ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud's well-known account of the Oedipus complex is the starting-point for any psychoanalytical reading of tragedy. In Freudian psychoanalysis the 'unconscious' replaces that Dionysiac energy which, as people saw, was for Friedrich Nietzsche the mainspring of tragic action. In Lacan, the division at the centre of subjectivity is articulated differently, and in such a way as to expose the various stages through which the infant travels to full subjecthood. The economy of desire in Lacan is complicated, and it is tied up with the question of signification. In a lucid discussion of this topic, Catherine Belsey has defined the Lacanian category of desire as 'a metonym of the want-to-be' that necessarily characterizes a human life divided between the unmasterable symbolic and the unreachable, inextricable real. In the writing of Andre Green, these difficult Lacanian insights are brought to bear directly on tragic drama in the theatre.
