Thus the focus of teaching shifted from content (character) onto process. Instead of learning the myriad ways psychiatrists have construed Hamlet, we look at what characters do (e.g., what they say, what they appear to emote and think) in response to each others' speech and imputed feelings and designs. The give-and-take entailed in the collision of their wishes, needs and pasts at specific points in the plot, and their reciprocal (mis)perceptions and (mis)interpretations, is especially relevant to understanding and teaching how to comprehend and manage the emotional valences of the therapist-patient relationship--often thought to be the most complex aspect of being/becoming a psychiatrist (Podrug, 2003). While such interactions are often explicit in, or can be adduced from, novels, short stories or poems, the one form to which they are intrinsic is drama.
That the interactions of dramatic characters may speak more directly to the psychiatrist-patient encounter should not surprise us given their common origins in ritual and religion, and kinship with myth and play. (Recall how Winnicott [1971] conceptualized play and cultural experience as "neither a matter of inner psychic reality nor a matter of external reality," but as "located in the potential space between the individual and the environment.") Furthermore, no postmodern perspective is needed to appreciate that in both, reality is constructed not by one or another character or narrator, but by participants' mutual exchanges.
Since the ghost commanding revenge had questionable credentials, Hamlet must first find out what really happened (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 594-600):
The spirit that I have seen/May be a devil, and the devil hath power/T'assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps/Out of my weakness and my melancholy,/As he is very potent with such spirits,/Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds/More relative than this.
He puts on "an antic disposition" partly to make his grief and thoughts harder to read, partly to provoke Claudius--and maybe his mother--into a telling (over)reaction of their own. But primarily he acts so because he has no choice but to give vent to the painful emotions he tries to and yet can no longer contain ("But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" [Act 1, Scene 2, line 158]). Claudius has the symmetrical problem of needing to find out what Hamlet's strange behavior purports. In addition to relying on the interrogative cunning of his chief minister Polonius, he commands Hamlet's old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him. Thus, most of Acts 2 and 3 are shaped by the mutually opposed efforts of Hamlet and Claudius to extract information from the opponent while secreting their own.
It is from that part that I show several video segments, demonstrating the corrosive, corrupting effect of these intrusive, deceitful queries on the other characters who find themselves inexorably drawn in and forced to choose sides. The balancing acts with which they apportion their allegiances slip into betrayals even before they realize it. My audience and I easily find our own pertinent experiences. Bennett Simon, M.D., following Aristotle, noted, "The actions portrayed in tragedy are generally deeds (things done) but also include wishes, fears, and, particularly important for dramatic action, the ascribing of meaning to the actions of others." Simon (1984) discovered an analogy between partially correct interpretations offered within the psychodynamic therapy and
how the characters in tragedy inexorably misinterpret what they see and what they hear. They interpret it correctly enough and plausibly enough so that we are faced not with the ridiculous or the absurd, but with the believably incorrect, or partially correct … These interpretations are actions that move the plot.
The play probably comes closest to mimicking a psychiatric-like interaction (several centuries in advance!) when Polonius, still excited from expounding on Hamlet to the royals, "boards" him to prove his theory. What ensues is a quasi-interview by a proto-psychiatrist of a pretend-patient. In this context it always elicits a knowing recognition by the audience of uncanny parallels between this scene (Act 2, Scene 2, lines 171-219) and when, enamored of some smart idea, we push too hard to elicit confirmatory information from the patient.
