deferral of desire: a lacanian study of mother-child relationships in tennessee williams’ the glass menagerie and darren aronofsky’s black swan

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.

deferral of desire: a lacanian study of mother-child relationships in tennessee williams’ the glass menagerie and darren aronofsky’s black swan

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.