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Abstract
This paper introduces the importance of siblings in the work of William Shakespeare: how psychoanalysis might help us grasp their role in his plays and how, in turn, Shakespeare can help us flesh out a place for them in psychoanalytic theory. Focusing on Hamlet, an only child, the paper builds on the author's previous work positing a 'sibling trauma' at around the age of two. It is suggested that this sibling trauma, which takes place in reality or in fantasy, offers a way of understanding Hamlet - and sibling relationships - from the perspective of lateral relationships. The paper offers an understanding of the confusion between fathers and brothers, mothers and sisters, and how these become clearer in Hamlet's trajectory from melancholia to mourning, from 'lonely only' to a place in the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of man.
Introduction
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't -
A brother's murder...(Claudius, Hamlet, 3.3.37 )
This paper suggests that, paradoxically, the only child gives us the template for the psychological dimension of sibling relations and offers a useful insight into the initiating place of siblings in the construction of social life (Mitchell, 2003; 2006a; 2006b; 2013). It is argued that siblinghood as a lateral relationship along a horizontal axis is distinct from the vertical axis of the parent-child relationship, although of course they interact. Although the wealth of sibling relations in psychoanalytic case histories - particularly child treatments - is in the background, the reading of Hamlet offered in this paper exemplifies the contention that we need to develop a fuller understanding of the horizontal.
In Shakespeare's comedies women are all-important. The heroines may be sisters such as Kate and Bianca or twinned as Viola and Sebastian. If they are only children then they are doubled in sibling-like relations: for better (Rosalind and Celia) or worse (Hermia and Helena). Being a singleton is accidental and rapidly compensated for. The comedies demonstrate that siblings and those lateral relations that surround and succeed them, peers, cousins, friends, affines and finally consorts, despite all the problems and disturbances, constitute a positive social world in which endings are more-or-less happy. Their plots involve the sorting out of difficulties in order...