This text analyses Hamlet’s first soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, using it as a poetical illustration of the earliest process of construction of ideals, seen from a psychoanalytic point of view.
On the one hand, there are there are two figures that are highly idealized as Ego Ideals: Hamlet´s father and the primitive family situation involving father, mother and child joined together in a primary narcissistic triad.
On the other hand (the abject Ego), when describing his mother at the moment she marries Claudius, Hamlet shows the lowest point of abjection that a human being can fall to.
The oscillation between these extreme positions of positive and negative values shows that primary narcissism has not been transformed to allow the construction of secondary ideals (Ego ideals).
Hamlet; psychoanalysis; melancholia; ego ideal