Study of Harold Pinter's playwright (Birthday Party) by Psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan

This article adopts a psychoanalytical approach based on Jacques Lacan’s theories, Neo Freudian psychoanalyst, to have a brief look at some of the plays written by Harold Pinter, the English playwright, and to study and analyze his first long play “The Birthday Party” (1958), which belongs to the early decades of his dramatic writing. These days Lacan’s theories are widely applied in different fields of literary and cinema studies. This article aims to utilize his theories in analyzing dramatic literature and plays. In addition the intellectual foundation of Lacan theories are based on Heidegger, Levi-Strauss and Hegel’s theories, which is in connection with Freud’s theories is explained and have subscription with foundations of the philosophy of Existentialism, is essential to gain an understanding of the foundations of “The Theatre of the Absurd “and Pinter’s works. Within this framework, some concepts including “The Imaginary, The Symbolic, The Real, The Empty signifier, Object a and Sexual differences “are elaborated on and then, “The Birthday Party” is analyzed based on these concepts to make possible achievement the Layers of complex and abstract world of this play. Pinter in “The Birthday Party” creates an atmosphere of threat and fear. He puts his characters in enclosed spaces such as home to emphasize on instability and human failures. Being driven from their world and located in another world where the meaning of everything has changed, these characters incur a painful fate. Their names and their identities have been taken and they have been thrown to a world in which the boundary between reality and non-reality is blurred. In fact, characters in this play use fantasyagainst external threats and fear. In modern world emphasis is placed on incomplete human that can never achieve the real truth. Lacan’s views regarding the incomplete human together with Existentialism in philosophy can be helpful to analyze Pinter’s plays. For this reason, Lacan insists that without modern science psychoanalysis could not come into existence and psychoanalytic concepts and theoretical framework are appropriate to modern times and modern Ego. In Pinter’s opinion the truth in drama is always elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. As Pinter says in his play “The Birthday Party“he thinks he allows a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focusing on an act of subjugation that is Emphasis on the claim. Finally all these are reflected in “The Birthday Party”, which is analyzed in this article.