, it had rational consequences. Gertrude feeds him with the wealth of the country. Freud's ideas about theatre, and its relation to dreams is another theme that is predominant in Hamlet. In Art & Literature, he explores the idea that creative literature is in essence the same as normal dreams, the expression of wish fulfillment. There are a number of similarities between a play and a dream.

Both take place in a darkened environment, the first in the cosseted comfort of a theatre, with lights dimmed, and the second at night in our beds. Both involve characters whose actions can be fantastical and need bear no strict relation to time or space; a character can fly, like Peter Pan, or be transformed in to an ass, like Puck. Crucially, both also allow us to express, in a disguised or distanced form, thoughts and feelings that we would be unable to satisfactorily deal with in our normal waking life; the desires of the id, unmoderated by the ego and super-ego. Being present as an interested spectator at a play does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a 'poor wretch to whom nothing of importance can happen', who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to... be a hero.

And the playwright and the actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself 'with the hero. They spare him something too... his enjoyment is based on an illusion; ... it is someone other than himself acting and suffering on stage, and, secondly, after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security. A play, then, can be thought of like a bad dream an audience can be reassured as a mother reassures her child, "Don't worry, it was only a dream. " The pretend or imagined allows us to embrace ideas and ambitions that normally we would "damp down, or rather displace. " Hamlet is particularly interesting in relation to Freud's theories. Not only is it a play itself, but it contains the play-within-the-play, exposing the audience to both the experience of watching, and a demonstration of that experience - that is to say they see themselves in a very real sense, as an audience on the stage, separate from any association they might make with individual characters.

Hamlet devises the play-within to "catch the conscience of the king", with the implication that the play we are watching, Hamlet could do the very same to us; any parricidal (or, less likely, regicidal) guilt we are harboring could be drawn out by this "false fire." Within the text of Hamlet, Shakespeare directly states Freud's dual view of drama as being simultaneously both a harmless release and a powerful tool. Claudius Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in't? Hamlet No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest, no offence i'th " world. Hamlet I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. As the above quotation states, "murder has no tongue", because, like other taboos, it is something that is repressed by our conscious mind as un conducive to social behavior.

In real life, such a topic could not be considered in normal conversation, but a play has added legitimacy for discussion because, paradoxically, it has less legitimacy; it is fiction, it is dream. Paedophilia and incest are too topics that today could not openly be discussed in a positive light because our conscious censoring super-ego recognizes the social implications, but in a work of fiction such a portrayal could take place, because the unconscious is in control, and can be easily dismissed. Freud was adamant of the importance of his theories to Hamlet, going so far as to say that it is only in the application of them to the play, that the text's full meaning could be discovered. It was not until the material of the tragedy had been traced back to the Oedipus theme that the mystery of the effect was at last explained.

But before this was done, what a mass of differing and contradictory interpretative attempts... [that] rather incline us to view that its magical appeal rest solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and the splendor of the language. And yet, do not... we feel the need of discovering in it some source of power beyond them alone? The apparent predominance of Freudian theory in literature, and especially Hamlet, is at the heart of the paradox of psychoanalysis.

Almost any of the relationships within the play could be portrayed, with enough rhetorical spin, as Oedipal; most of the characters could be portrayed as pursuing both narcissistic and analytic libido-objects; plays and dreams are both harmless 'releases of steam' and cathartic portrayals of uncomfortable truths. We are left with two equally possible solutions to the paradox. The first is that if Freudian theory is spread so thinly in its application as to encompass everything, then it probably lacks substance - if something is equally true of all things, how useful is it to apply it to any one particular? The second is that the ideas that combine to make a Freudian reading of a text are correct in their assumptions, and the dynamics at work are deeply engrained, hence their ubiquity.

Any denial of their truth is simply further evidence of the self-censoring and repressive activities of the constituent parts of our mind. In terms of Hamlet at least, we should be careful of following Freud to closely. His position that "the conflict in Hamlet is so effectively concealed that it was left to me [Freud] to unearth it" is a self-aggrandizing one that is ill supported by the play. Tom Stoppard neatly sums up "the conflict in Hamlet" without reference to Freud in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead: Rosencrantz To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popper on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner? According to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams we all have repressed wishes and desires.

One of the most common of these repressed desires is the wish to sexually possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the same sex parent. Freud named this theory the Oedipus Complex (which he discusses in detail in an essay entitled Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes). This was named after the mythical Oedipus who killed his father and married his mother without knowing that they were his parents. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-fantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams, in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence only through the effects which proceed from it. Also, according to Freud, whatever route is taken into the unconscious, what you find there is almost always about sex. The contents of the unconscious consist primarily of sexual desires which have been repressed.

Freud states that sexual desires are instinctual, and that they appear in the most fundamental acts in the process of nurturing, like in a mother nursing an infant. The instincts for food, warmth, and comfort, which have survival value for an infant, also produce pleasure, which Freud defines specifically as sexual pleasure. He says our first experiences of our bodies are organized through how we experience sexual pleasure. He divides the infant's experience of its body into certain erotogenic zones, the first of which is the mouth, as the baby feels sexual pleasure in its mouth while nursing. Because the act of sucking is pleasurable (i. e.

sexually pleasurable), the baby forms a bond with the mother that goes beyond satisfying the baby's hunger. That bond Freud calls libidinal, since it involves the baby's libido, the drive for sexual pleasure. Hamlet's power is in part due to the scenario, but its endurance is also due to the poetry of the text. Why do we need Hamlet when we already have Oedipus Rex?

Because the three hours of stagecraft add to the power of the story, add subtlety and beauty. Freud's interpretation is an interesting and valuable one, both in terms of the particular play and its resonance as a literary theory, but it is not, as Freud seems to assume, the only valid one. Bibliography Adelman, J. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) Freud, Art & Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin, 1991), On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1991), On Sexuality (London: Penguin, 1991) Shakespeare, W Hamlet: Prince of Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber & Faber, 1967) Jones, E. Hamlet and Oedipus, (Bevington: David Twentieth Century, 1982)


Free research essays on topics related to: guildenstern are dead, oedipus rex, rosencrantz guildenstern, sexual pleasure, interpretation of dreams

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