Intro
Hamlet is practically tailor-made for Freudians.
The sheer number of Freudian concepts that are applicable to Shakespeare's magnum opus is crazy. There is a father who must be avenged, but also a sense of guilt so overpowering that it paralyzes the hero, leaving him famously unable to act.
How's that for procrastination? Psychoanalysts trace Hamlet's sense of guilt to the relief or even satisfaction this Prince of Denmark felt after his father's murder.
What an awful thing to feel, Hamlet must have thought. And this thought must have led to all his hesitation and hand-wringing, as well as his repeated failure to fulfill his father's commands.
And even when the prince eventually fulfills his father's commands, things don't just magically get better. The cycles of violence and father-son kerfuffles are endlessly perpetuated in Hamlet.
The whole play is like Freud for Dummies, only much more fun to watch.
Quote
[Hamlet to the Ghost]
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
Analysis
This is Hamlet's promise to the ghost of his father. The prince solemnly swears here to obey the "commandment" laid down by his father. (Note the association between paternity and law, which is classically psychoanalytic.)
And the images Hamlet uses in this speech sure that would give an analyst a lot to interpret. There's the "book and volume of [his] brain," which is a surface onto which "records" are inscribed, and a "table" onto which "pressures" are applied. We think these images sound a bit like Freud's "mystic writing pad", or the passages about "preservation in the sphere of the mind" in Civilization and its Discontents.
But of course, for Hamlet, fulfilling his promise to Dear Old Dad is much easier said than done. "Pressures past" and present continue to bear on Shakespeare's antihero. As we're pretty sure you already know, his road to the end of the play is bumpy at best.
Poor Hamlet. Or something.