A Psychoanalytic Approach to Hooshang Golshiri’s “My Little Chapel”

Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflict with his surroundings. The obsessional attachment of the narrator with his sixth-toe, however, poses significant questions regarding the nature of his symptomatic dependence on this apparently useless piece of flesh. Through a psychoanalytical reading of the story, the present article is an attempt to shed light on the psychological intricacies of this problematic relation. Drawing on the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the only solution to this enigma is to consider the toe as a materialization of the pure nothingness and lack which, from a psychoanalytical point of view, marks the very core of the subject in the symbolic universe and becomes the only venue for the safe flowing of jouissance. Through its inert presence, the toe embodies the Lacanian objet a as the most precious, albeit illusory, thing in the psychic life of the human beings, the removal, or the disclosure, of which could lead to irreparable consequences.