Abstract
Paradoxically, Lacan’s “return to Freud” led to important revisions of the main tenets of psychoanalysis. Looking at their parallel readings of Hamlet and their divergent interpretations of the Schreber case, one grasps how Lacan rethought the Freudian myth of the Father, either by positioning of the desire of the Mother as a key to an understanding of the subject’s desire or by insisting on the Father’s role as a purely symbolic function.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Lacan, Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVIII: D’un Discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris, Édition de Seuil, 2007), 161. I will provide the translation and abbreviate this text S XVIII; further references will appear with page numbers in the text.
- 2.
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, tr. Lawrence H. Simon, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 158.
- 3.
Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, tr. Alan Sheridan, New York: Harper and Row, 1972; and Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet and Pierre Macherey, Reading Capital, tr. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, London: Verso, 2015.
- 4.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams: The Original Text, tr. Joyce Crick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 204. Further reference in the text.
- 5.
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VI: Le Désir et son Interprétation, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Editions de la Martinière, 2013. I refer to the French text by S VI and page number in the text; translations are mine.
- 6.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), 175.
- 7.
I am quoting from the partial English translation of Lacan’s Le Séminaire, livre VI, published under the title of “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet” in: Shoshana Felman (Ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 12. Hereafter abbreviated as LP and page number in the text. This has been the only available English version of Lacan’s Hamlet seminar for a long time.
- 8.
As Hamlet famously states: “The king is a thing—[…] Of Nothing.” In: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV, 2, l. 2702.
- 9.
Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, tr. Andrew Weber (London: Penguin, 2002), 42–43.
- 10.
Freud, letter to Sandor Ferenczi, October 6, 1910. In: The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, ed. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch; tr. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993), 43. Quoted by Colin MacCabe in his Introduction to: Freud, The Schreber Case, xii.
- 11.
Freud, The Schreber Case, 23.
- 12.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 197.
- 13.
For the identification of this Athenian Witz from the Hellenistic era, reported by Lucian, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 723–724.
- 14.
In his Anthropology, Kant had distinguished amentia (simple mental confusion), vesania (perturbation of thought), and dementia (a type of methodical madness). See Pierre Fédida, “La paranoïa comme théorie de la communication.” In Fédida, Le Temps de la réflexion V (Paris, Gallimard, 1984), 111–124.
- 15.
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits, Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, tr. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 445–488, here 455. Further references in the text.
- 16.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York, Norton, 1978), viii. Compare with Lacan, Autres Écrits (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 2001), 572.
- 17.
See Lacan, Le Séminaire XXIV, unpublished, session of May 17, 1977; gaogoa.free.fr/Seminaire.htm (access March 2021).
- 18.
Dany Nobus has given a wonderful analysis of this moment in “Once They Were Poets: The Function and Field of Sonority and Meaning in Psychoanalysis,” paper presented at the APW Study Weekend on Lacan’s Le Séminaire XXIV at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, October 9, 2011.
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Rabaté, JM. (2022). Freud’s Oedipal Myth and Lacan’s Critique. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_4
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