A Freudian Reading of Hamlet and Titus AndronicusIn 1900 the eminent Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud produced a seminal work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams which contains the idea that dreams allow psychic exploration of the soul, that dreams contain psychological meanings that can be arrived at through interpretation. Freud states that “every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of meaning, assignable to a specific place in the psychic activity of the waking state”. According to Freud's original formulations, dreams have two contents, a manifest content which is the dream actually experienced and a latent content which is the meaning of the dream discovered by interpretation. Literature can be thought of the same way, as fiction. of imagination whose underlying truth can be discovered through interpretation. A piece of literature may have a truth to say but it may remain hidden from us until we interpret the signs. According to Freud there are three ways to access the unconscious; dreams, parapraxes (or verbal slips) and jokes, and it is clear that psychoanalysis asks us to pay close attention to language, puns, verbal slips, etc. This suggests that psychoanalysis is directly related to literary criticism, as both types of analysis focus on close readings of language. Therefore, by understanding Freudian theory, we can gain a deeper understanding of literature. This essay attempts to discover how Freud's psychoanalytic accounts of human nature can lead us to a deeper understanding of the family relationships at work in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. According to Freud's Interpreter... in the center of the sheet..., in Bevington, David Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968) Kovesi, Lecture Note 'Titus Andronicus and Psychoanalysis' (2001) Shakespeare, W. Hamlet and Titus Andronicus in The Oxford Shakespeare ed. Olver, H.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) Information regarding Freud's theory and works taken from web addresses http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/4158 (General information) http://www. freudpage.com/ en-us/freud/psychotheory1.html (Classical psychoanalytic theory)http://www.mii.kurume-u.ac.jp/~leuers/Freud.htmn (Psychoanalytic theory)http://www. geocities.com/ ~mhrowell/ (Psychoanalytic Theory)http://fox.klte.hu/~keresofi/psychotherapy/index.shtml (Dictionary of Psychoanalytic Terms)http://www.vuw.ac.nz/psyc/vornikFreud /FRONT.HTM (General information and psychoanalytic theory)