Jacques Lacan: Demand

I had always thought that when a baby cries, it was its expression of discomfort. The baby is either hungry, needs a diaper change, or doesn't like being held by the ex-president of the United States. However, French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, suggests a different approach. Lacan argues that when the baby cries, it is calling to its mother in a synchronized symbolic structure. In the midst of an organized symbolic system that baby's use, a demand for both its mother and and love is made. A baby cries to keep its mother all to itself. However, a mother can never belong to the baby as it so desires. Lacan states that this love and demand is unconditional and insatiable. Hence, baby's do not stop crying until they are able to articulate its needs and wants into words. The desires for its mother are also then expressed through action.

This really makes me rethink about having kids.

"Hamlet" Analysis

     In the film, "Hamlet," Hamlet's fury seems to run deeper than it coming from the fact that his mother, Gertrude, has married her husband's brother, Claudius. On a Freudian analytic perspective, Hamlet's anger seems to be derived from the fact that he has yet another competitor fighting for his mother's heart, and also the fact that the competitor has won by marrying his mother. Yet again, Hamlet is not what his mother desires but that it was first his father, and now his uncle. This anger and rage may be argued to be Hamlet's "id," and his defense mechanism is derived by ultimately repressing such emotions and desires by claiming that his anger is merely coming from the incestuous marriage. If the play was told from Hamlet's perspective, it may be argued that the apparition of his father that Hamlet sees is actually his unconscious desiring the death of his uncle to rid of the competition for his mother. It may also be looked at as the physical representation between his "id" and "ego." The fight that Hamlet engages in with his mother appeared to be more of a lover's fight rather than a mother-son argument. This further confirms the Freudian approach to "Hamlet."