Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan's Hamlet

Abstract

T HE TRAGEDY HAMLET, Lacan says, tragedy desire.' winding path Hamlet's desire will take Lacan through territory familiar to his readers, perhaps new to others: from object petit a, to to foreclosure and mourning, and finally to death. How these views add to our understanding how far they go beyond Lacan's own indictment the sort hogwash that psychoanalytic texts are full of (p. 20) remains to be seen. Lacan's own text, titled and Interpretation Desire in Hamlet, is a text edited from transcripts his seminar for academic year 1958-59 on and Its Interpretation. Its themes resonate with some related essays in Ecrits: A Selection:2 The signification phallus, delivered in May, 1958; The subversion subject and dialectic desire in Freudian unconscious, presented in September, 1960; and On a question preliminary to any possible treatment psychosis, his analysis Schreber's Memoirs, completed in January, 1958, and to which we will return.3 Norman Holland notes that psychoanalysts seem to take to Hamlet like kittens to a ball yarn.4 Lacan is no exception. Lacan's basic thesis can be summarized as follows: Hamlet's