John Bowlby's Attachment and Loss: Challenging psychological whims in William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Abstract

The research explores the work Hamlet by William Shakespeare through the lens of the Attachment Theory proposed by John Bowlby through the defiant argument against the deep-rooted Freudian Oedipal paradigm, based on the assumption that Hamlet is a revolutionary approach to interpreting the psychological disorder and relationship issues of the main character. Bowlbyian ethological model (secure base, separation anxiety, internal working models (IWMs), triphasic grief process (protest, despair, reorganization)) explains why Hamlet oscillates between dismissing and embracing Claudius as father, taking Gertrude as a new wife, and betrayal of family sanctuaries as consequences (Hamlet): far from his ambivalence being due to repressed incestual desires, the ethological model sheds light on his vacillations as adaptive yet maladaptive reactions to catastrophic attachment disturbances: the instant pat Based on a close textual reading of important soliloquies, ghostly encounters, and interpersonal relations (e.g., the ambivalent fusilade of the closet scene, the avoidant displacement of the nunnery diatribe, the fratricidal usurper character of Hamlet, the romantic collateral damage to Ophelia), the paper follows the development of Hamlet as a secure base turned into disorderly dread, maternal anxious-ambivalence (Frailty, thy name is woman), fraterical usurpating attitude, and romantic collateral damage to Ophel Historical predictions in Ainsworth Strange Situation and longitudinal attachment research and contemporary grief literature (e.g., prolonged grief disorder correlations) point to the prescience of the play, and the social-cultural disruptions of those Elizabethan times such as purgatorial limbo of Reformation, pragmatics of Levirate remarriage proved fertile soil of proto-attachment narratives. This cross-disciplinary investigation democratises Hamlet as universal loss ecology by replacing Freudian phallocentric phantasmagoria with a relational ecology of empiricism (as in Bowlby), which can be used as a source of therapeutic knowledge of bereavement (e.g. EMDR-informed continuing bonds).

Key Words: William Shakespeare, Attachment Theory, psychoanalytical, Oedipus Complex, Hamlet, Detachment, maternal deprivation.