ABSTRACT
A whole movement of women began writing as a result of an encounter with J. Lacan's thought. Hamlet's absolute horror of femininity—linked to a failure to mourn and the turn toward narcissism—is crucial to unfolding what is amiss. Ophelia, Lacan says, is the embodiment of this femininity, and as such, she is the play's casualty. The temptation to resolve these through being the object of desire is a problem that Lacan called the problem of being the phallus for the Other—wanting to be for them what they are irrevocably lacking. Lacan said that in analysis one person believes that something is impossible and it can never be the analyst. Lacan conjectures that an intrinsic relation between time and mourning is staged in the very form of the play. Lacan's ethics, as it turns out, is an ethics that will always be internal to psychoanalysis, internal to its very theory.
