William Shakespeares Hamlet And Sophocles Oedipus The King

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet And Sophocles’ Oedipus The KingFor this paper I have decided to include information about both readings we have covered. We read William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Through reading both stories and by doing outside research I learned something interesting. This was that a Freudian theory was named for a few of the scenes in Oedipus the King and that this theory was also connected to Hamlet. This theory is known as the Oedipus Complex and when explained can provide a lot of insight into the interpretation of these plays.
Its actual definition can be found in psychology books and even most encyclopedia. It is a concept used in psychoanalysis that shows a child’s unconscious desire for the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite sex. This desire includes jealousy toward the parent of the same sex and the unconscious wish for that parent’s death (Oedipus Complex). Freud talks of the complex in boys and how this leads to attachment to the mother. In most cases it is explained using a boy for the example. (It is also explained for females, as a related complex known as Electra, Myers 464-65 and in Clark 168.) The child starts off as an infant being fed by the mothers’ breast or even by bottle, but either way the mother assumes the role of nourishing the child. She also cares for the child’s body, so much that in early life the child doesn’t even realize that they are or should be separate. With this, Freud says, it arouses in it a number of other physical sensations, pleasurable and unpleasurable. By her care of the child’s body she becomes its first seducer. The mother has now established her importance to the child and is its first love object. The further development of a child (positive or negative) can depend highly on how the parent and child interact after this point. The most commonly used example I saw in Psychology
books talks of when a mother notices her child curiously playing with himself. The mother realizes her connection to these actions and eventually, there will be an age at which the mother decides that it is unacceptable behavior. This can lead to the mother requesting that the behavior stop. The child now is forced to conceal his behavior or in a lot of cases is threatened with being told on or talked to by the father. This was shown by Freud to lead to issues of resentment towards the father. This is closely linked to how the term Oedipus Complex came about. In Oedipus the King Jocasta, Oedipus’ mother, realizes what is going to happen to her family after hearing what the oracle had to say. She is told her newborn son will grow to kill his father and marry his mother. She doesn’t want the child she has cared for to have to live this prophecy so she sends her son away to die. By trying to escape her own fate she later leads her son right into killing his own father. Oedipus grows up living a lie, the son to the King and Queen of nearby Corinth. He is ignorant to what was foretold. One day a drunkard gets him to question his origins and he travels to Thebes to see what he can find out about what really happened and whether or not the people he was raised by were actually his parents. On the road to Thebes, a man confronts Oedipus and he kills him without a second thought. In his ignorance he had just killed the man who turned out to be his real father, Laios. In effect, Oedipus unconsciously kills his own father, which Freud related to the unconscious desires felt by children throughout their normal early development. As the plot goes on we see what the oracle said coming true. Oedipus ends up in Thebes to find a widowed queen. Being of royalty himself Oedipus marries the queen not knowing it was his own mother. Not only has fate itself brought them back together but also, if you look at it through Freud’s theory you see it is true once again. Oedipus’ unconscious desire