Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/120

110 It is instructive to note that neither of them shew any sign of inhibition in the performance of this task, and that with neither is any reference made to his mother. In Hamlet, on the other hand, in whom "repressed" love for the mother is even more powerful than "repressed" hostility towards the father, inhibition appears; this is because the stronger complex is stimulated by the fact that the object of revenge owes his guilt to the desire to win the mother.

The important subject of the actual mode of origin of myths and legends, and the relation of them to infantile fantasies, will not here be considered, as our interest in the topic is secondary to the main one of the play of Hamlet as given to us by Shakspere. Enough perhaps has been said of the comparative mythology of the Hamlet legend to shew that in it are to be found ample indications of the working of all forms of incestuous fantasy. We may summarise the foregoing considerations of this part of the subject by saying that the main theme of this story is a highly elaborated and distorted account of a boy's love for his mother and consequent jealousy of and hostility towards his father; the allied one in which the sister and brother respectively play the same part as the mother and father in the main theme is also told, though with secondary interest.

Last of all in this connection may be mentioned on account of its general psychological interest a matter which has provoked much discussion, namely Hamlet's so-called "simulation of madness." The traits in Hamlet's behaviour thus designated are brought to expression by Shakspere in such a refined and subtle way as to be not very transpicuous unless one studies them in the original saga. In the play Hamlet's feigning mainly takes the form of fine irony, and serves the purpose of enabling him to express contempt and hostility in an indirect and disguised form (indirekte Darstcllung). His conversations with Polonius beautifully illustrate this mechanism. The irony in the play is a transmutation of the still more concealed mode of expression adopted in the saga, where the hero's audience commonly fails to apprehend his meaning. Of this, Saxo Grammaticus writes. "Falsitatis alienus haberi cupiens, ita astutiam veriloquio permiscebat, ut nee dictis veritas deesset nee acuminis modus verorum indicio proderetur." Here Hamlet plainly adopts his curious behaviour in order to further his scheme of revenge, to which, as we shall presently note, he had