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LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS OF RELIGIOUS HONOR KILLING IN THE SOUTH OF IRAN

by | Vol 42 (1) 2024

Summary: Religious honor killing is one of the most severe types of violence that women face in religious fanatic societies. In this way, in countries where religious fanaticism is prevalent, women are at risk of it. It seems that in a religious fanatic society, there are some mechanisms or factors arising from religion that cause these honor killings. In this article, by analyzing the case of Ms. A, we show what mechanisms cause their occurrence. The results of this research showed how religion, by emphasizing the phallus as a symbol of masculinity, creates a fragile phantasm that is defined by the complete control of women and the elimination or denial of their being. Therefore, Ms. A’s friendship with her boyfriend is enough for her family to see their illusional male power lost and kill her to compensate.

Authors: Paris Tanzifi, Narges Sharifzadeh, Hassan Makaremi & Mehdi Khorianian

The shine (éclat) of absences: lacan on the feminine in the fifties

by | Vol 36 (4) 2018

Lacan’s text, “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Female Sexuality” (1958), is an important text in exploring Lacan’s conceptualisation of female sexuality in the fifties. The text however goes much further than this and discusses castration and the phallic function as well as Freud’s three lines of feminine development: normative femininity, frigidity and female homosexuality. The richness and complexity of the text presents the sexuality of women as a vast field that has been misapprehended by the psychoanalytic establishment. Lacan indicates that women are not reducible to the phallic equivalency to men and in fact this misunderstanding has significantly undermined and devalued the analysis of women. With the aid of a clinical vignette, this paper explores two of the three lines of female development, normative femininity and frigidity, in light of Lacan’s substantial elaborations in the text.