This mini-course explores Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, examining the psychological dimensions of the play’s characters, themes, and dramatic structure. Drawing on classical and contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks, the course investigates issues such as mourning and melancholia, repression, desire, family dynamics, and the unconscious motivations that shape Hamlet’s actions.
Participants will gain a deeper understanding of how psychoanalytic criticism illuminates Hamlet’s enduring complexity and relevance, while also engaging broader questions about subjectivity, identity, and interpretation in literature and clinical thought.
At the conclusion of this activity, participants should be able to:
Apply psychoanalytic concepts to the interpretation of Hamlet.
Analyze key themes in Hamlet such as grief, repression, and ambivalence through a psychoanalytic framework.
Evaluate the relevance of psychoanalytic literary criticism to clinical thinking and practice.
Integrate insights from psychoanalytic readings of literature into broader understandings of human behavior and internal conflict.
James W. Stone is a lecturer on Shakespeare and early modern literature at American University and on Shakespeare at the Osher Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He taught at the American University in Cairo and at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Crossing Gender in Shakespeare: Feminist Psychoanalysis and the Difference Within (Routledge, 2010) and articles on Shakespeare, Milton, the Renaissance Ovid, film theory, and contemporary Egyptian art. In 2024 James Newlin and he co-edited the essay collection New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare: Cool Reason and Seething Brains (Routledge). He and Catherine Bates are the editors of Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis: Method in the Madness (forthcoming in Spring 2026 from Palgrave Macmillan).