Hamlet and Narcissus.

Hamlet and Narcissus offers a new psychoanalytic interpretation of Shakespeare's most celebrated tragedy and hero. Although respectful of Freud, much of whose terminology (death drive, Oedipal phase) he uses, John Russell finds in more recent theorists, especially Heinz Kohut, the key that unlocks the mysteries of Hamlet. According to Kohut, as Russell summarizes him, "the fundamental needs the child is seeking to satisfy in its negotiations with its environment have not to do with sex and aggression [as for Freud], but with self-esteem, that is, with its sense of itself as an effective agent in the world, capable of controlling and creatively deflecting the forces which impinge on it" (191). It is the task of the child's parents to encourage the development of self-esteem, to aid in that most difficult "transition from an archaic to a healthy narcissism" (32), to frustrate "the infant's grandiose and unrealistic demands for approval and protection," but to do so "within a context of consistent and realistic nurturance and support" (33). Denied this support, the child becomes an adult unable to function in the world. Such an adult, for just these reasons, is Hamlet.

Since the play tells us next to nothing about Hamlet's childhood, one might suppose its reconstruction to be impossible. Here is Russell's defense of his method: "Human motivation . . . is transferential: adult motives are transferentially informed by scenarios structured in the individual's infancy, childhood, and adolescence. As mimetic representations of human being [sic], fictional characters . . . will manifest in their motives such transferential information" (225-26). In my opinion, the second of these sentences does not follow from the first: a character's past cannot be transferred if it does not exist. As a mimetic representation, Hamlet has no past, and Russell's determination to show he does provides an unstable foundation for his study.

The readings of the play's individual details that follow from these assumptions are sometimes convincing but more often not. Russell is interesting on Gertrude's sexual insatiability, though I wish he argued for it more from the plays's evidence and less from a contrived analogy with Cressida. He gives much attention to Hamlet's scene with the players, his "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, and The Murder of Gonzago, all matters bearing on the incontrovertible fact (for Russell) of Hamlet's delay. The purpose of the play-within-the-play, for Russell, is not to determine Claudius's guilt but to remind Gertrude of her own "erotic willfulness" (124) and turn her interest from her husband to her son. Hamlet cannot be seeking more evidence of Claudius's guilt because the "rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy shows he is in no doubt about it; his explanation at the end of this speech of his fear that the Ghost "May be the devil" who "Abuses me to damn me" Russell discounts as "pure pretext" because the preceding lines belie it. That Hamlet's self-directed rage at the beginning of the soliloquy might be an automatic but ultimately inauthentic reaction to the Pyrrhus speeches, and the quieter subsequent reflections on the Ghost's unreliability, Hamlet's real ideas on the subject is a possibility that Russell will not entertain.

Hamlet and Narcissus better represents psychoanalytic theory than recent Shakespearean criticism. Venerable figures like A.C. Bradley, G. Wilson Knight, and Dover Wilson appear in these pages, but (among those whose own psychoanalytic work might have been considered) not Joel Fineman and David Wilbern. There is no mention of Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Schwartz and Kahn (1980) or, strangest omission of all, of Avi Erlich's Hamlet's Absent Father (1977).

MARK TAYLOR Manhattan College