Thursday, August 29, 2013

"We love because we lack." How does this quote relate to Hamlet?

The relation between "love" and "lack" is a Freudian psychoanalytic principle that associates desire with an insatiable void. It appears that the quote you are using is pulled from Joshua Rothman's article in The New Yorker, Hamlet: A Love Story. Rothman writes: 


"[W]e love because we lack. Inside each of us there’s an emptiness, and that emptiness can never be filled. None of us can ever be loved enough—by our parents, by our children, by our husbands or wives." 


In psychoanalysis, this "lack" is metaphorical, allegorical, figurative—but in Hamlet, it is presented quite literally. Consider the parents, children, and husbands/wives in the play: Hamlet's father is dead, a ghost; his mother, and incestuous adulteress; his lover, Ophelia, first, mad, then, dead. The emptiness and shadowy nature of these traditional instantiations of love causes Hamlet to question his own motivations and torture himself psychologically. But in doing so, he lays bare the foundations of the Oedipal complex, specifically, and Freudian psychoanalysis, generally. 

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