Hamlet's “Madness”

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Abstract
Drs. Stern and Whiles, in an interesting and provocative article in the January issue (1), claim to have solved the problem of Hamlet on the assumption that Hamlet suffered from the Ganser state occurring during the course of another psychosis. By this theory they hope to reconcile the seemingly contradictory views that Hamlet was insane, and that he was pretending to be so. He was both, they say, and the latter because of his being in the Ganser state.The authors claim to have examined the problem from a strictly psychiatric viewpoint; but it must be remembered that such a viewpoint is necessarily subject to many limitations, inasmuch as there exists no parallel to Hamlet in actuality. One has constantly to bear in mind that Hamlet is not an historical personage, but a character in a play, and that our task is not to explain some Hamlet of our own, but Shakespeare's Hamlet; and in consequence our theories must not only be psychologically acceptable, but must conform with the text of the play which, after all, is the final arbiter. With this in mind, a psychiatric study of Hamlet may be of great value, but it need not and perhaps cannot be expected to “explain” Hamlet.

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