The Loss of the Symbolic
Father: A Lacanian Inquiry into Subjectivity and Structural
Disintegration in Hamlet
Dr.Kahkashan Razi
ABSTRACT
This research paper offers a re-evaluation of
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, moving beyond traditional Freudian
Oedipal readings toward a sophisticated Lacanian psychoanalytic
framework. It argues that Hamlet’s psychological crisis is
fundamentally not a reaction to the physical loss of his father, but
a traumatic encounter with the collapse of the “Symbolic Order”—what
Jacques Lacan terms le nom-du-père (the Name of the Father). By
applying structuralist and post-structuralist critiques, this study
examines how the disintegration of this structure leaves the
subject, Hamlet, in a state of “ontological void,” where language,
agency, and social binary oppositions lose their stability. Through
a rigorous analysis of Hamlet’s soliloquies and his existential
fragmentation, this paper demonstrates how the loss of the Symbolic
Father serves as a catalyst for the protagonist’s transition from a
coherent, structured subject to a fragmented “Other”.
Keywords: Hamlet; Lacanian Psychoanalysis; Symbolic Order; Name of
the Father (Nom-du-Père); Subjectivity; Ontological Void.
