Hamlet at once mockingly parries Polonius's pandering, yet officious approach ("Do you know me, my lord?" "Excellent well. You are a fishmonger"), but the latter is too taken with his pet notions to notice. Instead of heeding cryptic warnings of his interviewee, which seem to indicate Hamlet sees him misusing Ophelia, Polonius discounts him ("he is far gone") and veers off into false empathy ("And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this"). To his credit he recognizes Hamlet is saying something ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") and even something important: ("How pregnant sometimes his replies are--a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of").
Then, as Polonius announces he will take his leave, he gets insulted again, this time unmistakably so: "You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal …." As enacted by Kenneth Branagh in 1996, the next few seconds are exceptional: Recognizing the insult, a glimmer of hurt comes over Polonius's face. Hamlet thereupon adds, "except my life, except my life, except my life." First he utters it spontaneously, as if disarmed by seeing for the first time a wounded old man and not a smug, snooping courtier, and indirectly apologizing to him, by revealing his own distress. He repeats it the second time in earnest, as if surprised himself at what he has just said and taking it in; but the third time he repeats it farcically, to mask his meaning out of concern that he has let on too much to the prying adversary whose facial expression has by this point quickly changed to that of keen calculation. Maybe I am, following Branagh, reading too much into the text; but I feel supported by Harold Bloom's (1998) general remark, "Hamlet keeps overhearing himself speak … [and] he changes with every self-overhearing." Incidentally, Bloom postulated self-overhearing is the royal road to individuation, out of which our present-day mode of consciousness developed.
I'll mention only one more interaction. What an inoculation against manipulative prying it is to see Hamlet give a recorder to Guildenstern and demand he play a tune; when the latter demurs, "I have no skill with the instrument," witness Hamlet tell him (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 354-361):
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery … do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Discussion
"This is interesting, but how is a literary exercise more useful than watching an actual tape of a patient?" is a common attitude. The answer has profound implications for psychiatry.
A century ago, psychiatrists saw no need for a theory of the therapeutic relationship. But then, before the profession became sophisticated enough to realize it needed one--and much before general social and scientific advances would be great enough to require it--psychiatry was provided with it by Freud's psychoanalytic theory. However, the presence and influence of the psychodynamic paradigm in psychiatric education has diminished to the point that its power to provide the glue that coheres our clinical skills is questionable. Yet our profession seems mostly unperturbed, except for residency training directors and trainees who find themselves on procrustean beds of psychotherapy competence requirements.
What can fill this gap? After a century of leading medicine in understanding its human side, psychiatry may learn from it. Things have changed from what Arthur Kleinman, M.D., (1988) found almost 20 years ago, when medical schools expected that "what is useful in social science can be acquired intuitively by the 'sensitive' physician," leading to neglect before and during medical school, and commonly rendering the practitioner "functionally illiterate when it comes to [their] basic terms, concepts, and modes of inquiry." At least medical educators now believe that as our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and the associated diagnostic and therapeutic technology become more complex, so, too, do the human interactions and concerns that accompany them (see the October 2003 Academic Medicine: Special Theme: Humanities Education). There will indubitably be some cul-de-sacs in these efforts to enlist humanities, but their presence in medical schools can only stimulate psychiatry. To appreciate the maturity of one such endeavor, hear Charon (2001):
