Reading Hamlet the play, one may infer that what impairs Hamlet, the character with whom all of us correlate, the most is not his father's havoc; rather his mother's hasty marriage. He divulges, "She married:-O most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets".

In this framework, Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, attributes the dilemma of Hamlet to being ill with the Oedipus Complex; a complex which takes its name from Sophocles‘ Oedipus Rex (who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother). Oedipus Complex is elucidated as the bond affinity that the child grows for his mother in its strong urge to possess the mother, desires to wreak havoc on the father. Prince Hamlet, throughout the play ponders and procrastinates the task of killing Claudius, to avenge his father’s murder. Freud proposes that Hamlet is unable to make up his mind to kill Claudius owing to his own Oedipus Complex the repressed but continuing presence in the adult’s unconscious, of the male infant’s desire to possess his mother and do away with his rival, the father. Moreover, Freud associates Hamlet’s dilemma to Shakespeare, the playwright himself, as the play was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father in 1601. Additionally, Shakespeare’s son who passed away at an early age bore the name Hamnet.

In similar vein, Ernest Jones in his tome Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), promulgates that Hamlet’s quandary is just “an echo of a similar one in Shakespeare himself.” After all, as Leo Tolstoy says "It is the family, it either creates a human being or a pile of knots. The family doesn't know what's happening to us! You do not know the extent of what we are going through".

For me, however, the raison de'tre of Hamlet's dilemma is that he is a human being whose neck is being put under razor edge of myriad pressure-cookers which sent him to the edges of insanity. Including but not limited to: his father's death, his mother hasty marriage, his beloved betrayal of his loyalty. Needless to say, Hamlet is a character with a peculiar personality; being delicately sensitive and contemplative is yet a reason why he's so thought-ridden persona.