Ophelia: Losing her Mind without the

Oedipus Complex
Different perspectives and thoughts have blossomed from Hamlet, including the Psychoanalytic
perspective.  Sigmund Freud’s ideas on melancholia are directly relatable to some of the
characters in Hamlet but not all.  While either melancholia or mourning affect the majority of the
characters in the play, Freud’s melancholia is sound in relation to male characters such as Hamlet
but is not applicable for female characters like Ophelia.  Because of Ophelia’s inability to take
on this problem, she becomes trapped in the dizzying state of melancholia until she kills herself
at the end of the play.

Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” explains the differences between mourning and
melancholia and reasons as to why these differences are formed.  “Mourning is regularly the
reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place
of one” (243).  It is normal to feel loss and sadness when someone or something is taken out of a
person’s life but eventually this feeling goes away and daily life goes on.  When the feeling of
loss does not go away, the person will move from mourning to melancholia.  Melancholia occurs
in the ego when “an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss” (249).  The person does not
know who they are anymore and loses a part of himself or herself, not only the person or object
that was taken away.  In mourning the person attaches the emotion to something or someone else
while in melancholia it attaches to the ego, creating the loss of self.

Hamlet includes characters that go through mourning and melancholia, most prominently
Gertrude, who is done mourning, and Hamlet and Ophelia, who are both struggling with their
own melancholia.  Gertrude exemplifies Freud’s idea of mourning since she was upset about her
husband’s death but has since moved on and relinquished her sadness as she advises Hamlet to
do:

“Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted color off…

Do not for ever with thy vailed lids

Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

Thou know’st ‘tis common, all that lives must die.” (Shakespeare, 1.2.68-72)

Hamlet’s “knighted color” are the clothes that he is wearing that symbolize his grief.  Gertrude
wishes for Hamlet to discard these clothes, misinterpreting his melancholy as mourning over his
father’s death.  But neither Hamlet nor Ophelia are able to find a new person to replace their loss
as the Queen has with her marriage to her brother-in-law, thus their melancholia goes on.

At first glance, Hamlet and Ophelia’s melancholia seem to stem from a similar problem: the loss
of those important to them.  Hamlet loses his father to mortality, his mother to his incestuous
uncle, “She married – O most wicked speed: to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets”
(1.2.156-157), his friends to his convincing uncle, and believes he cannot be with Ophelia
because women cannot be trusted, “I have heard of your paintings, well enough.  God / hath
given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (3.2.141-142).  Ophelia loses her brother
when he leaves for France, then she loses Hamlet after he tells her to become a celibate nun, and
finally Hamlet kills her father Polonius.  As Freud describes: “melancholia too may be the
reaction to the loss of a loved object” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 245) and it is true that these
losses are what begin and carry on the melancholia that rages on within the two.  Although their
melancholia begins in a similar way, their lives end differently: Hamlet shifts in and out of
madness until he is killed by a poisonous sword unlike Ophelia who completely loses her mind
and drowns herself.  If Freud is correct in his thoughts on melancholia then Hamlet should have
killed himself just as Ophelia did since their similar losses formed their melancholia.  The reason
Ophelia takes her own life while Hamlet keeps on surviving is found in another of Freud’s essays
titled “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud tells a general synopsis of the Greek tragedy Oedipus
Rex and bases his theory off of the life events of the main character Oedipus.  Through Oedipus’
actions, killing his father and marrying his mother, he explains that “It is the fate of all of us,
perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first
murderous wish against our father” (921).  Freud sees this realization in all people from when
they are children through adulthood.  This relationship between the parents and child is what
forms the rest of our sexual and hateful emotions for other people; the relationship creates the
foundation of these emotions.  It is this complex that separates Hamlet’s melancholia from
Ophelia’s melancholia.

When Hamlet speaks to his father’s ghost it reveals the story of how he was killed by Claudius
and gives Hamlet this command: “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther” (Shakespeare,
1.5.25).  Throughout the rest of the play Hamlet cannot easily make a decision, especially
pertaining to killing his uncle.  Instead of killing him quickly, Hamlet makes excuses not to:
“Now might I do it [pat], now ‘a is a-praying; / And now I’ll do’t – and so ‘a goes to heaven, /
And so am I [reveng’d]” (3.3.73-75).  Hamlet reasons that if he kills his uncle now, he will go to
heaven because he was murdered while praying.  Although his thoughts atone for this situation,
it does not reveal why he cannot take his revenge during the other numerous occasions that are
presented to him.  But, through the Oedipus complex, Freud reasons why Hamlet cannot kill the
king:

“Hamlet is able to do anything – except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father
and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his
own childhood realized.  Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in
him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally
no better than the sinner whom he is to punish” (“The interpretation of Dreams” 923).

Because everyone is born with this innate sense of sexual impulses and hatred, Hamlet cannot
simply kill his uncle.  But, at the same time, Hamlet cannot allow the man who killed his father
to live because he must avenge his father.  This inner turmoil that lingers throughout the play is
what keeps Hamlet alive.  He becomes focused on the decision to either kill his uncle or allow
him to live, both adding onto his melancholic state and giving him something to focus on outside
of his ego.  In these ways Hamlet fully encompasses the Oedipus complex and proves Freud’s
theory is correct.  Ophelia, on the other hand, does not work through the same problems as
Hamlet, which means her character negates the Oedipus complex in women

Neither does Ophelia share in the indecisiveness that plagues Hamlet, nor does she have
anything to funnel her melancholic energy into besides her own ego.  The reason for this
difference is the Oedipus complex does not and cannot occur with Ophelia.  There is never any
mention of her mother in the play.  This means that she does not have a sexual impulse towards
her mother that would make her hate her father.  In fact, in the conversations Ophelia has with
Polonius, she seems to have a close and trusting relationship with him since she listens to his
advice and tells him “I shall obey, my lord” (Shakespeare, 1.4.136).  But after she loses
everyone, she does not have anywhere to put her depressed energy into, causing her to lose her
mind as seen in Act IV Scene v when she begins to sing to the Queen and King:

“By Gis, and by Saint Charity,

Alack, and fie for shame!

Young men will do’t if they come to’t,

By Cock, they are to blame.

Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me,

You promis’d me to wed.’

(He answers.)

‘So would I ‘s’ done, by yonder sun,

And thou hadst not come to my bed.’” (58-66).

At first glance her singing may seem more like the babbling of an insane person.  But after
review, most of her songs have to do with what she has lost from Hamlet: love.  It can be
determined that Ophelia identifies herself as the woman quoted in her song.  The woman
expected the man to marry her after he promised he would.  But once he “tumbled” her and she
“came to his bed,” which are taken as sexual innuendoes, he decided against keeping his
promise.  In Act III Scene ii Hamlet makes several sexual innuendoes towards his relationship
with Ophelia, connecting Ophelia’s feelings to the feelings of the woman in the song.  The
repetition and reminiscing of lost love causes Ophelia to lose her mind until she cannot handle
her emotions and kills herself.

If the Oedipus complex affected Ophelia she would not be able to kill herself.  Similarly to
Hamlet, she would be struggling between killing her father’s murderer for rightful revenge and
allowing Hamlet to live because he killed the man she always held a subconscious, murderous
hatred towards.  Ophelia’s death comes from an internal focus on oneself that an indecisive
person could never focus on because they are so enveloped in their thoughts on someone else. 
This makes Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex inaccurate because it does not account for
women who do not harbor a sexual desire for their mother nor an aspiration to kill their father.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “The Material and Sources of Dreams.” The Interpretation of Dreams. New
York: Modern Library, 1950. 919-923. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and
Alan Tyson. London: Hogarth, 1957. 244-58. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Susanne L. Wofford. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.
Print.