ocd? isn’t that when you wash your hands all the time? isn’t that more of a lady macbeth type of thing?

getting this one out of the way because i do recognize that not everyone knows an inordinate amount about ocd. the answer is... well-yes-but-actually-no.jpg. excessive hand-washing can be a symptom of ocd! but it’s not even close to describing all of it.

ocd is a monster of a disorder to try to talk about in a tumblr post, because it manifests in so many different ways for so many different people (there are a GREAT many subtypes. blasphemous ocd, harm ocd, contamination ocd, relationship ocd... and you can have many of them at once overlapping, which is fun). but the basic core idea is that a person with ocd has obsessions, involuntary, upsetting, unstoppable, and anxiety-inducing thoughts, and then performs compulsions in an attempt to get rid of them. compulsions can be almost anything. sometimes they’re connected to the obsession (eg, if you have contamination fears, you might wash your hands a lot!), but they aren’t always (eg, worrying about your family’s health, so you turn the lights on and off); often they’re irrational. compulsions can also be entirely mental; pure-obsessional ocd happens when the compulsions are just doing mental backflips in your head all the time rather than having physical actions. (i have a few physical compulsions, personally, but by and large my ocd is mostly pure-o. i think hamlet’s is, too, if only because we only see his words/thoughts and not any physical actions in the script. that said, i do think a staging of hamlet where he has physical compulsions would be sick as fuck.)

like i said, ocd is difficult to describe succinctly in one post because it manifests in SO. MANY. DIFFERENT. WAYS. in my personal experience/awareness, at least, the central factor is the spiral of doubt. ocd is called the doubting disorder, and it’s called that for a reason. it’s an illness of what-ifs and circles. ocd causes you to doubt everything, particularly yourself, and especially your own morality. you question everything. you question yourself constantly. people with ocd are really good at convincing ourselves we are terrible people. and the cycle never stops - because the thing is that compulsions don’t actually stop the obsessions from happening. compulsions relieve anxiety for a brief while. then the obsessions come back. so you do your compulsions again. and then the obsessions come back. so you do your compulsions again. and then -

circles, circles, circles. a neverending downward spiral. a neverending sense of doubt.

hamlet folks, i think i could end this post here.

hamlet knows something is wrong with him (and so does everyone else)

but i won’t! because i have more to say! a lot more to say! before i get into the actual symptoms he displays, here are some of the most telling things, imo, that hamlet says about himself, and that other people say about him:

1.4:

so oft it chances in particular men that for some vicious mole of nature in them as, in their birth, wherein they are not guilty, since nature cannot choose his origin, by the o’ergrowth of some complexion, oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason or by some habit that too much o’er-leavens the form of plausive manners, that these men carrying, i say, the stamp of one defect... doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal.

now, it’s very likely that hamlet’s talking about claudius here; he’s just finished yelling about how claudius is making all of denmark look like drunkards. that said, the way he chooses to talk about this is very interesting - he focuses on the idea of one fatal flaw that grows and grows until it blots out everything else about a person. he might very well think this way about himself & his uncontrollable thoughts and doubting (the use of the word “doubt” here did make my ears prick up, i won’t lie, even if it’s used in a different context). additionally, this is very much how ocd feels: one thought will grow and grow until it blots out the rest of the world. also very interesting that he singles out the “breaking down... of reason” specifically 🤔🤔🤔

2.2:

okay, we all know “i would have fought god if He didn’t nerf me with mental illness” -

o god, i could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that i have bad dreams!

but let’s also consider:

for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

the emphasis on the power of thought & the instability of morality... & the mind as a centerpiece of what is good and bad, as if your thinking is both highly subjective and also the only thing you can rely on...

3.1:

this something-settled matter in his heart, whereon his brains still beating puts him thus from fashion of himself.

this is a claudius line (emphasis mine) but like come ON. come ON??? this is LITERALLY claudius diagnoses you with ocd asmr. (and speaking of claudius lines, “o limed soul” is said about himself, but the idea of being trapped in one’s mind, fears and doubts... oof.)

okay! so we all know something’s wrong with hamlet! even hamlet knows something’s wrong with hamlet, better than anyone else does, actually! but what, exactly, is actually wrong with hamlet?

obsessions and intrusive thoughts

not every intrusive thought is an obsession, but obsessions, generally, are intrusive thoughts: thoughts that come into your head involuntarily, that you do not want. intrusive thoughts usually go directly against one’s morality; our brains are always seeking out the worst-possible what-if, even if it’s something that would never happen, and the irony is that many people become terrified of doing what they’re absolutely least likely to do.

hamlet is constantly worrying that the ghost is a liar, that he’s hurting an innocent man, that he’s going to be damned for this. all of these are repeated, obsessive intrusive thoughts; so could be fears that he’s actually going mad, or that he genuinely wants to hurt the people around him, that he’s naturally a bad person, that he deserves to be damned. at the end of 3.2, right before he goes off to see his mother, he tells himself:

o heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever the soul of nero enter this firm bosom: let me be cruel, not unnatural: i will speak daggers to her, but use none; my tongue and soul in this be hypocrites; how in my words soever she be shent, to give them seals, never, my soul, consent!

what he’s doing is telling himself - coaching himself, almost - pleading with himself, almost - not to hurt his mother. not to draw his blade on her. not to put her in real physical danger. he says this as if he barely has a choice about it - as if he’s unable to control himself. and that, the fear of being unable to control oneself, of hurting someone without being able to stop yourself, of hurting a loved one, when it is genuinely exactly opposed to what you actually want - that has intrusive-thought written all over it.

i also think this is a much more interesting standpoint from which to characterize hamlet’s preoccupation with incest / his mother’s sex life than “hamlet really really wanted to fuck his mom.” sexual intrusive thoughts are common; among other things, ocd can give you unwanted vivid mental images of morally awful things, sexual acts among them. the first time he brings up his mother’s ambiguously-faithful ambiguously-incestuous remarriage, in 1.2, hamlet actually moans, “let me not think on’t,” and later asks, “must i remember?” forget the o*dipal complex, man. give me a hamlet who has uncomfortable and unwanted thoughts about his mother’s sex life that he hates and wishes he could be rid of because they must make him awful, but he can’t stop thinking and he can’t get away from it and every time he sees his mother with claudius the thoughts pour back in - does he have to remember? can’t he stop thinking about it?

religion

one of the ways ocd can manifest is as obsessions about religious/moral beliefs. this tends to result in 1) a very strict moral code and 2) a constant fear that you’re an awful person who’s constantly breaking said moral code. for example, someone might be afraid of doing or thinking something blasphemous. if they have a thought they consider “blasphemous” (obsession), they may try to make up for it by praying endlessly (compulsion). this tends to make religion a really anxiety-inducing topic! the moral side of this is particularly common in pure-o sufferers, who tend to constantly question not only their own morality but the Big Questions of the world. wow. boy oh boy. i wonder who else tends to do that. incessantly. without ever coming to a conclusion he’s sure about. wow. (REALLY good article on this here; i am realizing as i type this out that i do not have the space in this post to give a ted talk on this type of ocd.)

i’m no expert on Religion In Hamlet, but it is clear that religion impacts the way hamlet thinks. he’s terrified that the ghost is a demon sent to damn him to hell and he constantly questions what lies after death. in 3.4 (the closet scene), when he and gertrude argue, he puts heavy focus on the unholiness of gertrude’s marriage, emphasizing sin, corruption, and taint, ideas lots of obsessive-compulsives fixate on. i know these things are not exclusive to ocd, but in an ocd reading of hamlet, they have extra significance - particularly because it’s one of the rare times he seems sure. hamlet spends the whole play questioning the universe; to fall back now on the idea of sin, with a certainty he’s rarely shown, suggests that it’s something he’s almost trained into himself. you could also interpret the “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” line - he’s putting on a show of certainty he doesn’t feel in an attempt to quiet the unquietable doubts. i’d call that a compulsion, for sure.

...and on that note. it’s interesting that in placing his life in the hands of god and walking passively into death, hamlet’s able resign himself to dying while also circumventing the action that he thinks would Definitely send him to hell - killing himself. (AKA, finding the loophole in your obsession/compulsion cycle, doing something that’s TECHNICALLY not against the rules you made up in your head.)

completion, repetition, & the way he talks

okay i understand that this one brings us dangerously close to “source: bro trust me” territory, but... obsessive-compulsive disorder affects everything about the way i think and speak. part of the reason, if not all of the reason, that this post is so long is that i am predisposed to Do The Most with everything, for two reasons: 1) the completion thing and 2) the proof thing. i hate leaving things undone or half-done, and i feel the need to prove my point to the furthest degree possible. hence the constant disclaimers, backtracking, and covering of all of my bases when i make posts.

hamlet does the same exact thing. out loud, he is constantly exploring his thoughts, discarding thoughts, second-guessing himself, doubling back on what he’s saying, elaborating to the fullest extent and then second-guessing himself again - he goes On and On and On, and it’s because he has to cover all of his bases. he thinks and talks himself in circles and circles and circles! spirals and spirals and spirals! even his analysis of his own thoughts is near-compulsive; ocd means you think and think and think and never STOP and you think about your own thinking, too! just as it’s a torment for us, it’s a torment for him.

“is this entire post an example of this repetitive circular thinking/speaking style?” yes. 4d experience <3

doubt, waiting, & the end

here’s the thing about ocd: it’s the disorder of doubt and what-ifs. it’s an illness that means you are never, never sure about anything. you are never sure. and that, really, is the most obsessive-compulsive thing about hamlet: he is never sure.

what do we think of when we think of hamlet? indecision. (whether that’s charitable to him or not - in the cultural psyche, he’s attached to indecision as a concept.) and indecision and ocd go hand-in-hand, because it’s so so very hard to make a decision or take a stance on anything when you’re never certain of anything at all. he wavers constantly. at the end of act two he’s desperately doubting; he settles on the play as the thing that will give him certainty! but the play, in itself, is a compulsion; it’ll fix his doubt briefly, but only briefly, and after that the uncertainty will seep back in, because the obsessions never go away and you never get to be sure! the first time i read this post about reason and deliberation in hamlet, it SCREAMED ocd to me (emphasis mine):

he wants so desperately to do something, but he only wants to do it if he’s 100% certain it’s the right thing to do, and he spends whole acts talking himself in circles trying to figure it out.

to do this thing - to kill a man, to kill a member of his own family, his mother’s husband and the actual king of his country, to do a real actual murder when he's already afraid of hell - he needs to be 100% sure it’s the right thing to do. but he can’t be. you can’t be! that’s the trap of ocd, is that it convinces you that you may, someday, be certain, when you never will be!

why does hamlet take so long to kill claudius? because he’s chasing the certainty he will never, ever have. even at the very end of the play, when gertrude tells him the drinks have been poisoned - hamlet must know it’s claudius’s doing. who else would it be? who else would want to kill hamlet this badly? who else has used poison before? and yet, what does he say?

villainy! ho! let the door be lock’d! treachery! seek it out!

he calls for the doors to be locked. he calls for a hunt for the treachery he MUST know is right under his nose. because even now, he can’t kill the king until laertes gives him undeniable indelible proof: he can’t kill the king until he’s sure, and on his own, he never will be.

silence; the end

when i think of ocd, i think of endless thinking. endless questioning. endless doubt. a downward-spiralling never-ending cycle. an inability to ever stop thinking. an inability to ever, for just a moment, have a quiet mind. an inability to ever, for just a moment, relax or think nothing.

“nothing. that’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.” we all know this is a dirty joke; i know this; you know this; ophelia knows this. but at the same time - how nice it would be, to have just a moment of not thinking at all -

to have just a moment of silence.

the desire to stop thinking is by no means unique to ocd. but doesn’t it add just another painful dimension to the very last scene? for hamlet, a sufferer of a disorder that causes so much endless and agonizing thinking, that offers up the worst kinds of thoughts on a platter, to finally reach the end and find that the rest is silence - that the rest is a peaceful nothingness, that finally for once he can stop thinking and just meet oblivion -

and for horatio, who knows about hamlet’s obsessive problems, who knows about his fears, to hold him as he dies and tell him that he has absolutely no doubt that there are angels coming to sing him to rest, that he is absolutely certain that hamlet is going to heaven -

well. it fucks me up, i’ll tell you that.