Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought

“Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” is the phrase Freud invokes for the established reading of Hamlet as a man paralyzed by thought. He sets that account against a more disturbing explanation: Hamlet’s hesitation is specific to the act of revenge, because the man he must punish has enacted a wish that Hamlet himself cannot consciously acknowledge.

The Phrase and Its Interpretation

Freud introduces the phrase while considering why Hamlet delays the revenge required by his father’s ghost. The play’s text, he observes, does not disclose the reasons for the delay, and prior interpretations have not settled them. In the account associated with Goethe, Hamlet is a person whose power to act is paralyzed by the overdevelopment of thought. The phrase gives that explanation its memorable image: thought casts a pale shadow over action.

Freud does not treat this reading as sufficient. Hamlet is not shown to be generally incapable of acting: he suddenly stabs the eavesdropper concealed behind the arras, and he later acts purposefully and cunningly, sending two courtiers to the deaths intended for himself. These contrasting episodes make the question more exact. Hamlet can act, but he cannot carry out this particular act of revenge.

Freud’s Alternative Account

Freud explains the inhibition through the nature of Hamlet’s task. The target is the man who removed Hamlet’s father and took the father’s place beside Hamlet’s mother. In Freud’s interpretation, this man has realized Hamlet’s repressed infantile wishes. The expected impulse to avenge the father therefore gives way to self-reproach: Hamlet’s conscience accuses him of being no better than the sinner he is supposed to punish.

The phrase thus marks an interpretive contrast, not Freud’s final diagnosis of Hamlet’s delay. What may look like thought obstructing action becomes, in his account, a conflict whose underlying wishes remain unconscious. He translates that conflict into conscious terms while acknowledging that it would remain unconscious in Hamlet’s psyche; he also says his interpretation permits the inference that Hamlet is hysterical.

Dramatic and Critical Context

Freud places the phrase within a larger comparison between Hamlet and Oedipus the King. In his account, the child’s wishful fantasy underlying Oedipus is openly realized, whereas in Hamlet it remains repressed and can be inferred through its inhibiting effects. The contrast makes Hamlet’s hesitation an indirect sign of what the drama does not plainly state.

The explanatory note identifies the phrase as an allusion to Hamlet, Act III, scene i, and traces the familiar interpretation to Goethe’s discussion in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. There, Hamlet is understood as a pure and moral nature burdened by a great action for which he lacks the strength of a hero. Freud’s use of the phrase preserves that account as a recognizable critical position while redirecting attention from an excess of thought in general to the particular desire and self-reproach that, in his reading, obstruct revenge.