Hamlet is Sick: Patient care in the total institution

Hamlet is Sick: Patient Care in the TotalInstitution

Peter Bray

AbstractWilliam Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is conceived as anexploration of one patient’s experiences of the powerof a total institution. In the unethical andunsuccessful processes of healing his step-son’smelancholia, Claudius the chief executive and seniorconsultant of Denmark’s Elsinore Castle transformsHamlet’s condition from princely protégé to patient. Asa noncompliant inmate Hamlet goes about creativelyfinding ways to both resist his helpers and assembleevidence that will prove the institution’s power baseis corrupted by its new leader. His increasingreluctance to see the world as the state sanctions itgives the institution reason to treat his personalchallenges as attacks on its integrity. Thus,Shakespeare’s play exposes the sickness of totalsystems that vest power in a single individual. It alsoshows how a diagnosis of complicated mourning,experienced as a difficult personal process of intra-psychic transformation, might be reframed by itsonlookers as ‘madness.’ By showing the tragicconsequences of withholding or intentionally ignoringthe true source of a patient’s disease, Hamlet’s casedemonstrates the difficulties of making correctdiagnoses and giving appropriate treatment. At bestthere is a fragile symbiosis between a doctor andpatient. In Hamlet the institution misdiagnoses,threatens, renders incompetent, and denies Hamlet thepatient a say in his own healing processes. However, inhis institutionally inconvenient condition he isprovided with opportunities for the kind of

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unsupervised self-analysis and experimentation thatultimately risks his life and those of the community.After his assault on the body politic, steps are takento fully remove him from the public gaze. Hamlet’s caseserves to illustrate how a unitary approach to patientcare that disenfranchises and disempowers, tragicallydisables the service relationship and totally restrictsits staff in their work.

Key Words: Doctor-patient relationship, Shakespeare’sHamlet, Erving Goffman, madness, total institution.

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1. Introduction and BackgroundSince its appearance at the turn of the sixteenth

century William Shakespeare’s colossal theatricalversion of the bloody legend of Amleth has continuallychallenged the academy to curiosity about themotivation of its main protagonist.1 In thepsychoanalytical tradition, for example, Hamlet hasbecome the everyman of patients – and these powerfulobjectifications and examinations of Hamlet haveilluminated his seemingly infinite interiority andreductively ‘bounded’ him ‘in a nut-shell.’2 Possessing‘a consciousness that seems to over-hear itself,’Shakespeare’s incarcerated prince invites his audienceto ‘pluck out the heart of my mystery’ and examine hisdisease.3 Subsequently for centuries writers andthinkers have attempted to solve him and by someimpossible alchemy cure him. Impossible to fully knowand projected onto time and time again, Sigmund Freudand Ernest Jones finally confined Hamlet and transmutedhim into a bona fide oedipal neurotic patient - an objectfor hypothesis, assessment, and treatment.4

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This chapter suggests that Hamlet might be conceivedof as a play whose organising principles are similar tothose later elaborated upon in Erving Goffman’sdescription of traditional patient care in the self-protective total institution, ‘the epitome oforganizational tyranny and coercion.’5 Hamlet describesa unitary approach to social life that has becometainted by corruption and therefore beyond individualcontrol. It shows how this infection impacts upon theinstitution’s community and negatively influences theways in which it cares for its members. Hamlet’ssymptoms of traumatic mourning are genuinely

1 Although its provenance is problematic, it isgenerally agreed that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was firstperformed in 1602, or thereabouts. John Dover Wilson,Introduction to The New Shakespeare Hamlet (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1972), vii-lxvii. 2 Hamlet, 2.2.255: The bloody tale of Amleth isdescribed in the late 12th century Danish historian SaxoGrammaticus’s third book of history entitled HistoriaDanica.3 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (NewYork: Riverhead Books, 1998), 410-411: The New ShakespeareHamlet, 3.2.368-369.4 Sigmund Freud, “Some Character-Types met with inPsycho-Analytic Work,” (1916), trans. James Strachey,Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 14: 316-324; Ernest Jones, ‘Hamlet and Oedipus,’ in Shakespeare,Hamlet: A Casebook, ed. John Jump (London: Macmillan,1949), 51-63.

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problematic to the patient but it also offends theinstitutionally constructed perception of what it to bea prince, and therefore threatens the stability of anorganisation that has plans to move on. Under thesecircumstances even a return to baseline functioning istragically impossible. Through supernatural intuitionHamlet understands that his institution is sick.However, as Claudius the therapist is reluctant toallow Hamlet the agency to make his own changes toDenmark’s social order, he exploits his symptoms ofmourning to further the patient’s mortification and toforce him to ‘go a progress’ through the intolerably‘rotten’ guts of the institution.6 In this extraordinarypassage Hamlet, in order to protect himself fromClaudius, feigns madness but gives the institution afurther excuse to assess, diagnose, and treat him.

2. ‘. . . think of us as of a father’: The Patient,the Paternalistic Institution, and the Cure

Elsinore fully embraces Erving Goffman’s four ‘commoncharacteristics’ of total institutions, particularlyprisons and mental hospitals, suggesting that,

All aspects of life are conducted in thesame place and under the same singleauthority; Daily activity is carried out inthe immediate company of a large batch ofothers; Activities are tightly scheduled . .. by a system of explicit, formal rulingsand a body of officials; Activities are

5 Greg Smith, Erving Goffman (London: Routledge, 2006),71; Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation ofMental Patients and Other Inmates (London: Penguin Books,1961/1991).6 Hamlet, 4. 3. 29-30.

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brought together into a single rational planpurportedly designed to fulfil the officialaims of the institution.7

As such, Elsinore’s custodial environment provides theseat of institutional and hierarchical power and itspaternalistic chief executive has a mandate to organiseclinical, custodial, and administrative inmates in‘healing’ confinement that guarantees protection andfreedom from infection for the wider community. Subjectto the values, structures, and rules of a totalinstitution Hamlet acknowledges that his home is ‘aprison . . . one o’th’worst.’8 In order to be cured, hemust accept the reduced circumstances of institutionallife and endure the dissolution and removal of his‘domestic existence’ for a subtle version of themortifying regime of ‘batch living’, segregation,observation, analysis, experimentation, and constraint.9

Unravelling this relentless game of doctor andpatient in Hamlet draws attention to how one mightdoctor one’s own solutions whilst simultaneouslylearning to be good patients to other medical andsocial ‘doctors’ whose service ministrations teach usto serve themselves.10

A. The Patient

7 Goffman, Asylums, 17: See also Erving Goffman’s paper‘On the Characteristics of Total Institutions,’presented in April 1957 at the Walter Reed Institute’sSymposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry.8 Hamlet, 2.2.246-50.9 Goffman, Asylums.10 Michael Taussig, ‘Reification and the Consciousnessof the Patient,’ Social Science Medicine 14.B (1980): 5.

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Hamlet’s traumatising losses make him extremelyvulnerable. Exchanging one father for another, aplayground for a prison, Hamlet’s assumptive world hasbecome an unpredictable and dangerous nightmare wherenothing fits.11 Held in the institutional grip of a‘forcing house for changing persons,’ and condemned toa life of unmet needs or imminent destruction, Hamletstill has the freedom to acquiesce or withdraw intohimself but does so at the risk of this being mistakenfor a deeper form of mental illness.12

From Claudius’s pragmatic perspective, before he cancomplete Hamlet’s treatment he must consider thepatient’s potential to spread the epidemic of civilwar, which also justifies his containing the patient’sinfection at its source. Thus, Hamlet’s conditionrather than Claudius’s act of regicide provides thethreat to the institution. Claudius restricts thepatient’s freedom, places him under surveillance, andsifts him using those he trusts the most. Meanwhile,the patient becomes increasingly aware of the wrongnessof the institution’s world view and his own impendingdiagnosis and provides the motive power to furtherinvestigate the underlying truth of his complexposition. Constantly watched and having to guard hisfeelings, other than to his long-time friend andconfidante Horatio, there is no secure transitionalobject that can replace Hamlet’s multiple losses offather, mother, kingdom, and thwarted expectations inthe world. His interaction with the Ghost, a tangiblesymptom of his spiritual crisis, forces him to11 Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a NewPsychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992); BrayPeter, Hamlet’s Crisis of Consciousness: The Deeper Dimensions ofAdolescent Loss (Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008).12 Goffman, Asylums, 12.

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contemplate issues previously hidden in the shadow ofhis unconscious.13 No longer sharing the same communalunderstanding and sense of the world as he believesothers do, the Ghost confirms his worst fears aboutClaudius and provides a motive to powerfully resist hisinstitution.

B. The Institutional DiagnosisHighly visible to the institution’s gaze, the

patient’s discomfort with his father’s death andmother’s remarriage at first presents as melancholy.Later, if education or psychiatric treatment fails totransform him into a compliant and largely sane memberof this society, his recalcitrant condition will becynically manipulated to create the impression that heis mad and an object to be cured or removed. Since theMiddle Ages it had become a common and lucrativebusiness to expeditiously remove the mad by ship toother countries where they might be disembarked andquietly and conveniently disposed of.14 As Claudius’sdiagnosis confirms, ‘Madness in great ones must notunwatched go.’15

According to Goffman the ‘social beginning’ of thepatient’s career is the ‘betrayal funnel.’16 This isdescribed as a conspiracy of trusted and concerned

13 Ronald David Laing suggests that ‘No one who has notexperienced how insubstantial the pageant of externalreality can be, how it may fade, can fully realise thesublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, orexist alongside it.’ Ronald David Laing,‘Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion andPsychosis,’ Spiritual Emergency: When Personal TransformationBecomes a Crisis, ed. Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof (LosAngeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1989), 53.

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family and friends who report behaviours toprofessional helpers and other members of the ‘circuitof agents’ who will ultimately make important decisionsabout their inmate status in the institution. Asidefrom Horatio, the other characters fulfil their rolesadmirably well. As senior ‘complainant’ and concernedfamily member, Claudius is the first to questionHamlet’s brokenness and introduce him into the funnel.Summoned back to court, Claudius offers Hamletpersuasive therapeutic advice over his grief anddirects him to conform in his dress and worldview bypublically suggesting that his step-son’s self-indulgent grief is ‘unmanly’ and unnatural.17 Placedunder informal house-arrest he is to ‘remain here inthe cheer and comfort of our eye,’ under surveillance.18

Already experiencing losses and ‘out of contact’ withthe world beyond the institution, the patient’smortification process meticulously disposes of anyfurther ‘previous self conceptions,’ identity andresources in order that he might be ‘“rebuilt” with anorganizationally appropriate identity’ that ‘producesan acceptable inmate self in the eyes of the staff.’ 19

At this stage in the treatment in Act I, given theinequitable power relationship between patient anddoctor, Claudius resorts to emotional blackmail to beseen to gain the patient’s fragile compliance. However,to retain his ‘executive competency’ Hamlet establishesan alternative ‘under-life’ that engages his energy ina search for evidence.20 Fraternising with other inmatesand directly practising ‘amoral arts of shamelessness’against them permits him to covertly offer a resistance14 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity inthe Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge:Routledge, 1995), 8-9.15 Hamlet, 3.1.192.

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that honestly rails against the institution withoutexposing his true purpose.21

Hamlet tantalisingly suggests a number of possiblediagnoses to explain Hamlet’s condition. Polonius andGertrude are convinced that Hamlet’s true madness iseither due to Gertrude’s ‘o’er hasty marriage’ or thathe is love-sick for Ophelia.22 Ophelia too, on her ownpathway to institutional insanity, questions Hamlet’sstability after his vicious rejection of her. However,it is Claudius’s first and cynically misdirectingdiagnosis of a melancholy that leads to madness that ismost relevant here. In the therapeutic project both

16 Goffman, Asylums, 123-135.17 Paul A. Jorgensen, ‘Hamlet’s Therapy,’ The HuntingtonLibrary Quarterly XXVII (1963-64): 244, suggests thatClaudius is following the advice of Robert Burton:‘...gentle persuasions are to be used, not to be toorigorous at first, or to insult over them...but ifsatisfaction may not be had, mild courses, promises,comfortable speeches, and good counsel, will not takeplace; then...handle them more roughly, to threaten andchide.’; Hamlet, 1.2.94-97.18 Hamlet, 1.2.115-117.19 Smith, Erving Goffman, 72-74.20 Ibid., 43 and 305.21 Ibid., 155.22 Polonius is referring to ‘heroes’ a term thatdescribes a ‘melancholy anguish caused by love for awoman. The cause of this affliction lies in thecorruption of the faculty to evaluate… [men forget] allsense of proportion and common sense…it can be definedas melancholy anguish.’ Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic inthe Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1987), 20.

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parties share the same terrible intent, making itimpossible to accommodate a therapeutic outcome.Beginning with the Ghost, associated in the Elizabethanmind with disruptions in the institutionalrelationships between king and cosmos, reality andunreality run together and the combatants are left‘watching one another, forming theories about oneanother, listening, contriving, full of anxiety.’23

Finally realising that Hamlet’s behaviour is both apersonal and an institutional threat Claudiusdispatches Polonius, his senior consultant and spy-master, to observe the patient and to undertake anumber of tests, and his friends Rosencrantz andGuildenstern to ascertain the extent of his ‘madness.’24

Thus, Hamlet’s curious behaviours are ‘transformed fromdefiance . . . into mere symptoms of sickness.’25 Muchof Acts 1I and III find the institution bendingthemselves to the difficult task of covertly collectingevidence of Hamlet’s symptomology and analysing it,whilst Claudius works to reveal the extent of Hamlet’sawareness of his culpability.

C. In PracticeIn ethical practice expert helpers rarely work with

close relatives and in this case the therapeuticchallenge to work with Hamlet momentarily falls uponPolonius who is totally self-assured in his knowledgeof the human condition. Taking the form of anassessment, Polonius in his role as pre-Freudiananalyst and spin-doctor undertakes his first session23 Clive Staples Lewis, Selected Lterary Essays (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1980), 99.24 Hamlet, 3.3.2.25 Eliot Freidson, ‘Celebrating Goffman, 1983,’Contemporary Sociology 12.4 (1983): 359-362.

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with Hamlet quite spontaneously by posing questionsthat confirm his preconceived hypothesis.Unfortunately, in his fumbling attempts at atherapeutic relationship he fails to note that thepatient is mocking him. However, he does have the witto momentarily see that Hamlet is rational: ‘howpregnant sometimes his replies are!’26 Duping Poloniusinto thinking that he is ‘mad for love’, and laterdetaching himself from Ophelia and her father’s spying,the patient is able to signal his losses andcondemnation of the love/lust that has infected hismother’s new marriage.27

In the character of Polonius is found the genuinetension that exists in the server-served relationshipthat typifies all institutions. His allegiance to hischief executive prevents him from acting in the bestinterests of his patients. He makes cursory judgementsand poor assessments of patient needs and withholdsconfidentiality. He impugns his daughter’s characterand reputation by revealing and reading personalletters sent by the patient to her and has nohesitation in devising an experiment that will see herunethically employed as a humiliated decoy.

Unaware that Hamlet is conducting his own experiment,his university friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern areinstructed by Claudius to find out ‘Whether aught to usunknown afflicts him thus.’28 Hamlet bluntly asks if26 Hamlet, 2.2.210-213.27 For further references to concepts of eroticmelancholy such as lovesickness and ‘heroical’ love inthe Middle Ages, see: Angus Gowland, ‘Burton’s Anatomyand the Intellectual Traditions of Melancholy,’ BabelLitteratures Plurielles, 221-257. Viewed 16 June 2013,http://babel.revues.org/2078#bodyftn21. 28 Hamlet, 2.2.17-18.

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they have been sent to spy on him. Their obfuscationand transparent denial press him to suggest that theyare being manipulated by Claudius and he satisfies themwith a self-diagnosis and symptoms of melancholy thatwill serve to convince Claudius of his vulnerability:‘I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind issoutherly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.’29 Gertrudehopes that an imminent stage performance to the inmateswill prove a distraction that will literally change herson’s mind. Meanwhile, in his under-life in theinstitution Hamlet uses his celebrity status todiscreetly prepare the actors to perform ‘The Murder ofGonzago’ as a means to check the Ghost’s veracity,create a visualisation of his father’s murder,challenge the institution’s story, ‘catch theconscience of the king,’ and wring a guilty confessionfrom him.30

As all the inmates and staff of Elsinore areavailable to be used in forwarding the needs of theinstitution, Polonius hastily arranges a spontaneousclinical encounter for the patient with his daughter asbait where he and Claudius can secretly observeHamlet’s reactions and verify Polonius’s hypothesis.Hamlet enters ‘in deep dejection,’ as he begins ‘To be, ornot to be’ soliloquy.31 In a painfully self-consciousaltercation, the patient’s treatment of Ophelia isfurther distorted by his disappointment in herdissembling. A shocked and bemused Ophelia is left topray ‘Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’32

29 Ibid., 2.2.382-83.30 Hamlet’s re-working of Old Hamlet’s account of hispoisoning in the garden and subsequent seduction of hiswife by his brother. Hamlet, 2.2.609.31 Hamlet, 3.1.56-90.32 Ibid., 3.1.153.

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Intuiting that the patient has been goading them,Claudius is convinced that ‘Love! His affections do notthat way tend.’33

Having hijacked the performance, the patientenergised by the approaching fruition of his planindiscriminately fires caustic puns at the assembledstaff and inmates in such a way as to confirm theinstitution’s continuing prognosis that his ‘wit’sdiseased.’34 On cue at the climactic moment of theperformance Claudius bursts from the hall. For a momenta triumphant Hamlet has proved the authenticity of hisspiritually inspired evidence and out-witted histherapists. Unfortunately, Claudius’s abrupt exit fromthe play whilst inconclusively a public disclosure ofguilt might be interpreted as an attempt at managing adangerous patient who, prior to the performance, made adeath threat.35

Summoned to face a concerned Gertrude by Rosencrantzand Guildenstern, Hamlet savagely vents his frustrationon them and implicates them as agents of theinstitution, ‘Why...how unworthy a thing you make ofme!’36 Joined by Polonius, he resumes his scatologicalperformance before sinking into a soliloquy that,though it briefly threatens emotional violence to hismother, also counsels against losing control - to ‘becruel not unnatural.’37 Claudius’s fears for his own

33 Ibid., 3.1.165-7.34 Ibid., 3.2.322-323.35 Ibid., 3.1.151. Hamlet’s suggestion to Ophelia inClaudius’s hearing that, ‘Those that are marriedalready – all but one – shall live,’ might easily beinterpreted as a death threat. 36 Ibid., 3.2.366-373.37 Ibid., 3.2.398-399.

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safety should he let Hamlet’s ‘madness range’,reinforced by Hamlet’s sixth soliloquy, are confirmedby his staff’s confidential reports of the patient’sgrowing excitement.38

Hamlet keeps his appointment with his mother, whilstClaudius, preserving ‘his reputation as a kindlytherapist’, follows Hamlet’s treatment plan to itsinevitable conclusion by referring him to a similarinstitution in England that prevents furthercontamination to a sensitive population.39 In themeantime, Polonius is hiding in Gertrude’s room takingnotes.

The patient begins to scourge his mother over hermarriage - suggesting that it is her mad lust that mustbe cured. Gertrude, anxious as the patient ‘[seizes herarm]’, cries ‘murder’ and startles Polonius in his hidingplace.40 Thinking it is Claudius, Hamlet blindly stabsand kills him. Undeterred, he continues his self-righteous interrogation, and it is at this point thatthe Ghost appears, unseen to Gertrude, to cautionHamlet against violence. Instead Hamlet lecturesGertrude, in the language of the institution, on herfuture chastity with Claudius and challenges her totest his sanity: ‘lay not that flattering unction toyour soul, that not your trespass but my madnessspeaks.’41 The patient’s final speech is coldly self-

38 Ibid., 3.3.2.39 William F. Bynum and Michael Neve, ‘Hamlet on theCouch,’ American Scientist 74.4 (1986): 391.

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assured as he informs her that he knows of Claudius’splans to have him silenced.

As the institution rallies to search for its violentinmate, Gertrude’s diagnosis on Hamlet’s state of mindis unequivocal, ‘Mad as the sea and wind when bothcontend which is the mightier.’42 Claudius admonisheshimself for the institution’s failure to restrain andcorrect the patient’s fatal behaviour by caring toomuch. Notably, his language in subsequent scenes ispeppered with ironic descriptions of ‘disease’ inconnection with the patient, and his proposedintervention is ominous:

Diseases desperate grown by desperateappliance are relieved, or not at all . . .Do it England, For like a hectic in myblood he rages, and thou must cure me; tillI know ‘tis done, howe’er my haps, my joyswere ne’er begun.43

In his final soliloquy the patient carefullysummarises what he has learned from his time in theinstitution and, about to embark, puzzles over hisprogress through the institution. In this he ‘weighs’his painful personal losses ‘against humanity’scapacity for self-destruction and deception.’44

40 The Ghost’s individual appearance to Hamlet but notto Gertrude defies the logic of the previous groupencounter but this incongruity does serve the plot andsubsequent diagnosis perfectly. In this contextGertrude is able to claim that ‘Alas he’s mad.’ Hamlet,3.4.106-135.41 Ibid., 3.4.145-146.42 Ibid., 4.1.7.43 Ibid., 4.3.9-67.

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Metaphorically and literally severed from theinstitutions of his childhood and motherland he is freeto embark upon an uncertain future.

3. Killed and CuredIn the final stages of Hamlet providential

occurrences now shape the design of the play revealinga Hamlet symbolically and freely rebirthed to theinstitution via its graveyard. No longer a patient,Hamlet appears markedly ‘normal.’ Even though heremains convinced of Claudius’s guilt, his thoughts areno longer so overtly inclined to revenge. Nor does heseem afflicted by madness. Hamlet has achieved anunderstanding of the self, a paramount human task forearly Elizabethans which, rather than ‘egoism’,provided ‘the gateway to all virtue.’45

44 Peter Bray, ‘Men, Loss and Spiritual Men, Loss andSpiritual Emergency: Shakespeare, the Death of Hamnetand the Making of Hamlet,’ Journal of Men, Masculinity, andSpirituality 2.2 (2008): 10-14.45 Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, Shakespeare’sHistory Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 79.

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Encouraged to take part in a fencing bout withLaertes, with whom he now believes he is reconciled,Hamlet is wounded by a poisoned rapier. Fatally woundedand forced to defend himself he watches his mother diefrom a drink meant for him and witnesses Laertesconfession to his part in Claudius’ elaborate murderplot. Finally justified in confronting Claudius ‘withall his crimes broad blown’ he stabs him with a

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poisoned blade.46 It could be said that having exploredthe roles of a ‘patient’, and a ‘doctor’ to theinstitution, he has achieved a level of psychic balancethat enables him to fearlessly accept his own death andserenely reconcile himself to a reality that he cannotcompletely change.

46 Hamlet, 3.3.81.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. NewYork: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Bray, Peter. Hamlet’s Crisis of Consciousness: The Deeper Dimensionsof Adolescent Loss. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2008.

———. ‘Men, Loss and Spiritual Emergency: Shakespeare,the Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet’, Journalof Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, 2008. Viewed 25January 2013. http://www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume2/number2/pp95-115.

Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie. Shattered Assumptions: Towards a NewPsychology of Trauma. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Bynum, William F. and Michael Neve. ‘Hamlet on theCouch.’ American Scientist 74.4 (1986): 390-396.

Couliano, Ioan P. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Translatedby Margaret Cook. Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1987.

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4. The Tragic Institution This work has examined Hamlet as a patient and an

object for psychological analysis in a totalinstitution. Hamlet’s objectification by theinstitution illuminates the tragic dimensions of Hamletin Hamlet whilst exploring the belief that themortifying confinement and reconstruction of patients

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of insanity inthe Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. Cambridge:Routledge, 1995.

Freidson, Eliot. ‘Celebrating Goffman, 1983.’Contemporary Sociology 12.4 (1983): 359-362.

Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete PsychologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey London:Hogarth Press, (1916/1957) 14.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of MentalPatients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin Books, 1961/1991.

Grof, Stanislav and Christina Grof, ed. Spiritual Emergency.New York: G. P. Putnam, 1989.

Jorgensen, Paul A. ‘Hamlet’s Therapy.’ The HuntingtonLibrary Quarterly XXVII (1963-64): 239-58.

Jones, Ernest. ‘Hamlet and Oedipus.’ Shakespeare, Hamlet: ACasebook, edited by John Jump, 51-63. London: Macmillan,1949.

Laing, Ronald David. ‘Transcendental Experience inRelation to Religion and Psychosis.’ Spiritual Emergency:When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis, edited by

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serves the greater good. However, as the roles ofpatient and doctor are blurred, almost interchangeable,it poses questions about the fitness of one group towork upon the other. Shakespeare’s parable of Hamletreveals a service relationship that is so functionallyskewed that its flawed autocracy serves nothing butitself.

Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof. Los Angeles: J. P.Tarcher, 1989.

Lewis, Clive Staples. Selected Lterary Essays. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Smith, Greg. Erving Goffman. London : Routledge, 2006.

Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall. Shakespeare’sHistory Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

Wilson, John Dover. The New Shakespeare Hamlet. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Peter Bray is an Associate Professor in The Faculty ofHumanities, Arts and Trades at the Eastern Institute ofTechnology in Hawke’s Bay, NZ. He has been widelypublished in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and hasrecently edited two collections of work which reflecthis developing interest in trauma, Voicing Trauma andTruth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation(2013) with his son Oliver Bray, and ‘The StrangledCry’: The Communication and Experience of Trauma(2013), with Apara Nanda. Currently, his research andwriting in counselling and psychology concernthemselves with exploring the position of individualswho are challenged by crises, and the roles that

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There is no happy ending to Hamlet’s condition – thisis a tragedy. It illustrates how the institution canpass on its own sickness through the patient’sreconstruction process. It also raises one very subtleand important question: Are we implicated in Claudius’sguilty scheme? As scholars and audience we relish Hamletin the asylum, not because Hamlet requires healing, butbecause he unwaveringly and enigmatically taunts uswith his mystery.

Notes

spiritual dimensions of experience play in their post-traumatic growth. Peter Bray is the author of Hamlet’sCrisis of Consciousness: The Deeper Dimensions ofAdolescent Loss (2008).

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