Yes, ChatGPT Can Write a Pretty Good Paper on Hamlet

Which tells us something about papers on Hamlet

In my previous post and Quillette article, I observed: “When ChatGPT can analyze Hamlet as well as any grad student, we might reasonably ask, ‘What is the point of writing papers on Hamlet?’”

To double-check my own assertion, I asked ChatGPT to do just that. In particular, I asked it to analyze Hamlet from a “Relational Psychoanalysis” perspective.

Relational psych is a post-Freudian form of psychoanalysis that emphasizes human interrelations at all periods of life over drive theory (Ego, Id, Superego) and Oedipal Theory (our big problem is repressed sexual and aggressive desires directed toward our parents, formed in the first few years of life).¹ It’s the theoretical approach I took in grad school in the nineties. You had to take a theoretic approach—and you still do—to write a dissertation in literature, and relational psychology was the most humanist one I had come across. ²

So, below is the paper I asked ChatGPT to write.

Granted, relational psych never really caught on as a lit theory, and this paper would require maybe some updating with more trendy theorizing to be published, that and more of a lit review. It would have to justify the relational psych approach vs other current approaches, as I did in my paper on Joyce.

But as a paper written, say, for a master’ s-level class, I’d award it an A. It’s clearly written, accurately summarizes key points of the play, and smoothly applies the assigned theory.

What does all this prove?

1. ChatGPT can synthesize ideas, that is, create something new from what has already been created. This is not, perhaps, true creation, but it is pretty close to it.³ I’m not a Shakespeare scholar, but I believe this paper, if published, would represent a new contribution to the field.

2. ChatGPT can write servicable prose. The writing here may lack flair and personality, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s clear, precise, and readable.

3. Literary analysis, as it has been practiced for the past half century, is largely a mechanical operation easily reproduced by AI: take a text, run it through a theoretical sausage grinder, get a publishable article.

All this raises the question of what is the purpose of writing an essay on Hamlet anyway?

From a pedagogical perspective, I’d say there are numerous things professors seek to accomplish by assigning such a paper.

1. We want evidence that the student has read and truly understood the play—or “the text,” as many of my colleagues would say. This is simply evaluative.

2. We want evidence that the student has read, understands, and can apply some sort of theoretical apparatus relevant to the discipline. This is also evaluative.

3. We want the student to engage their critical faculties and produce something new, original, and interesting, in short, to produce a true work of criticism. This is mentoring, trying to develop a critical sensibility.

4. We are giving the student practice in a basic requirement of the field, producing scholarly papers. This is professional training.

5. We are giving them an opportunity to discover something new about Hamlet, which, theoretically, would advance human understanding of the play. This is “for the betterment of mankind.”

Now that ChatGPT can write this paper for the student, it obviates almost all of these goals, with the possible exception of the last—I mean, if we really need to keep producing new interpretations of Hamlet, which, to be honest, I kind of doubt.⁴

I do believe there’s value in teaching Hamlet, and I do believe there’s value in writing about Hamlet—if a student does so out of a genuine curiosity and desire to delve deeper into the play. You will never understand a work of literature as deeply as when you write about it. And no, prompting ChatGPT to write your paper for you will not give you that experience.⁵

But I think this experiment demonstrates the hollowness of a lot of what passes and has passed for literary criticism and the need we, in the English profession, have to reconsider our approach.

I, for example, would far rather a student write a personal essay relating Hamlet to their own experiences of life than run it through the theory sausage machine—and that might make them less eager to have ChatGPT write it for them. But that won’t satisfy the “scholarly training” impulse. But, again, maybe we don’t need scholars to do what a computer can do just as well.

If you’re interested, read the essay and judge for yourself.

Haunted Relations: Hamlet and the Relational Psyche
Thomas P. Balázs⁶

Abstract
This paper offers a relational psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet, arguing that the prince’s psychological turmoil arises not from repressed Oedipal desires but from relational trauma—namely, the collapse of mutual trust, recognition, and coherence within his primary relationships. Drawing on the work of Jessica Benjamin, Stephen A. Mitchell, and Philip Bromberg, the essay reframes Hamlet’s madness, alienation, and ambivalence as responses to ruptured interpersonal bonds, particularly those with his parents, Ophelia, and his social world. Hamlet, in this light, becomes a tragedy not simply of revenge or inaction, but of broken intersubjectivity.

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Introduction: From the Isolated Mind to the Relational Matrix

Psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamlet have long centered on Freudian themes—most famously, the Oedipal complex. In this reading, Hamlet’s paralysis is driven by unconscious guilt and identification with the murderous uncle who enacts Hamlet’s own forbidden wish. But more recent developments in psychoanalysis have emphasized the social and relational constitution of the self. Relational psychoanalysis, especially as developed by Stephen Mitchell and Jessica Benjamin, posits that identity emerges within a network of affective relations rather than from isolated drives. In this light, Hamlet’s suffering appears less as a repressed wish and more as the symptom of relational disruption—of betrayal, misattunement, and the failure of mutual recognition.

Relational theory provides a framework for understanding the psychic consequences of broken attachments and failed “holding environments.” The core question shifts from “What does Hamlet unconsciously want?” to “What has happened to Hamlet’s relational world that has made the self unlivable?”

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The Ghost and the Disintegration of the Relational World

The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears as both symptom and agent of relational rupture. He shatters Hamlet’s moral and emotional framework, revealing a world where love has become betrayal and kinship has become treachery. The father’s injunction—“Remember me” (1.5.91)—is not just a command to avenge, but an appeal to restore a lost bond. But this demand destabilizes rather than affirms Hamlet’s subjectivity.

Philip Bromberg’s concept of “self-states” is useful here: trauma, for Bromberg, fragments the self into dissociated parts that cannot be integrated without relational repair.[^1] Hamlet’s erratic behavior—the oscillation between lucidity and madness, tenderness and cruelty—suggests such fragmentation. The ghost is not simply a plot device but a psychic rupture that breaks continuity with the past and severs Hamlet’s capacity to trust the present.

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Gertrude and the Collapse of Mutual Recognition

Jessica Benjamin argues that subjectivity depends on “mutual recognition,” the ability to sustain one’s own agency while acknowledging the subjectivity of the other.[^2] Hamlet and Gertrude’s relationship exemplifies the breakdown of this process. Hamlet cannot see Gertrude as a complex subject—only as the “adulterate” queen. He demands that she “confess herself to heaven” (3.4.150) in a scene that resembles a failed therapeutic encounter: one partner demands acknowledgment, the other remains opaque.

Gertrude, in turn, fails to validate Hamlet’s grief. Her early rebuke—“Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die” (1.2.72)—dismisses the singularity of his loss. This misattunement deepens Hamlet’s sense of alienation. In Benjamin’s terms, both characters retreat from recognition into reactive modes of control and disavowal.

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Ophelia and the Fragility of Intimacy

Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia reflects the classic ambivalence of the traumatized subject: the desperate need for connection coupled with an inability to trust it. His cruel command—“Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.121)—can be read as a defense against intimacy, a preemptive strike against a relationship he fears will betray him like his mother has.

Relational theorist Lewis Aron emphasizes how early relational trauma can lead to “anxious vigilance,” where closeness is experienced as threatening.[^3] Hamlet projects onto Ophelia the duplicity he perceives in Gertrude, responding not to Ophelia herself but to the maternal betrayal she unconsciously symbolizes. Ophelia’s madness and death, often portrayed as romantic or inevitable, can thus be understood as the psychic consequence of being denied recognition by those closest to her.

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Friendship, Surveillance, and the Failure of the Holding Environment

Winnicott’s concept of the “holding environment” describes the emotional space in which a subject can develop a stable self through consistent care and recognition.[^4] For Hamlet, this environment has collapsed. Claudius’s Denmark is a panoptic regime; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s betrayal mirrors the broader collapse of trust. Even Horatio, the loyal friend, remains more observer than participant, unable to contain Hamlet’s anguish.

This isolation exacerbates Hamlet’s psychological instability. His soliloquies function as internal holding attempts—efforts to stabilize self-state through language when no reliable relational other is available.

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Theater as Substitute Recognition: The Mousetrap

The “play within the play” reveals Hamlet’s deep need for external validation. The Mousetrap is more than a strategic ploy; it is a desperate performance in search of acknowledgment. In staging Claudius’s guilt, Hamlet seeks to render his inner reality visible—a dramatization of what D.W. Winnicott called “true self” expression in the hope that someone will witness and believe.[^5]

In relational terms, the theater becomes a surrogate for mutual recognition. Hamlet does not trust Claudius to confess or Gertrude to see, so he appeals to the audience within and beyond the play. His identity, destabilized by relational betrayal, now depends on spectatorship: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” (2.2.606–7).

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Conclusion: From Psychic Splitting to Relational Witnessing

By the end of the play, Hamlet is not “healed,” but there is a shift: he entrusts his story to Horatio, asking him to “tell it” (5.2.343). This gesture suggests a movement, however faint, toward re-integration. In asking to be remembered truthfully, Hamlet opens a space for the kind of witnessing that relational psychoanalysis sees as essential to repair.

From this perspective, Hamlet is not just the tragedy of a man who cannot act—it is the tragedy of a subject whose selfhood is undone by relational betrayal and whose efforts to reclaim coherence are thwarted at every turn. In this sense, the play is uncannily modern: a study in the fragility of identity when the relational world collapses.

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Bibliography

Aron, Lewis. A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Bromberg, Philip M. Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1998.

Mitchell, Stephen A. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

Winnicott, D.W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

1. I always found Freud not only reductive and formulaic, but short-sighted as he seemed to ignore as formative any sort of experiences beyond, say, age 9. And yet, for me, adolescence and young adulthood were equally powerful in forming my identity.

2. I used it as the theoretical underpinning for my dissertation, Toward the New Man: Modernism and Masculinity from a Relational Psychoanalytic Perspective. Later, when I wrote my one scholarly article, “Recognizing Masochism: Psychoanalyis and the Politics of Sexual Submission in Ulysses” I drew heavily on this theory, distinguishing my approach both from classical Freudianism and the French poststructuralist analyst Jacques Lacan, who was all the rage at the time (at least in the humanities. People in his own profession, psychology, paid him scant attention as I remarked in my paper).

3. The great Romantic poet and writer Samuel Coleridge distinguished between “Fancy” and “The Imagination.” Fancy is a lesser artistic power that involves producing seemingly new ideas from recombining old ones: attaching wings to a lion, for example, to produce a new creature. Imagination is the greater power, essentially God-like, creating something from nothing. The romantics prized the imagination above all, but whether it actually exists outside of God is, in my view, an open question.

4. I remember my first English professor, who loved Tolkien, asking nonetheless of students who repeatedly re-read LOTR, “How many times are you going to go back to Mordor?” To which one might add, how many times are we going to go back to Denmark?

5. Although maybe having a long, productive back-and-forth talk with ChatGPT might. . . . I’ve gained a lot from such interchanges.

6. Without a moment’s ethical pause, ChatGPT attributed the article, entirely written by it, to me. Unless you think the prompt was enough to give me the credit. . . .