revenge against Claudius's murdering his father. On the other, because Hamlet unconsciously wished to supplant his father incestuously in his mother's bed (which Claudius has done consciously), he feels unworthy to avenge the death. Freud asserts that Hamlet's impulse reflects the deepest (perhaps unconscious) impulses of Shakespeare as well, claiming for Oedipal impulse and guilt (however unconscious) primacy over the whole of the culture. In Totem and Taboo, Freud says that "the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex."5 In other words, the whole of the culture, like the whole of human experience, is grounded in the incest wish.
Jacques Lacan's adumbration of Freudian theory begins with Freudian essentials as a point of departure. Indeed, Lacan cites Freud's own statement that the individual's Oedipal impulses are transmuted into maturing sexuality when "narcissistic interest in the penis gets the better of libidinal investment in parental objects. . . . But [Lacan adds] at the same moment the Oedipus complex is not only repressed, it is liter
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