OEDIPUS COMPLEX

It is 4-or 5- year-old children who are generally affected by the Oedipus complex. Someone is affected by the Oedipus complex if they strongly love the parent of the opposite sex and hate the parent of the same sex. Some critics think that Hamlet is affected by an Oedipus complex. That means that Hamlet loves his mother and hates Claudius, his uncle, and that he is more horrified by his mother’s remarriage than by his uncle crime. So the cause of his melancholy is explained by his love for his mother. A critic, Dr. Johnson, shows that the source of his repugnance stems from the activation of his repressed childhood Oedipus complex: “The actual realisation of his early wish in the death of his father at the hands of a jealous rival would then have stimulated into activity these repressed memories, which would have produced, in the form of depression and other suffering, an obscure aftermath of his childhood’s conflict”. Other critics think that we can find the reason of Hamlet’s melancholy in his sensitivity explaining that he hates Claudius because he is his father’s murderer, governs in a different way and probably Gertrude committed adultery with him before King Hamlet’s death.