Only less important than the relations of child-in-law and parent-in-law are those of step-child and step-parent[111]; and such lesser degree of importance as these have is due rather to the lesser frequency of their occurrence than to any lesser significance which they possess for the individuals actually concerned. The generally outstanding feature of these relations is the manifestation of a more intense, or at any rate a more open, form of those feelings and tendencies which would normally exist between the child and the corresponding blood parent. A boy, for instance, who may successfully have displaced or repressed his original feelings of jealousy or hostility towards his own father, may often prove incapable of carrying out a similar re-adjustment in the case of a subsequently acquired step-father. The latter may have none of the glamour which belonged to the former in virtue of his position as head of the family (and therefore centre of the child's world) during the infancy of the child (_cp._ p. 55) and which may have helped to inhibit the original hostility experienced towards him through arousal of the opposite emotions of love, gratitude or admiration. The step-father, therefore, may easily re-awaken in his step-son any remnants of the hatred which the latter may have experienced towards his real father, without re-awakening in corresponding degree the compensating forces which kept the hate in check. [Sidenote: "Hamlet" as a study of this relationship] Furthermore, the boy's mother only marries the step-father after a period of widowhood during which the boy may have appeared to possess the sole, or at any rate the chief, claim upon her interest and affection. By her re-marriage she will probably seem to the boy's unconscious mind to have been, in a very real and poignant sense, unfaithful to himself, and to have rejected his own love for that of an outsider; an idea which may appear in consciousness in the rationalised form of an imputation of unfaithfulness towards the mother's previous husband--the boy's own father. It is a complex of feelings of this kind which, as Ernest Jones[112] has so convincingly shown, underlies and forms the principal psychological motive in Shakespeare's tragedy of "Hamlet". It is this which is the cause of Hamlet's vacillation in regard to the contemplated murder of his step-father; the latter had only done what Hamlet himself would fain have done before him, but was inhibited from doing. The contemplation of Claudius's ill deeds serves dimly to call up the buried tendencies which at one time prompted Hamlet himself to commit a similar atrocity--the murder of the king (his father)--for a similar end--the possession of the queen (his mother)--and the paralysing effect of the arousal of such feelings makes itself felt as an inability to carry out the punishment of one with whom he thus has much in common, and whom he feels to be in a sense no worse than himself, the would-be punisher.