A number of suggestions came to me out of the Œdipus complex, the ubiquity of which gradually dawned on me. The poet’s choice, or his invention, of such a terrible subject seemed puzzling; and so, too, did the overwhelming effect of its dramatic treatment, and the general nature of such tragedies of destiny. But all of this became intelligible when one realized that a universal law of mental life had here been captured in all its emotional significance. Fate and the oracle were no more than materializations of an internal necessity; and the fact of the hero sinning without his knowledge and against his intentions was evidently a right expression of the _unconscious_ nature of his criminal tendencies. From understanding this tragedy of destiny it was only a step further to understanding a tragedy of character—_Hamlet_, which had been admired for 300 years without its meaning being discovered or its author’s motives guessed. It could scarcely be a chance that this neurotic creation of the poet should have broken down, like his numberless fellows in the real world, at the Œdipus complex; for Hamlet was faced with the task of taking vengeance upon another for the two deeds which are the subject of the Œdipus desires, and before that task his arm was paralysed by his own obscure sense of guilt. Shakespeare wrote _Hamlet_ very soon after his father’s death. The suggestions made by me for the analysis of this tragedy were fully worked out later on by Ernest Jones. And the same example was afterwards used by Otto Rank as the starting-point for his investigation of the choice of material made by dramatists. In his large volume upon the incest theme[24] he was able to show how often imaginative writers have taken as their subject the themes of the Œdipus situation, and traced in the different literatures of the world the way in which the material has been transformed, modified and softened.