A Lacanian Reading of the Poem Winter

The Views and theories of the prominent French philosopher and theorist Jacques Lacan are based on the fundamental concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis and at the same time expand these concepts by a set of new terminologies and methodologies. Lacan’s theorisation of the unconscious is a characteristic example of his complimenting and modifying of the classical psychoanalytic theory. The attention that Lacan pays to language in his theory is indicative of the Freudian basis of his thought. However, the status and importance of language in his theory of the unconscious go further beyond Freud’s general linguistic considerations. Drawing on, and at the same time modifying, Saussurian linguistics, Lacan proposes a new framework for understanding the concept of the unconscious, a framework which cannot be found in Freudian psychoanalysis and which is itself an instance of interdisciplinary expansion of psychoanalysis. The present study starts with an exposition of Lacan’s language-based theorisation of the subject’s psychic development. With this end in view, the Lacanian concepts of the “Imaginary Order”, “Symbolic Order” and other related concepts will be examined. In the final section of the study, the applicability of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the examination of literary texts will be examined in a critical reading of the modern Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan-Salles’s celebrated poem “Winter”.