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First published as a special issue of Yale French Studies in 1977, this collection of essays, based primarily on the theories of Jacques Lacan, is of major significance in that it attempts to relate psychoanalysis and literature in ways that show the interconnections between the two disciplines while at the same time doing justice to the differences between them.
What makes this new kind of dialogue possible is Lacan's emphasis on the essentially linguistic aspect of psychoanalysis. His position is best summarized in Fredric Jameson's essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject.” Drawing from Piaget and Melanie Klein, Lacan sees the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic stage the most crucial aspect of the development of the psyche. Since Lacan believes that this movement from the preverbal to the linguistic stage results in a fundamental alienation of the subject and that this movement is irreversible, he concludes that it is only in the linguistic order that the unconscious is reflected.
Lacan's essay on Hamlet illustrates his neo-Freudian theory and methodology. Taking Hamlet rather than Oedipus as his model, Lacan sees Shakespeare's character as already having undergone a fundamental alienation with its consequent loss of power or psychic castration in the transition from the Imaginary, preverbal level to the Symbolic. Unlike Oedipus, who acts out his unconscious desires, Hamlet is already within the symbolic order from the beginning: that is, he is already alienated and determined by the signifying Other (in this case the desire of the Mother). The initial renunciation or loss of potency at the Imaginary level is revealed only at the linguistic level of the drama. Thus, for example, he reads the scene of Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia as the moment when Hamlet recognizes in her the imaginary Other, which in his movement to the linguistic level, he has already denied. This simultaneous recogn