The Imaginary and the Symbolic in Suad Al-Sabah’s “A Woman Without Shores” from the Psychoanalytic Perspective of Jacques Lacan

Abstract

The research intended to analyze the collection of poems entitled “A Woman Without Coasts” by Suad Al-Sabah from the perspective of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in exploring the collection’s metaphorical and figurative language, which formed the metonymy of signifiers and determined the centrality of the signifier during desire in the collection, in terms of its dual identification in the imaginary system and triple conflict in the symbolic system in light of the terms “presence” and “absence.”

The research used the psychoanalytic method of Jacques Lacan through the triangles of the "Imaginary" and the "Symbolic," as well as monitoring the course of desire depending on the results of statistical tables such as the tables of Lacanian analytical references, auxiliary words, the development of discourse, and the statistics of the keyword "love."

The research concluded the significance of the word metaphor as related to psychoanalysis to explore the unconscious expressions that confirmed the poet’s feminist project and the sincerity of her desire in discourse represented in the main title, “A Woman without Shores,” or “A Woman without Love.” The collection included ten poems, five of which are identical to the “Other” in the imaginary system, while the other poems formed the symbolic system starting from her sixth poem, “A Woman Without Shores,” and reaching the tenth, “The Revolution of the Folded Chicken” in which she revolted against her masculine reality that suppresses her desire to be with him on a common linguistic coast.

Thus, in light of the psychoanalysis theory, the researcher answered many questions about the contradiction between the poet’s “I” and her poetic “Self” during her transition from the imaginary system to the symbolic system.