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(2012) Toward a sociobiological hermeneutic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
"Just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being "over-interpreted" and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood," reasons Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 'so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet's mind" (266). Yet, while psychoanalysis enables the literary critic to investigate the stimuli behind creativity, "the grandest and most overwhelming creations of art," as Freud concludes in "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1914), "are still unsolved riddles to our understanding. We admire them, we feel overawed by them, but," he maintains, "we are unable to say what they represent to us' (211). Michelangelo's Moses exemplifies this mystery in sculpture, while "another of these inscrutable and wonderful works of art," William "Shakespeare's masterpiece," Hamlet, does so in literature (213).
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Wainwright, M. (2012). Veering toward an evolutionary realignment of Freud's Hamlet, in Toward a sociobiological hermeneutic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 147-175.
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