Psychoanalytic Texts Research Articles

A Note on Angel Medina's Commentary

equally thoughtful, indeed meditative, reply. That must be foregone. But there is one specific point in Angel Medina's commentary that deserves contradiction. Commenting that I do not handle the literary codes with assurance, he asserts: The phenomenon of repression fits better the code of persons than the code of actions. Mr. Medina's statement represents a traditional view of the place allowed to psychoanalysis in literary criticism, and some determination to keep it in its place. Psychoanalytically based literary criticism has usually been exercised in three areas: the psychogenesis of texts (the author's unconscious), the psychodynamics of literary response (the reader's unconscious), and the psychoanalysis of fictional characters (postulating an unconscious for them in order to explore occult motivation and to establish psychoanalytic typologies). Mr. Medina allows the pertinence of the psychoanalytic concept of repression in the third category-the code of persons-whereas it is my contention that all three categories are largely impertinent, and that we should be looking (and working) elsewhere: toward a psychoanalytically informed textual criticism, one that, for the moment at least, may find its most powerful exercise in the superimposition of literary and psychoanalytic texts, in an intertextual play between them.

Psychosis and Mourning in Lacan's Hamlet

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