Lacanian psychoanalysis

The present article investigates Emily Dickinson's poem "I taste a liquor never brewed" and aims to solve the confusion of scholars that struggled to specify the precise meaning of some of the terms in the text and fully appreciate the psychic dynamics of it in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first question the article asks is how is 'desire' represented, and the second is whether the speaker of the poem longs for an 'Other jouissance.' In Seminar XX, Lacan defines Other jouissance as the most intense and ineffable kind and equals it to the jouissance of the mystics. Desire, in Lacanian teachings, is unattainable and an inevitable consequence of language. The famous Lacanian maxims "desire is the desire of the Other," and the "Other is the treasure trove of signifiers" indicate that desire could be represented through signifiers. The article integrates These Lacanian notions in Paul Ricoeur's three-staged hermeneutic Arc, which consists of 1) explanation, 2) understanding, and 3) appropriation. The poem will undergo these three stages of interpretation. By the end of the last stage, the world of the text is appropriated by the selected Lacanian notions. The results of the study are the following: 1) the poem is unique in displaying what Lacan termed 'Other jouissance,' 2) it demonstrates an intense desire for a supreme being—the Other, 3) desire is explicitly named in the poem: it is manifested explicitly in the words ‘liquor," tankards," Alcohol," inebriate," debauchee," drams," drink," little tippler.'

This study examines how The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson and The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan build on Fredric Jameson’s critique of pastiche, offering a more immediate and engaged model of postmodern writing. Drawing on Jameson’s reading of Lacan—particularly his use of schizophrenia as a way to describe the breakdown of the signifying chain in late capitalism—the research explores how both poets confront the fragmentation of language and its absorption into commodified culture. Olson’s projective verse emphasizes presence and locality, while Duncan’s layered syntax and mythic references resist fixed interpretation and invite open-ended exploration. The study uses close reading and theoretical interpretation to show how both poets turn poetic form into a site of resistance, where language—though fractured— still carries meaning and shapes how we see the world. In Jameson’s terms, these works function as “symbolic texts,” where personal expression and social contradiction intersect. Rather than mirror postmodern disorientation, the poems open up a space for a different kind of awareness—one that moves through the tension between imagination and structure, and points toward the hope and possibility woven into poetic form. 

This study explores how Lacanian psychoanalysis governs and understands the mother-child relationships in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1944/2014) and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). In so doing, the primary purpose of this study has been to establish the links between the central characters' behaviors and the psychoanalytic concept of 'deferral of desire’.' The research proposes a novel aspect of 'psychoanalytic meaning' by basing it on the counter-intuitive process of evading the jouissance of actualizing and immersing oneself in one's object of desire. To support the proposition mentioned above, this study has explored the eventual fate of the children in Black Swan (Nina), and The Glass Menagerie (Tom and Laura), analyzing their respective experiences of (dis)satisfaction after their ultimate success or failure in their attempts to attain their objects of desire . This study has employed the Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of the objet petit a and register theory to posit that satisfaction lies not in obtaining one’s object of desire, but in repeatedly failing to do so, due to the fact that possessing the object of desire shatters the lack which is the necessary condition of maintaining the desirability of the object of desire. The article concludes that while we are intuitively equipped to think of satisfaction as the effect of the realization of the object of one's desire, psychoanalytically speaking, satisfaction is found in precisely the opposite direction, that is, in a repeated failure to obtain the object of one's desire .