Sunday, April 12, 2009

What does Hamlet's failed attempt to kill Claudius reveal about his nature?

In Carl Jung's excellent book Psychological Types (1921) he identifies four conscious functions: sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. And he emphasizes that thinking and feeling are mutually exclusive.



Naturally only those functions can appear as auxiliary whose nature is not opposed to the dominant function. For instance, feeling can never act as the secondary function alongside thinking, because it is by its very nature too strongly opposed to thinking. Thinking if it is to be real thinking and true to its own principle, must rigorously exclude feeling.



This would seem to explain Hamlet's problem. It isn't just that he thinks too much but that thinking, as Jung says, excludes feeling. Hamlet cannot kill someone in cold blood. He has to feel anger and hatred. We see that he is charged with such emotions when he does finally kill Claudius. But when he encounters Claudius at his prayers, he cannot bring himself to kill him because he doesn't feel anger and hatred at that point. 


Hamlet can act decisively when he isn't thinking, as when he kills Polonius. He acts decisively and courageously when he leaps aboard the pirate ship and attacks their whole crew singlehandedly. He also acts decisively and "rashly" when he breaks open the letter that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking to England and forges a substitute letter in which he has Claudius ordering the immediate execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead. As Hamlet tells Horatio after returning to Denmark:



Rashly—
And praised be rashness, for it let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will



Whenever Hamlet acts decisively or impulsively it is because he is motivated by strong feelings, and whenever he fails to act decisively, it is because his habit of thinking—no doubt acquired during all his years at Wittenberg—excludes feeling. Hamlet can't understand himself, as he shows in his soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 2, where he asks:



What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? 



It is to be noted that Laertes does not have Hamlet's problem. Laertes is strongly motivated by his feelings. But, as Jung would point out, Laertes' feelings interfere with his thinking just as Hamlet's thinking interferes with his feelings. It would appear that Claudius is able to manipulate Laertes in Act 4, Scene 7, just because Laertes is not a thinker.

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