The Plays of William Shakespeare in perspective, we have only to remind ourselves what Johnson brought to it – an assemblage of almost every qualification we should ideally like to have brought to this kind of work with the single exception of patience... Operating in and through these qualities was his own extensive knowledge of human nature and life. No Shakespearean critic or editor has ever approached him in this respect. John Wain, another of Johnson's biographers, claimed, "There is no better statement of the reason why Shakespeare needs to be edited, and what aims an editor can reasonably set himself" than Johnson's "Proposal". The
Name of the Father only confers identity and position on the subject within the symbolic order, but also signifies the Oedipal prohibition (the "no" of the incest taboo). If this signifier is foreclosed, in the sense of being excluded from the Symbolic Order, the result is psychosis. Psychotics have not been properly separated from their mother[er] by the fixed name-of-the-father, and hence relate to speech and language differently from neurotics. In "On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (1957), Lacan represents the Oedipus complex as "the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the metaphor that substitutes this Name in the place